From Family Roots to the Routes of Empire: National Tales and the Domestication of the Scottish Highlands

"We have been now, for some years, inundated with showers of Scotch novels."

—Sarah Green, Scotch Novel Reading, or Modern Quackery (1824)

Sarah Green's Scotch Novel Reading demonstrates that the "showers of Scotch novels" published during the first three decades of the nineteenth century constituted a literary phenomenon remarkable enough to warrant a three-volume warning against these novels' potentially pernicious effects on English readers.¹ Declaring itself to be written by a Londoner and "founded on facts," Scotch Novel Reading charges Scottish novelists with misleading readers through their romantic idealization of a region and a people both of which are in fact poor and uncivilized. Its heroine, an avid reader of "Scotch novels," imitates a Scottish dialect, wears plaid dresses, and even longs to marry a Scotsman and retire to the Highlands—until she meets some dirty, impoverished, and ill-mannered Highlanders who cure her of this mania. The literary deluge described by Green did not consist only of Sir Walter Scott's immensely popular Waverley novels; indeed, her insistent punning on Scottish places Scott at the forefront of a mainly female band of followers whose names and works now are almost as little known as Green's own.

Many of these "Scotch novels" are national tales, a genre of novels that several recent studies of the Romantic novel have recovered from critical obscurity.² As Ina Ferris has explained, the national tale "takes national matters or manners for its subject," and "locates itself in a contentious zone of discourse in order to articulate the grievances of a small people."³ To a greater extent than Scott's historical novels, national tales position domesticity as central to Britain's national and imperial interests: they explore the conflicted relationships between metropolitan England, its Celtic peripheries, and an expanding British empire through marriage plots and family histories. Ferris and Katie Trumpener have examined the once-popular national tale's generic affiliations with historical novels, gothic novels, and travel writing, and its role in the articulation of early nineteenth-century British nationalisms. Focusing almost exclusively on Ireland, however, their valuable investigations of the genre's literary genealogy tend to either homogenize Britain's Celtic peripheries and their literary productions, or neglect the Scottish national tale entirely.⁴ My aim in this essay is not to dispute but rather to extend and complicate the critical paradigm of the national tale by examining what was at stake in the very specific cultural work that the genre performed in Scotland. The national tale's development in Scotland coincided with, and as I will suggest, responded to, the large-scale emigration of Highlanders now known as the Clearances. These novels sought to establish a discerning version of the sympathetic identification that Scotch Novel Reading condemned and, through this sympathy, to promote the integration of an ethnically and culturally distinct Highland nation into a heterogeneous British empire.

Arguing that the national tale emerged in Ireland as a means of addressing the political, religious, and cultural conflicts surrounding the Anglo-Irish Union of 1800, Ferris contends that Ireland "confounded [England] in a way that Scotland in general did not." While the circumstances of England's unions with Scotland and Ireland differed dramatically, Ferris's assertion that the 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union of Parliaments produced "a new national whole" must be qualified.⁵ Eighteenth-century Scotland comprised two vastly disparate cultures—the relatively commercial, cosmopolitan, and "enlightened" Lowlands, and the feudal, agrarian, and isolated Highlands. Rather than creating a cohesive British nation, the 1707 Union arguably exacerbated tensions and disparities between southern Britain and the Gaelic-speaking Highlands. If, by the end of the eighteenth century, the southern regions of Scotland did share a new sense of unity with metropolitan England, it was largely because, as Janet Sorenson has argued, Lowlanders enlisted "as junior partners in Britain's global imperial project."⁶ While Lowland Scots capitalized on the commercial, military, and political opportunities for assimilation and unification with England that empire-building offered, Highlanders remained geographically and ideologically on the peripheries of a newly united...