Murray Pittock

Scottish and Irish romanticism

Preface 1. The Lake Isle of Romanticism: The Challenge to Literary History 2. Allan Ramsay and the Decolonization of Genre 3. Romance, the Aeolian Harp and the Theft of History 4. Strumming and Being Hanged: the Irish Bard and History Regained 5. Robert Fergusson and his Scottish and Irish Contemporaries 6. Robert Burns 7. Maria Edgeworths National Tale 8. Scott and the European Nationalities Question 9. Hogg, Maturin, and the Gothic National Tale 10. Fratriotism: Sisters, Brothers, Empire and its Limits in the Scottish and Irish Imagination, c.1746-1837 Bibliography

Inventing and resisting Britain : cultural identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685-1789

Inventing and Resisting Britain - Blest Paper Credit: Financing the Revolution - Crown Culture and Counter Culture -Enlightenment and Empire - Orc and the Primitives - Notes - Select Bibliography - Index

Scottish sovereignty and the union of 1707: Then and now

This article discusses the history of Scottish sovereignty as a component of Scottish identity. The argument is that certain aspects of Scottish sovereignty were preserved by the union, and that these have often remained latent until the devolution settlement. The new political landscape in the UK has contributed to a redevelopment of ideas of British parliamentary sovereignty, which have served to render these elements of preserved Scottish sovereignty active, and this new state of affairs is reflected in the findings of the Calman Commission. In this context, what is independence?

Bonnie Prince Charlie

The Malt Tax riots in Glasgow in 1725 were caused by legislation seen as being in breach of the 1707 Treaty of Union: they were crushed by General Wade, himself at the beginning of a 16-year mission to improve roads and communications in the Highlands, to redevelop Independent Companies of Highlanders to police the area and to emplace an upgraded cadre of local law officers. In 1745, Wade’s achievement was to be highly beneficial to Charles Edward’s army, whose lightning pace of advance owed much to the Hanoverian general’s roads.1

Introduction: Scottish Romanticism

The idea of national Romanticisms is of course central to the idea of Romanticism itself, but while this is widely acknowledged in many contexts, in the post-1945 era the delineation of national Ro...

Thresholds of Memory: Birch and Hawthorn in the Poetry of Robert Burns

ABSTRACT Robert Burns’s status as a poet sufficiently close to rural poverty to be able to represent himself as its product, and sufficiently distant from it to be able to manipulate that product, is increasingly being realized. In this essay, Burns’s use of the country lore associated with the birch and hawthorn trees in Scotland and indeed in Europe more generally, is analyzed in terms of its deceptively simple representation of emotion, and the manner in which it acts as a point of access for Burns’s view of the tragic status of being human, caught between the cyclical natural world and our own narratives of being, which demand a linear time ending in a “forever” which on earth can only become loss.

Décor, Decoration and Design

Jacobite decor and design are both among the earliest and the most controversial areas of the identification of political sympathy through material culture. This may be partly because some of the maximalist cases for Jacobitism have been made through decoding houses and gardens, as, for example, in Richard Hewlings’s long essay on Chiswick in the 1995 Lord Burlington collection edited by Toby Barnard and Jane Clark. Some of the arguments from garden and domestic architecture which have been advanced seem to many scholars to make claims stronger than those that can be substantiated from documentary historical sources: as Christopher Christie notes, ‘the complexities of Georgian politics and an individual’s personal beliefs within the political system make any generalisation regarding “political landscaping” fraught with danger’. As if to underline this point, John Dixon Hunt notes that Italian gardening could be linked to ‘rural retreat from political life and the interests of the country party’ as an ‘ideological gesture’, while at the same time accepting that Italian gardens could symbolize the virtues of mixed government for Whigs. Similarly, the assumption that French style was rejected on political grounds needs to be qualified by examples such as the Versailles-style frontage commissioned from William Adam by the hardly Jacobite Earl of Hopetoun at his great house 2 kilometres from South Queensferry, near Edinburgh.1

Postscript: The Making of Memory

In time, the language of treacherous objects which developed in the Jacobite era subsided into kitsch as less controversial souvenirs of memory and exchange had done. This was logical enough: as the risk of prosecution for Jacobite sympathies declined, so too did the tendency to exchange commitments and ideas through objects in a defined, ritualistic way. The looseness and variability of sentiment took over, and with it the reification of charisma beyond politics and oppositional memorialization into kitsch and memory as a marketplace or lieu, no longer lived but remembered in various places and through various things, constructed to make sense of defeat rather than displayed, circulated and trafficked in prospect — or hope — of victory. Objects began to lose the atmosphere of tension through which they had previously been exchanged. Even cant diminished as a language of challenge to order, and the hidden allusive words or phrases of thieves, radicals and Jacobites subsided into slang for less focused group purposes, such as the use of buckish cant to allow sexual terms to be mentioned in front of ladies.1

Propaganda: Medals, Weapons, Glass, Ceramics and Relics

In Chapter 1, I discussed the different kinds of treacherous object which were explicit in their references to Jacobite loyalty: those produced abroad or after the last Rising; hidden objects not for use in communication; relics; objects and decor produced for use in core Jacobite areas and weapons. Although this book is primarily concerned with the use of objects, decor, cant and code to communicate the currency of outlawed memory beyond text and the reach of prosecution, it would be inappropriate not to pay some attention to the more explicit messages and iconography of Jacobite objects in these more overt categories. Of these, medals (including touch-pieces) were the most widespread.

Associations and Antiquarians

If material culture, architecture, design, colour, symbols, cant and code were among the shape-shifting modes of communication which Jacobite culture adopted in the face of the unstable elision of treason, sedition and penal legislation in the British Isles, the effectiveness of such communication was key. The public world of print was — as we have seen — risky, even for allegorical and oblique statement. It was therefore underpopulated, as indeed was the private personal or business and associational realm of letters and records, for much the same reason, and in a manner which has done a good deal to legitimize to incurious posterity the apparently marginal status of Jacobitism. The grammar and syntax of landscape, architecture and object round and in a great house could make a powerful statement, but it was socially restricted. The isolated object or memento might communicate political sympathy but, without society of some kind, was also inevitably limited in its range. Private or domestic objects, preserved in intimate space, were to some extent protected by virtue of being within what was perceived to be a woman’s sphere, but to that extent were circumscribed in their ability to communicate to a wider public. Oak leaves, white roses or tartan were among the means of the public display of memory which did communicate but, apart from being sufficiently explicit to be open to retaliatory mob violence, evolved by their tokenistic public reiteration into symbols which were seen as the cliches of politics rather than the means of its development.