Abstract
James Thomson, we may recall, produced two memorable images of the Scottish borders in The Seasons. There is the personal association of the Tweed, which allows him to make the traditional connection between himself as a pastoral poet and the river closest to his place of birth, ‘whose pastoral Banks first heard my Doric Reed’.1 The other image is of the remnant of an Iron Age hill fort, now a mound encircled by grazing sheep. These peaceable means of describing the landscape were well suited for viewing the united kingdom as an essentially harmonious place whose countryside, cultivated gardens and expanding industries could be brought by the poet’s unifying and proportionate eye into that happy prospect of the ‘ISLAND of Bliss! amid the subject Seas’.2 The encoding of a geo-political settlement in such imagery (ordered and balanced at home; torrid and sublime overseas) did not exclude the possibility of introducing a historical dimension into these national discussions in verse. And history, for Thomson, was essentially of the conceptual universal kind, with the cycle driven onwards by the opposing personal and national forces of industry and luxury; there were certainly both internal and external threats to modern Britain, but the balance of evidence probably still suggested that the nation was on an upward curve.
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Notes
James Thomson, The Seasons, ed. by James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), p. 179
See John Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 76.
See Walter Scott, ‘Introduction to Sir Tristrem’, Poetical Works, 12 vols (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1833), V, pp. 30–50.
[Walter Scott], The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French. With a Preliminary View of The French Revolution, 2nd edn, 9 vols (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1827), I, p. 63.
James Hogg, Memoirs of the Author’s Life (1807) and Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott (1834), ed. by D.S. Mack (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972), p. 129.
See Paul Hamilton’s chapter ‘Waverley: Scott’s Romantic Narrative and Revolutionary Historiography’, in his Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 115–38.
See Susan Oliver, Scott, Byron and the Poetics of Cultural Encounter (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 5
Alison Lumsden, Walter Scott and the Limits of Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 42–74
Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 187–97.
The illustrated editions of Scott’s poems are listed in William Ruff, A Bibliography of the Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, 1796–1832 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 1937)
William B. Todd and Anne Bowden, Sir Walter Scott: A Bibliographical History (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1998)
Peter Garside, ‘Illustrating the Waverly Novels: Scott, Scotland, and the London Print Trade, 1819–1836’, Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 11 (2010), pp. 168–96
Richard J. Hill, Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel (Famham: Ashgate, 2010).
See Gerald Finley Landscapes of Memory, Turner as Illustrator to Scott (London: Scolar Press, 1980)
[Francis Jeffrey], ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel: a Poem’, The Edinburgh Review, 6 (1805), [1]–20
See Marjorie Garson, ‘Scott, Walter (1771–1832)’, in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. by A.C. Hamilton and others (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 633a–c.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. by G. Barden and J. Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 67
R. G. Howarth, The Poetry of Sir Walter Scott (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1971), p. 7.
W. G. Thornbury The Life of J. M. W. Turner R.A., new edn (London: Chatto & Windus, 1897), p. 134.
See Finley, Landscapes of Memory, pp. 158–69; Luke Herrmann, Turner Prints: The Engraved Work of J.M.W. Turner (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 197–9
Jan Piggott, Turner’s Vignettes (London: Tate Gallery, 1993), pp. 54–6.
Finley, Landscapes of Memory, pp. 161–2. The watercolour is now part of the Vaughan Bequest at the National Galleries of Scotland (D NG 860). See also Christopher Baker’s discussion of the view of Melrose in his J.M.W. Turner, The Vaughan Bequest (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2006)
David Hume, The History of England, 6 vols (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1983), III, p. 106.
[Francis Jeffrey], ‘Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field’, The Edinburgh Review, 12 (1808), [l]-35 (p. 3).
Anna Seward to Walter Scott, 15 March 1808, quoted in J. H. Alexander, The Reception of Scott’s Poetry by his Correspondents: 1796–1817, 2 vols (Salzburg: Universität Salzburg, 1979), II, p. 305.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. by A.C. Hamilton, revised 2nd edn (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001), p. 138
Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London: Pimlico, 1992), pp. 161–2.
See A. J. Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), p. 238.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 15–42.
Murray Pittock, The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 90.
Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 4.
See Gerald Finley, Turner and George IV in Edinburgh, 1822 (London: Tate Gallery, 1981), p. 43.
See David Blayney Brown, ‘Historical Subjects’, in The Oxford Companion to J.M.W. Turner, ed. by Evelyn Joll and others (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 140a–141a.
[Probably John Landseer], ‘The Battle of Trafalgar, as seen from the Mizen Starboard Shrouds of the Victory’, Review of Publications of Art (1808), quoted in Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, revised edn, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), I, p. 46b.
See Walter Scott, ‘Report of the Highland Society, ed. by Henry Mackenzie, and The Poems of Ossian, ed. by Malcolm Laing’, The Edinburgh Review, 6 (1805), 429–62.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. by J.C. Maxwell (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 56
See Takero Sato, A Concordance to the Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott (Tokyo: Liber Press, 1996), p. 807b.
[Francis Jeffrey], ‘The Lord of the Isles’, The Edinburgh Review, 24 (1815), 273–94
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 89
John Kemp, The Philosophy of Kant (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), pp. 97–122.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. by James Creed Meredith and rev. by Nicholas Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 91.
Judy Egerton, Making & Meaning: Turner: The Fighting Temeraire (London: National Gallery, 1995), p. 68
J. Hillis Miller, Illustration: Essays in Art and Culture (London: Reaktion, 1992), p. 131.
See James Hamilton, Turner: A Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997), p. 257.
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Mitchell, S. (2013). Scott, Turner and the Vision of North Britain. In: Visions of Britain, 1730–1830. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137290113_7
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