Anthony Jarrells

Bloodless Revolution and the Form of the Novel

In synthesizing the Jacobite—Enlightenment dialectic in his historical fiction Walter Scott did more than just render amusing a particularly painful historical episode. His synthesis helped to solidify the novel as a literary and a national form. In this, Scott seems to have succeeded where Godwin failed. In this chapter I present these two writers side-by-side and compare the sense of history and Enlightenment implicit in their fictions.

Tales of the Colonies: Blackwood’s, Provincialism, and British Interests Abroad

One of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’s most distinctly Romantic features is its regionalism, or, what might better be termed its provincialism: that is, the way its ‘outlook, mannerisms, tastes, etc. [are] associated with or attributed to a particular province or the provinces as distinguished from the capital or chief seat of government’ (OED).1 Blackwood’s was provincial in a very straightforward sense: it took pride in - and wrote articles from the perspective of - its Scottish origins. But its provincialism had a less straightforward character to it as well: it was part of the magazine’s general opposition to a political economic stance that both marked the previous generation of literati in Scotland and continued to provide the philosophical underpinnings for the most dominant periodical voice of the period, the Edinburgh Review. Enlightenment political economy took as its subject ‘the causes of improvement, in the productive powers of labour’ (in Adam Smith’s words) and posited a world system whose interrelating parts and interests were based in the human propensity ‘to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’.2 As Smith’s disciple and biographer, Dugald Stewart, explained, ‘It is the business of the political economist to watch over the concerns of all, and to point out to the legislator the danger of listening exclusively to claims founded in local… advantages’.3