CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE LAST MINSTREL— SIR WALTER SCOTT AND THE HIGHLAND REVIVAL
Why is there is no full-length literary biography of Sir Walter Scott, apart from Edgar Johnson’s Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, two volumes (London, 1970), which is now more than thirty years old? One reason, without a doubt, is that Scott remains the most underrated major author in modern literature; this is a sad fate for an author of whom William Hazlitt said, “his worst is better than anyone else’s best,” and whose novels, which have been ignored by serious critics for generations, have been turned into popular movies (witness Ivanhoe and Rob Roy). So the curious reader still needs to turn to The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, published in one volume in Edinburgh in 1950, and his son-in-law James G. Lockhart’s biography, The Life of Sir Walter Scott, which appeared in seven volumes in 1837–8—although Lockhart himself has been savagely attacked in a curious little book by Eric Quayle, The Ruin of Sir Walter Scott (New York, 1968), who puts the blame for Scott’s financial disasters later in life squarely on Scott himself, and accuses Lockhart of covering up the facts.
Scott has also suffered from the scorn of Scottish nationalist writers because of his associations with the Royal Visit in 1822. However, Paul H. Scott’s Walter Scott and Scotland (Edinburgh, 1981) is actually a sympathetic and deeply perceptive treatment—the reader’s only wish is that it were longer. The same is true of David Daiches’s Sir Walter Scott and His World, mentioned under Chapter 10, above. Graham McMaster’s Scott and Society (Cambridge, 1981) gives a good overview of Scott’s reliance on the Scottish historical school, including John Millar. For Scott’s relations with other folklorists and collectors of Scottish heritage, including Hogg and James Wilson, the scholar turns to Jane Millgate’s Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Toronto, 1984) and Donald Carswell, Scott and His Circle (Garden City, N.Y., 1930).
There are by one count over nine hundred biographies of Robert Burns— just about one for every possible taste. I turned to the study by the editor of Burns’s letters, James MacKay: RB: A Biography of Robert Burns (Edinburgh, 1992). But any biography by David Daiches is worth reading, including his Robert Burns (New York, 1966), and Hugh Douglas offers a new version of Burns’s life in Robert Burns: The Tinder Heart (1999). Anything else relating to Burns studies can be found in The Burns Encyclopedia, edited by Maurice Lindsay in 1959, but reissued in paperback more recently in 1996. Burns’s poems, of course, are available nearly everywhere, including in the heads of most literary-minded Scotsmen.
The best book on James McPherson is by Fiona Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James McPherson and the Poems of Ossian (Edinburgh, 1988), who also wrote the introduction to the best modern edition of The Poems of Ossian, edited by Howard Gaskill for the Edinburgh University Press and available since 1996 in paperback.
John Prebble told the harrowing story of the Highland Clearances in his book of that title in 1963, but it needs to be balanced with Thomas Devine’s Clanship to Crofters’ War (Manchester, 1994). Also useful is Alexander MacKenzie’s History of the Highland Clearances, which first appeared in 1883 but which has been reissued by Mercat Press in Edinburgh; it contains Donald MacLeod’s description of the clearing of Strathnaver in Sutherland quoted in this chapter. James Robertson’s biography of David Stewart, The First Highlander: Major-General David Stewart of Garth (Edinburgh, 1998), is not only informative about his career and writings, but also has a detailed description of his role in the Royal Visit—which the reader can supplement with John Prebble’s The King’s Jaunt. Books on the “invention” of Highland traditions and Scottish identity abound, and even on the “invention” of the Highlands themselves (meaning the construction of an ideological myth surrounding them)— anyone curious on the subject can find a author to match his own opinions and feelings, which usually range from mild amusement to outrage. I think Robert Clyde’s From Rebel to Hero: The Image of the Highlander (see Chapter Five, above) does as well as any other, but it is safe to say that no one has had the last word on this tendentious and volatile issue.
CHAPTER TWELVE: PRACTICAL MATTERS—
SCOTS IN SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY
My sources for this and the next two chapters are so many and various as to defy adequate summary. So I will limit myself to pointing out where certain quotations and facts came from, and what books are particularly useful for the discriminating reader.
I have relied on two sturdy classics on James Watt: John Lord’s Capital and Steam Power, first published in 1923 and reprinted in a second edition in 1965, and Thomas Marshall’s 1925 biography. The discussion about the relations between Glasgow professors and local industrial entrepreneurs is from David Daiches’s essay in Hotbed of Genius, which also has a valuable article on James Hutton. The starting point for any discussion of the roots and impact of Scottish medicine is David Hamilton’s The Healers: A History of Medicine in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1981). For Boerhaave and his students, the standard work is G. A. Lindeboom’s Hermann Boerhaave: The Man and His Work (London, 1968). The background to the relationship between medicine and science is carefully delineated in A. L. Donovan’s Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1975).
The Hunter brothers are the subjects of several, not always accessible, biographies. I found Charles Ilingworth’s The Story of William Hunter (Edinburgh, 1967) still useful, along with George Quist’s John Hunter, 1728–1793 (London, 1981); the best most recent piece is Roy Porter’s lovely essay on William Hunter in Richard Sher’s edited volume, The Glasgow Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1995). The role of Scottish doctors in the development of public health policy in Manchester and elsewhere is set out in Anand Chitnis’s Scottish Enlightenment and Early Victorian English Society.
For a good overview of the transportation revolution in Scotland and Britain, see A.R.B. Haldane’s New Ways Through the Glens: Highland Road, Bridge, and Canal Makers in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, 1962). Of the biographies of James Macadam, I like W. J. Reader’s Macadam: The Macadam Family and the Turnpike Roads (London, 1980) best. Thomas Telford is the subject of a very recent biography by Anthony Burton (London, 2000), but I have relied more on Derrick Beckett’s Telford’s Britain (Newton Abbot, 1987). There is also a stimulating account of Telford at work in Paul Johnson’s Birth of the Modern (mentioned under Chapter Ten, above). On Henry Bell and the steamship, see Brian Osborne’s The Ingenious Mr. Bell (Argyll, 1995). Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help can be found in various editions, but his Lives of the Engineers deserves almost as much attention and was helpful for writing this chapter. Smiles should have his own biographical treatment; unfortunately, most authors who deal with him are so dismissive or condescending that their books have only passing value.
Finally, another study of Scottish engineers should not be missed: that of Robert Louis Stevenson’s family and their construction of lighthouses, described in delightful detail by Bella Bathurst in The Lighthouse Stevensons (New York, 1999).
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE SUN NEVER SETS— SCOTS AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE
I first saw the quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson in Ian MacLeod’s The Scots and have not hesitated to borrow it here. The overseas Scots diaspora is a large and complex subject. The best place to start might be Thomas Devine’s chapter on emigration in The Scottish Nation and the collection of essays in R.A. Cage’s edited volume, The Scots Abroad, 1750–1914 (London, 1985). Also worth reading is Gordon Donaldson’s The Scots Overseas (Westport, CT, 1976).
Duncan Bruce’s The Mark of the Scots has a section on Scots and the British Empire; James Morris’s Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (London, 1973) is an entertaining survey of the British Empire at its height, even though it says nothing particularly about Scots—except for a wry and witty essay on Charles Napier, which I have quoted in this chapter.
Paul Johnson discusses Charles Pasley in The Birth of the Nation; Pasley’s Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire went into successive editions: I used the four
th, published in London toward the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1813. There is an abridged edition of Mill’s History of British India from the University of Chicago Press, edited by William Thomas in 1975, which can be found in some used bookstores. More accessible is the Cambridge University Press selection of Political Works by James Mill. Suresh Chandra Gosh’s Dalhousie in India: 1848–56 (New Delhi, 1973) gives a fascinating summary of Dalhousie’s attempts to raise the quality of life for India’s women.
The story of the Nemesis and its role in the First Opium War comes from Daniel Headrick’s Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1981), which also summarizes the impact of the breech-loading rifle and its percussion cap. On the Jardine-Matheson partnership, see Robert Blake’s entertaining Jardine Matheson: A History (London, 1999). For Scots in Canada, there is Stanford Reid, The Scottish Tradition in Canada (Guelph, 1976). The account of the Orcadians’ role in the Hudson’s Bay Company is from Peter Newman’s Company of Adventurers (New York, 1985); the description of George Simpson is from Bartlett Brebner’s Canada: A Modern History (Anne Arbor, 1960). John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Scotch (second edition, Boston, 1985) is a charming and astute portrait of the Scottish legacy in Canada. The quotations about Glengarry come from James Hunter’s A Dance Called America: The Scottish Highlands in the United States and Canada (Edinburgh, 1994), which was helpful for this chapter and the one that follows. There is a new biography of Sandford Fleming by Clark Blaise, Time Lord: Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time (New York, 2001).
For Lachlan Macquarie, see Robert Hughes’s fascinating The Fatal Shore (New York, 1987). I relied heavily on George Seaver’s David Livingstone: His Life and Letters (New York, 1957) for my portrait of Dr. Livingstone. In this multicultural age, some biographers try to debunk the Livingstone legend, but even Judith Listowel in The Other Livingstone (1974) can only criticize him for claiming to find some places when others deserve some of the credit. Dorothy Helly’s Livingstone’s Legacy (Athens, OH, 1987) ends up vindicating Livingstone’s progressive racial views.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: SELF-MADE MEN— SCOTS IN THE UNITED STATES
In addition to the works by Duncan Bruce and George Black already mentioned (for Chapter Nine, above), I think the best guide to understanding the Scottish contribution to the United States is Bernard Aspinwall’s Portable Utopia: Glasgow and the United States, 1820–1920 (Aberdeen, 1984) and his tightly packed article “The Scots in the United States” in R.E. Cage’s volume mentioned for the previous chapter. The numbers for immigration to the United States come from Gordon Donaldson’s The Scots Overseas, also mentioned above.
Douglas Sloan gives a solid account of the Scottish contributions to American education in The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal (New York, 1971), which can be supplemented with David Hoeveler’s James McCosh and the Scottish Intellectual Tradition (Princeton, 1981). George Jardine deserves his own biography: nineteenth-century copies of Outlines of Philosophical Education abound, which is itself significant, but Jardine himself remains largely ignored, even in Sloan’s otherwise fine work.
My account of Scots in California owes a large debt to Kevin Starr’s America and the California Dream (Oxford, 1973) and Susanna Bryant Dakin’s A Scotch Paisano: Hugo Reid’s Life in California, 1832–1852 (Berkeley, CA, 1939). On William Taylor, see John Paul’s The Soul Digger or The Life and Times of William Taylor (1928). I used S. I. Prinne’s The Life of Samuel F.B. Morse, LL.D. (New York, 1875) to trace Morse’s Scottish and Scotch-Irish lineage, and Robert Bruce’s Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Boston, 1973) for the life of the inventor of the telephone. Bell’s role in the making of Langley’s airplane is summarized in Duncan Bruce’s notice on Bell in The Scottish One Hundred; other details can still be gleaned from the exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.
Unlike his colleagues John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie still has not found an author able to turn his life into a bestseller. So I have relied on an older biographer, Joseph Frazier Wall, and his Andrew Carnegie (New York, 1970) and Harold Livesay’s concise and brilliant Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business, both of which can be found in paperback. But the reader curious about Carnegie does not need to stop there; his Autobiography, available in many modern editions, is not only a mine of information, it is charmingly written, especially the sections on Scotland.
CONCLUSION
The scholar I quote on the grim conditions of everyday life in late nineteenth-century Scotland is C.W. Hill in his Edwardian Scotland (1976). However, better and more detailed accounts of Scotland in those years exist, including the later chapters of Thomas Devine’s The Scottish Nation and I.G.C. Hutchison’s Scottish Politics in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2001). David Daiches’s Scotch Whisky: Its Past and Present (Glasgow, 1976) is the perfect guide to understanding the swift rise and then decline of the Scottish distilling industry in the nineteenth century. For trying to understand James Bond, I always turn to Kingsley Amis’s The James Bond Dossier (London, 1967), which is sadly out of print.
Pat Gerber gives the best most recent account of the Lia Fail in her Stone of Destiny (Edinburgh, 1997), which bravely attempts to sort out the fact from the fiction surrounding the many versions of the stone’s origins and travels. Kay Matheson’s eyewitness account of the 1950 heist comes from that book, as does the quotation from Ian Hamilton when the stone was returned to Scotland. Books on Scottish nationalism and the future of Scotland under devolution grow thick on the bookshelves with each passing month: however, I think Keith Webb in The Growth of Nationalism in Scotland (Glasgow, 1977) gives the best and most balanced account of the movement’s origins and links to mainstream politics. The fact that in 1977 neither Webb nor anyone else knew where the Scottish Nationalist Party would finally end up gives the book, oddly enough, a kind of detached perspective more recent and more enthusiastic accounts do not. Colin Kidd’s Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity (Cambridge, 1993) is actually a more balanced book than the title implies: it reveals the tension between the Enlightenment’s desire to establish a modern identity for Scots as well as Britons, and the traditionalists’ pride in Scotland’s past, including the Declaration of Arbroath. For those who want a more nationalist-driven view of these matters, there is always William Ferguson’s The Identity of the Scottish Nation (Edinburgh, 1988). One can only hope this debate will finally end on a less angry note.
Acknowledgments
Space will not permit me to give proper thanks to every person and institution who helped me, through wise words or generous ges-ture, to complete the book. But here they are: the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, the Fenwick Library at George Mason University, the Evergreen Society at the Johns Hopkins University; Adam Bellow, John Billings, Daniel Boorstin, Jennifer Bradshaw, Lillian Brown, Faye Dale Browning, John Barclay Burns, Jack Censer, Jan Cleaver, Deborah Gomez, Ian Hazlett, Lynn Hopffgarten, Peter Klepper, Nick Lyons, Angus MacDonald, Robert Matheson, Jerry Z. Muller, Marvin Murray, Nick Phillipson, J.G.A. Pocock, Richard Sher, Mark Seiler, Caroline Sincerbeaux, Robert Vey, David Wooton, and Fred Warshofsky.
Paul Koda listened patiently to my original plans for this project, offered his usual sensible advice, and has remained an enthusiastic ally right up to the end. My learned friend Charles T. Matheson read an early version of the entire manuscript. My parents Arthur and Barbara Herman cast their expert critical eyes over the final manuscript and the galleys. Special thanks also go to Peter J. Diamond of New York University, Bruce Lenman of St. Andrews University, and Will Hay of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. They read versions of separate chapters and, bringing all their skill and erudition to bear, agreed with some points, argued with others, and corrected errors throug
hout. Any errors left are entirely my own doing.
In addition, there are six people without whom this book would not exist. Lloyd John Ogilvie, Chaplain of the United States Senate, offered counsel and inspiration from start to finish. Lynn Chu and Glen Hartley proved, as always, that they are intellectual partners as well as literary agents. The enthusiastic support of my original editor at Crown, Bob Mecoy, made writing the book both a pleasure and a personal journey. Emily Loose took over in mid-race, and with her brilliant and efficient editing, guided the book across the finish line.
My wife, Beth, gave me her advice and insight over the five years this project was in gestation. The final result is lovingly dedicated to her.
1 For more on Robertson, see chapter 4.
2 The last of these took place in 1703, when the Parliament that voted the treaty of union first took their seats.
3 Whig is one of the most famous words in English politics; its origin, however, is Scottish (just as its counterpart, Tory, is an Irish word). Whigg is Scots for a kind of sour milk or whey. In hard times it was the main diet of the poor and indigent; since many of the Covenanters were thought to be lower-class trash, opponents taunted them with the word. When a group of Covenanters marched on Edinburgh to prevent the Engagement with Charles I in 1648, it became known as the “march of the whiggamores” or “sour milk men.” Whiggamore soon shortened to Whig; in John Locke’s day, it referred to anyone bound and determined to have a Protestant succession, whether in Scotland or England.
4 Sept refers to a subclan of Highlanders commanded by a minor chieftain. For more about this, see chapter 5.
5 In the end, they agreed to split the inheritance between them.
6 When Scottish judges took their seats on the Court of Session, they were automatically addressed as “my Lord” and allowed to take honorary titles. Hence James Boswell’s father, Alexander, became Lord Auchinleck, James Burnett became Lord Monboddo, and so on. Kames’s title, which he took from his family estate, was in no way a peerage or a claim to nobility: from that point of view, Lord Kames remained a commoner for the rest of his life.
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