The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism (review)

Fewer than twenty years ago, a prevailing orthodoxy held that Romanticism had passed Scotland by. In Allan Ramsay, James Thomson and ‘Ossian’ Macpherson, as well as in wider native cultural facets such as the highland landscape, folklore and song, Scotland provided ‘proto-Romantic’ material to a movement in which it played no central part. According to various commentators, most notoriously the twentieth-century poet Edwin Muir, Scotland was too dourly Calvinistic and/or neo-classical to participate in the liberated, joyous expression that comprised ‘Romanticism’. The English, on the other hand, with their cultural history – more natural, less religious, more freely dynamic – supposedly could: England produced its ‘big’ six Romantic poets (leaving conveniently aside the facts that Scottish culture might stake a fair claim for a piece of Byron and that Blake was little understood or appreciated when Romanticism was actually happening). Obviously enough, we suffered too long from an academic definition of Romantic canonicity that not only relegated Scotland (to say nothing of Ireland and Wales) to scenic backdrop in the ‘Romantic era’, but that also had difficulty accommodating Jane Austen, arguably the most brilliant stylist in fiction during the Romantic period. Thankfully, in the past two decades the critical landscape has at last shifted, with the proper accommodation of ‘four nations’ Romanticism, women Romantic writers and labouring class Romantic poets, as well as other modes of Romantic writing, not only fictional prose furth of Frankenstein but the non-fictional variety too, alongside drama (beyond merely the plays of Byron).

Murray Pittock’s edited volume lays comfortable claim to something called ‘Scottish Romanticism’. When one reads of the Romantic writers and energies covered by his contributors it seems astonishing that anyone previously could have doubted its existence. Part of the ‘problem’ with Scottish Romanticism, of course, is that a considerable part of it is pre-1798 (or pre-1800 if we want to be accurate a propos the fully mature version of the preface to Lyrical Ballads). In a sense Burns was giving us one version of ‘the real language of men’ in the 1780s. James Macpherson’s Ossian poems luxuriated in, and brought to the modern age, a love of primitive nature in the 1760s (this being one of a number of features – the poems’ ‘fabrication’ being not the only one – by which Samuel Johnson was revolted). One might, therefore, have been tempted to include a discrete chapter on Allan Ramsay (or even Ramsay and James Thomson), not least since the former especially crops up frequently, but in passing, across The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism. Ramsay give us the ‘real language of men’, an attention to nature, a pastoral antiquarianism even (something of the kind we find much later in Shelley or Keats) from the second and third decades of the eighteenth century. But this, presumably, would have been to push things too far – though one might make the argument that with Ramsay and Thomson Scotland is ‘Romantic’ earlier than England, and that only much later in the eighteenth century, with a little help from the likes of Thomas Percy, David Herd and Joseph Ritson, does the latter nation catch up. Who knows, perhaps, confidently inspired by this volume, there will be those who begin to make such arguments in future.

In this Edinburgh companion, Fiona Stafford writes with her usual fluency in relatively limited space on Macpherson’s importance and his influence in Romantic writing, but, quite brilliantly, also in a way that reflects on both the early eighteenth century novel and Thatcher’s Britain. In some ways, even as she rightly acknowledges Macpherson’s innovative and unusual qualities, Stafford ‘restores’ Macpherson as a centrally canonical figure in British cultural history. The Edinburgh Companion series is geared towards the initiation of bright undergraduate thought, and Stafford’s essay succeeds in being suitably illuminating for this audience, while at the same time her ideas about the accessibility of Macpherson for...