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In response to the fact that "there is no comprehensive study of Scottish immigration to North America, including the West Indies" (3), Dobson intends "to identify [...] the Scottish contribution to the settlement of North America prior to 1785, with particular emphasis on the seventeenth century" (8). The thesis put forward is that "the Scots played a hitherto undervalued role in the economy and society of prerevolutionary America from the earliest times. Although Scots immigrants were less numerous than those from England or Ireland, they clearly made a contribution out of proportion to their number in commerce, civil service, education, medicine, and the church" (194). [2]
Although the emphasis, in terms of pages, has been placed on the eighteenth rather than, as indicated in the introduction, on the seventeenth century, and although Dobson's statistical findings are not as well presented as in other recent publications on the subject [3], the study under consideration provides detailed information which conveys new insights into the history of Scottish emigration to colonial America. As the author demonstrates, Lowland Scots, including merchants, craftsmen and professional workers, were predominant until the 1730s, being particularly attracted to living in port towns of the eastern seaboard and the West Indies, whereas the Highlanders who followed were more likely to settle on the frontiers of Georgia, the Carolinas, New York, and Canada. While many Scots emigrated involuntarily - as indentured servants, banished criminals, defeated Jacobite insurrectionists, or Presbyterians and Quakers escaping religious persecution -, others came in search of economic opportunity or in the wake of military settlement.
By consulting source material which is anything but easily accessible, Dobson unearths fascinating details of Scottish-American history, such as the undated kidnapping of ten-year-old Peter Williamson, "shanghaied in his native Aberdeen and shipped to Philadelphia, where he was sold to a farmer from the Forks of Delaware for sixteen pounds" (93). Surviving numerous adventures, including captivity among the Indians and the French, Williamson returned to Aberdeen in 1758, "sued those responsible for his kidnapping, and with the proceeds settled in Edinburgh, where he opened a coffeehouse, operated a penny post, and published the city's first directory in 1773" (93). Another priceless episode which the author recovers by plowing the hard ground of dusty archives is a transatlantic correspondence illustrating the frequent tensions between Scottish clergymen and their largely English congregations. Here, one Christopher Wilkinson wrote from Maryland to the bishop of London in 1718, "reporting complaints against Mr. Baily, a clergyman removed from office for drunkenness, swearing, and quarreling. He [Wilkinson] added, 'It would be better for parishes to remain vacant than to be supplied with young men from Scottish universities'" (100).
The reservations I have about Dobson's study relate to style, structure, and information missing from its contents. What makes the text problematic in terms of style is the fact that Dobson constantly speculates about historical developments not to be ascertained due to missing documentation, instead of unequivocally focussing on the various and fascinating textual evidence he did find (cf. e.g. 73). Paradoxically, the items that are really controversial are uncritically presented as established facts. A good example of this is Dobson's ready classification of John Lawson, about whom nothing positive is known before his sailing for America, as a Scot from Aberdeen. Although it was thought for many years that he was probably from Yorkshire or Scotland, recent findings seem to show that he was from London and an apothecary by training. Moreover, according to leading authorities on the period, he died in 1711 and not in 1712 as Dobson makes us believe. [4] In general, reading the study affords little pleasure because, from a stylistic point of view, the text is all too frequently a mere listing of names, years and events rather than a coherent narrative.
The second major drawback of the present study is the way it is structured. As announced in the blurb, "[the] book is arranged by geographic location within a chronology that frames the major periods of Scottish emigration [...] the half-century before Restoration ['The Emigrant Tradition (1607-60)'], Restoration to Union ['The American Apprenticeship (1660-1707)'], Union to the Peace of Paris ['Transatlantic Opportunities (1707-63)'], and the Peace of Paris to the Treaty of Paris ['Scottish America (1763-85)']." Although it is extremely laudable that Dobson includes the West Indies, Barbados and Canada in his analysis of Scottish emigration to British America, which, as William C. Spengeman has reminded us, was much larger than the original thirteen colonies that became the United States [5], Dobson's decision to divide his main chapters into several subchapters describing what went on in the different regions during the respective period leads to unbearable redundancy in the text. As a logical consequence of this structure, we are informed far too often that the defeated Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 stimulated emigration (cf. 6, 92, 94, 99, 101, 104, 117, 125, 127, 131, 133, 140, 153), or that Scottish soldiers and ex-soldiers settled in the North East after the French and Indian War (cf. 6-7, 89, 100, 113, 136, 139, 143, 150, 163).
The third, and perhaps the most serious, reservation I have derives from the fact that too much seminal information is missing in a study that, according to the author, is designed to be comprehensive. In contrast to similar studies on the Scottish contribution to American colonial history - e.g. MacDougall's Scots and Scots' Descendants in America (1917) and Karras's Sojourners in the Sun (1992), two of the many studies which the author ignores [6] -, Dobson does not sufficiently consider the significant intellectual contributions of the prominent Scots he includes. Many important Scottish writers or literati living and working in British America during the period under examination are left out altogether. For instance, of the twenty-seven early American writers born in Scotland who are listed in James A. Levernier and Douglas R. Wilmes's American Writers Before 1800, Dobson includes only fourteen. Those writers included are discussed without mentioning even one of their influential publications. [7] Almost unforgivable seems to me the omission of the Scottish-born writers Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816), one of America's leading early novelists, and Dr. Alexander Hamilton (1712-1756), whose The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club (ms 1745-56) is now considered to be one of the most important texts written in eighteenth-century British America. [8] In keeping with these omissions is the fact that Dobson totally ignores recent secondary literature on the influence of Scottish philosophy and intellectual history on early American culture, such as Terence Martin's The Instructed Vision (1961), George A. Shepperson and Owen D. Edwards's Scotland, Europe and the American Revolution (1977), and Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten's Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment (1990). [9]
Despite these deficiencies, David Dobson's Scottish Emigration can be commended for complementing the few historical studies on the interrelation of Scotland and colonial America that are available, and for enhancing academic interest in a field of research that, indeed, has not received the attention it deserves. The data and documents which Dobson has saved from obscurity are of interest to Scotticists and Americanists alike.
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- an analysis of the reasons which led the SNP to take a "pro-European" stance in the 1980s;
- a prognosis concerning the influence which developments in other European regions and the treatment of regional conflicts by the European Union will have on Scottish nationalism in the future;
- a critical assessment of the hopes which the Scottish national movement (as well as other national or regional movements) is pinning on the European Union.
However, these main points are not dealt with until chapter 5 (out of 6). Chapters 2-4 are concerned with the causes of Scottish nationalism: single cause or complex process? Significance of economic and political factors versus cultural factors? The SNP as catalyst or vehicle of Scottish nationalism?
Eickhoff succeeds in giving his study a clear structure, but, owing to the enormous scope of the questions he poses himself, the book cannot reach great depths. Unsatisfactory details include inadequate historical statements - for example on the political attitude of the Scottish workers after World War I (38) or on the foundation of the SNP in 1934 (64) - and the omission of James Mitchell's book Conservatives and the Union from Eickhoff's bibliography. Moreover, the book would have benefited from a more critical use of key phrases (such as "Scottish interests"), a better conceptual differentiation (for example between "regionalism" and "nationalism"), as well as a more explicit discussion of implicit judgments (for example the categorization of the "right of national self-determination" as "democratic").
Eickhoff thankfully refrains from using the jargon of political science. Quotations have been translated from English into German - probably in order to make the book accessible to a wider readership; but it is a moot question whether this aim will in fact be achieved. In my opinion the study will mainly be appreciated by those who have a solid general knowledge of matters British and Scottish and the corresponding language skills. Eickhoff's study offers this circle of potential readers interesting questions and stimulating ideas.
The text itself appears in this edition with a few substantial amendments: if the major distortions of 19th-century English editions, which included a reassuring "correction" of the original title as The Confessions of a Fanatic, belong to a different age, modern editions surprisingly still anglicise Robert's words of anguish, so that an utterance like "I got up and strode furiously round an' round the room" (169) becomes "round and round" (cf. Introduction, xvii).
Completed by notes to the text and a glossary of Scots words, the Canongate critical edition certainly represents a further valuable step in the direction of the reappraisal of one of Scotland's most refined and unjustly marginalised writers.
The New Makars on the whole is certainly an attractive collection, featuring some superb poems, together with a striking number of translations from a variety of European and non-European languages (including Afrikaans, Basque, Sijo, Tamil etc.) bound to pose serious problems to any reviewer. The varieties of Scots and of dictions featured are equally impressive, going from the rhythm and the vocabulary gently blending the Scots with the English of Duncan Glen's "The Medici Chapel" ("A place o daith. The waws close in, press doon / in formal beauty. The haurd lines cauld / across the hairt. The heivens and the earth / move agin us" [78]) to the search for harsh alliterating Scots words and rhythm in Alexander Hutchinson's "Aince Wuid, an Aye Waur" ("Aa yon thirled, bunsucken crew / that quidna cock and crank it: / wid raither jouk or mooch a fry / - or draw yer bleed an bank it." [102]) and to the Northern resonance of Robert Alan Jamieson's Shetlandic "Return Falcon" ("Seekin fir da puckle o truth / du slippt fae dy neb quhan du flew, / du comes back t' da laand / quhar hit micht hae faan." [169]). Predictably, the contemporary in the title simply means living, and in fact comprises some three generations of poets, with very different backgrounds and attitudes: some of them are in fact best known for their works in English (e.g. Ron Butlin, Alan Bold), others follow in the Makars' tradition (as Tom Scott and William Neill). There are also a few (too few?) mild attempts at experimentalism, as in the Morgan-esque "Acid Burns" (174-76) by Mike Cullen (born 1959). "Stairway til Heaven", a translation/response to Led Zeppelin's famous song by the youngest representative in the anthology (Matthew Fitt, born 1968) does not prove to be equally challenging, either in theme or form. In fact, after declaring confidently that "Scots isnae dead" (in the "biographical details of poets" [194]), Fitt does not do much (at least in the poem anthologised) to clear the doubts posed by Hubbard's opening question: is there a future for poetry in Scots? That is: will it be able to keep in step with contemporary experimentation, or will it deteriorate to an empty philological exercise? The risk is undoubtedly there, and it is shared today by many minority languages and dialects all over Europe and the world, even though the present collection still veers clear of it.
Morgan goes through three centuries of poetic tradition, from the 18th century to the present day, commenting on texts and presenting themes and images with great "lightness" (as Italo Calvino would have termed it in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium [Harvard, 1984]) and with an entertaining and witty style well-known to those acquainted with his work. It is really a story of the city - of its river, its inhabitants, its slums, its patois - seen through the eyes of a selection of its poets, not necessarily its finest or best-known (already anthologised in the beautiful Noise and Smoky Breath, edited by Hamish Whyte in 19831). Poets are here the privileged chroniclers and commentators of Glasgow's glory and misery over the last three centuries; their portrait of the powerful capital of Scottish trade of the 18th and 19th centuries is either characterised by overt sympathy and optimism, as John Mayne's Scots verses (1783), which celebrate Glasgow's grandeur ("Hail Glasgow! famed for ilka thing / That heart can wish or siller bring!" [1]), or by deep concern at the uncontrolled industrialisation, as Thomas Campbell's "Lines on Revisiting a Scottish River 1826" (3), which mourns - about sixty years later - the loss of Clyde's "romantic shore". Morgan includes samples of "street poetry" by "Blind Aleck", and of James Macfarlan's radical verse. He does not omit however to cite from more established Glasgow poets, from Hugh MacDiarmid to Tom Leonard, and to quote from at least three women poets: Jean Milton, Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay.
Morgan's essay, very much like a black-and-white photo by Oscar Marzaroli (another well-known Glasgow "poet"), reflects the seductive image of a city of many contrasts: sternly beautiful, sadly humorous, heavily industrialised and yet humane. It is really its contradictory nature which places it today at the centre of Scotland's creative life, as is wittily implied by Robert Crawford's humorous "The Scottish National Cushion Survey" (15), quoted by Morgan at the close of his lecture: in this little fable, while old "cushions" (a self-eloquent metaphor) are being eagerly collected and stored in museums all over Scotland ("There are no more Scottish cushions / Lamented the papers"), in Glasgow "quick hands began / Angrily making cushions". It is in the post-industrial metropolis that life (and art) goes on, irrespective of untimely obituaries and of bleak "Scottish National Surveys".
Oliphant's supernatural fiction is discussed from very different points of view by Rubik and by Esther H. Schor. Rubik's chapter on "The Seen and Unseen", like the rest of her book, offers 'surface' interpretations (I am using the term in a descriptive, not an evaluative sense), stating for example that "the plot of A Beleaguered City centres on the idea that souls are occasionally permitted to return to earth until they realise that they cannot change anything, and that the salvation of their friends and relatives lies solely in the hands of God." (286) Schor, by contrast, provides an exercise in poststructuralism, reading "Earthbound" and A Beleaguered City as narratives about the practice of interpretation: in A Beleaguered City, "Dupin's multivocal document, by enfranchising a wider spectrum of the community than Dupin does as mayor, deconstructs his own interpretive authority. [...] The populace of Semur see themselves inscribed in the mysterious sign because they [...] cannot be interpreted by a univocal, authorized rhetoric [...]." (106) This looks rather more sophisticated than Rubik's remark; but on the other hand, the notion of reading/writing, so pervasive in late-twentieth-century criticism, may well tell us more about the theory from which it springs than about the individual texts to which it is applied.
Rubik's study is almost exclusively devoted to Oliphant's fiction, aiming at a comprehensive survey of all her novels and short stories published in book form. In addition to the points already mentioned, she deals with the presentation of other aspects of social life, such as the role played by various religious denominations, and with formal features (narrative technique, style, plot). Surprisingly for a book which appears in a series subtitled Feminist Literary Studies, Rubik on the one hand shows that Oliphant's authorial narrator and narratee are often explicitly feminine, but on the other tends to refer to both the narrator and the reader as he. Her language thus undermines part of her own argument.
Trela's collection of essays is more selective than Rubik's monograph in its treatment of Oliphant's fictional texts. However, it also includes a substantial section on nonfiction. This opens with an examination by Joanne Shattock of the cooperation between Oliphant and John Blackwood in the writing of The Perpetual Curate (a piece which might just as well have been placed in the section on fiction). Merryn Williams's contribution on Oliphant and feminism I have already referred to. Elisabeth Jay deals with the text of Oliphant's autobiography, badly mangled - tamed - in the posthumous original edition of 1899 and only recently made available by Jay in its complete form [2] Laurie Langbauer and Dale Kramer look at two aspects of Oliphant's critical writings: her ideas on autobiography and tragedy. Langbauer argues that by emphasizing the commonplace, the trivial, the ordinary in autobiography, Oliphant forms "a theory of history [...] that adds to the most recent debate on the subject" (132). Kramer focusses on Oliphant's notion of domestic tragedy, through which she shifted attention away from Greek precedent and towards the actualities of middle-class life. Taken as a whole, Trela's collection, despite its heterogeneity, is probably a more useful introduction to Oliphant's oeuvre than Rubik's study, which tends to get bogged down in its multitude of examples.
Neither of the two volumes deals with the Scottish dimension of Oliphant's works. Rubik does include a brief subchapter on the presentation of "The Scottish Kirk", but seems unaware of the difference between Church of Scotland and Free Church and makes no attempt to relate Oliphant's treatment of church and religion to the Scottish tradition - a clear lacuna, given the importance of this subject in Scottish literature. A handful of Scottish authors are perfunctorily mentioned in both books, as are a few of Oliphant's Scottish settings; but an exploration of the central theme of subversion in a Scottish context is conspicuously lacking in both. What Oliphant, this "distinguished and individual novelist, celebrated by so many of her contemporaries for her remarkable contribution to English literature" (John Stock Clarke in Trela [45]), this "original voice" in the "chorus of the Victorian writers" (Rubik [308]), has done for Scottish literature remains a question unasked and unanswered here.
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Carla Sassi, Universita degli Studi di Trento
Klaus H. Schmidt, University of Mainz/Germersheim (currently Massachusetts, USA)
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