Scottish Romanticism and Collective Memory in the British Atlantic by Kenneth McNeil (review)

McNeil opens this excellent new study with a quote on change. Taken from Maurice Halbwachs' Psychology of Social Class, the reader is immediately faced with the fact that change characterises all our lives and affects our beliefs. Although written in the 1930s, this quote epitomises the changeable time we are living in now, alongside another notable age of flux – the Romantic period. This era was intimately concerned with ideas of memory, as demonstrated particularly in the broad range of Scottish writing created at this time and epitomised in texts such as Walter Scott's Waverley (1814). It is made clear that Scotland during this period was considered as a part of Britain and the entire country's 'expanding North American empire' (3) ensured that Scottish writers were primed to engage with and challenge historical understanding in this area. Equally presciently, McNeil engages with the contemporary fear that Scotland as a nation during the Romantic period was being reduced to a subsidiary of Great Britain and thus losing its rich history, identity, and collective (or overlapping) memories of different generations – another issue that looms large in the twenty-first century.

After a broad introductory chapter, the volume examines five distinct case studies and explores how the range of post-Enlightenment authors examined by McNeil each produced their own individual styles of historical writing through creating 'structures of collective memory' (15) in their works. The writers chosen, excepting Walter Scott, were done so due to their links with the Scottish Atlantic network, and due to their experiencing North America or the Caribbean in person as 'migrant Scots' (24).

The first case study focuses on Walter Scott (1771–1832) and his unique twist on historical fiction in relation to these wider ideas of collective memory. Scott's novel writing and his visualisation of memory within texts such as Waverley and Ivanhoe (1819) played a large part in the popularity of his works in North America, during a time of conflict, political factions, and enslavement. This chapter also demonstrates Scott's influence on American writing, particularly in the works of Washington Irving (1783–1859) and John Neal (1793–1876), and the legacy Scott left behind in what McNeil defines as Scottish "memorial" writing. Robert Chambers' Traditions of Edinburgh (1825) and Henry Cockburn's Memorials of his Time (1856) are prime examples of this. Descriptions of normal, everyday life in Edinburgh merge with fine detail to demonstrate the merging of memory with social history narratives.

Turning to an examination of travel writing and memoir, Chapter 2 analyses the writings of Anne Grant (1755–1838), who grew up in America whilst her Scottish officer father was posted there. Focusing particularly on her letters, plus her Memoirs of an American Lady, this chapter explores the Scottish Highlands and Highland culture found within these works. McNeil describes Grant as having a 'modest but influential body of work' (98), that provides key insights into ideas of modernity. Significantly, Grant wrote truthful descriptions of the British Atlantic in the nineteenth century and her experiences of colonial America. Like Scott, her work was seen as influential for those residing in America, as it became the inspiration for further works of historical fiction by other authors.

Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk (1771–1820), is the subject of Chapter 3, which scrutinises his resettlement plans for independent Highland communities in the New World. Selkirk believed that emigration from Scotland to North America ensured that previously dispossessed Highlanders were able to preserve their status through the retaining of their long-standing traditions. McNeil sensitively discusses the traumatic effects of these processes, as displaced peoples went on to colonise and displace others in a different area of the British Atlantic, which in turn leads to questions of land-ownership, identity, and the collective memory of a land that is no longer lived in by its 'native' inhabitants.

The fourth of McNeil's chapters focuses on the pertinent topic of enslavement...