Ian Duncan. Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh

Studies in Romanticism, Spring, 2009 by Evan Gottlieb

Ian Duncan. Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. 387. $44.00.

The official tourist website for Edinburgh touts the city as embodying "the perfect balance between all things contemporary and traditional" (www.edinburgh.org). Such a description could just as easily apply to early nineteenth-century Edinburgh as delineated in absorbing detail by Ian Duncan in Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Indeed, in Duncan's capable hands, post-Enlightenment Edinburgh is revealed to be the location for the origin of many of the most important trends in nineteenth-century British literature. Focusing on the genre of the historical novel as it was developed by Sir Walter Scott and negotiated by his contemporary competitors, Duncan paints a fascinating portrait of a city and a culture whose importance to the history of British literature has gone hitherto underappreciated. In the process, Duncan makes a compelling case for the specificity of fiction as the modern form of belief par excellence.

As Duncan notes in his Preface, the historical focus of the book is primarily limited to a thirty-year span, between 1802--the founding of The Edinburgh Review--and 1832, which saw both Scott's death and the passing of the Reform Bill. In fact, these were not the only reasons for Edinburgh's relapse to provincial status following 1832; Duncan points out that, as changes in transportation and financial technologies narrowed the distance (literally and figuratively) between London and Edinburgh, the latter lost many of the qualities that had distinguished it in the previous decades. For some thirty years at the start of the nineteenth century, however, Edinburgh not only basked in the glow of the Scottish Enlightenment--in particular, the lasting influences of David Hume and Adam Smith--but also boasted a publishing and reviewing culture that temporarily eclipsed that of its larger rival to the south. Edinburgh's civic ascendancy was highlighted by George IV's ceremonial visit in 1822. This was the first time a Hanoverian monarch had visited the city since the 1707 Act of Union, and Scott, who acted as de facto tour manager, was determined to make the most of it. Accordingly, as Duncan indicates in his first chapter, "the King's Jaunt" was an opportunity for Scott to stage "the sovereign's relation to 'the ancient kingdom of Scotland' as the primitive, patriarchal relation of a Highland chieftain to his clan" (4). Of course, this has often led commentators, both at the time and afterward, to decry the phoniness of Scott's spectacle of a Stuart-plaided Hanoverian king being feted by loyal Lowlanders dressed up as Jacobites and Highlanders. Duncan is clear, however, that Scott at least was well aware of the staginess of what he was doing: "assembling a gaudily up-to-date national spectacle that relied on the availability of sovereignty--its mystic link with the past decisively broken--as a sign among other signs that gathered its meaning in public circulation and consumption" (4). The spurious theatricality of the King's Jaunt worked, in other words, not because it was meant to be taken at face value, but because it was recognizable as a fiction in which people could nevertheless believe--and which gained legitimacy precisely insofar as people chose to believe in it.

The King's Visit was also staged by Scott, Duncan points out, as an attempt to mediate between the two dominant cultural forces in post-Enlightenment Edinburgh: the liberal, Whig Edinburgh Review, which promoted a conception of civic virtue in line with the Scottish Enlightenment's original tenets, and the conservative, Tory Blackwood's Magazine (founded 1817), which put forward a more Romantic cultural nationalism as the basis of national solidarity. Scott himself was a strong enough presence on the Edinburgh literary scene that, despite--or perhaps because of--the putative anonymity under which he published his novels between 1814 and 1827, he did not need to choose sides. Duncan focuses primarily on Blackwood's because, as he puts it, "Blackwood's equipped Tory politics with a counter-Enlightenment aesthetic ideology of cultural nationalism shaped by the magazine's innovative mixture of literary forms and discourses, among them fiction" (27). Indeed, Blackwood's not only refused to segregate fiction from non-fiction within its pages, but also introduced patently fictional devices into its non-fiction pieces. The most famous example of hybrid writing produced by the Blackwood's writers is of course the "Noctes Ambrosianae" series, in which semi-fictionalized versions of "real" contemporary persons mix indiscriminately, and often to great satirical effect, with novelistic characters. Such a synthesis of fact and fiction clearly shows the influence of Scott's fiction, which, beginning with Waverley (1814), routinely introduced real historical personages into fictional situations. One of the truly original contributions of Duncan's book is to demonstrate how this mixing, in turn, draws inspiration from Hume's skeptical philosophy, which denied the existence of positive knowledge of empirical reality, and instead demonstrated the centrality of custom and shared belief in making possible our understanding of the world around us. Just as Hume, in his Treatise of Human Nature (1839-40), showed how his solitary metaphysical reflections would inevitably drive him to return to the pleasurable world of social exchange, so Scott in Waverley "narrates not just the emergence of modern civil society through the final conquest of an ancient regime but a Humean dialectical progression from metaphysical illusion through melancholy disenchantment to a sentimental and ironical reattachment to common life" (29). Like the King's Jaunt, in other words, Waverley "activates skepticism rather than faith as the subjective cast of the reader's relation to history" (29). In this way, it sets the tone for the rest of Scott's novels, which repeatedly revisit questions of identity, sovereignty, nationhood, and the blurry line between history and fiction.