Provincializing enlightenment: Edinburgh historicism and the Blackwoodian regional tale.

Jarrells, Anthony

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO THEIR 2004 COLLECTION, SCOTLAND AND THE Borders of Romanticism, Ian Duncan, Leith Davis, and Janet Sorensen suggest that postcolonial criticism "would seem" to provide "the likeliest instruments for rethinking [the] geopolitical borders" of Romantic-period Scotland. (1) Two problems, however, complicate this. The first is Scotland's "anomalous position" (2) with regard to colonialism following the 1707 Act of Union. Such a position necessitates a substantial retooling of postcolonial critical insights gleaned from quite different political and historical circumstances--from India, say, or from the West Indies. The second problem is that those critics who do apply postcolonial instruments to the literature of the period--most often via analyses of "internal colonialism"--tend to "absorb the traditional category of Romanticism into the 'long eighteenth century'" (9). (2) They fail, that is, to account for Scotland's anomalous position with regard to Romanticism. (3)

When Duncan, Davis, and Sorensen turn to address this traditional category, they assert that "[t]he cultural breach with Enlightenment, defined by the antagonistic formation of a 'Romantic Ideology,' came late in Scotland" (13). It arrived in 1817 with the founding of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine--"Romanticism as (at last) Counter-Enlightenment" (13). The Enlightenment here countered is largely Scotland's own, initiated by the philosophical historians of mid-century Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, and maintained in the Romantic period via the Whig-centered Edinburgh Review. In this essay, I want to examine a significant element of this famous "breach": the inclusion in Blackwood's of regional tales such as those written by James Hogg, John Galt, David Macbeth Moir, and others. Wendell Harris characterizes regional tales as short fictional works that "[describe] the life and manners of a particular people." (4) In general, these tales exhibit a preoccupation with the local, a heavy dependence on vernacular speech, and a penchant for mixing the natural and the supernatural. As such, they fit comfortably into most accounts of "Romanticism." With regards to the brand of Romantic ideology espoused by Blackwood's, the very presence of these tales--especially in the early years of publication--helped to distinguish the magazine from its Enlightenment-oriented rival across town.

But the regional tales published in Blackwood's also exhibit a complicated engagement with Enlightenment thought, and in this they challenge the notion that Romanticism in Scotland was constituted by a cultural breach with Enlightenment. As I will suggest below, postcolonial instruments can help account for this discrepancy--and in such a way that does not fold Romanticism into the longer sweep of the eighteenth century. Drawing upon the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose book Provincializing Europe (2000) emphasizes the importance of Enlightenment categories for understanding postcolonial thought and historical difference, I argue that while the regional tales published in Blackwood's were a vital part of its oppositional identity, they nevertheless do not reject outright or wholeheartedly the Enlightenment historicism against which this identity was posited. Rather, they provincialize it, in Chakrabarty's sense of the word. That is, in these tales the progressive-historicist categories of Enlightenment thought are shown to be both real and necessary for describing the contemporary moment. At the same time, Blackwoodian regional tales highlight the limitations of these categories for understanding what Chakrabarty calls the "heterotemporality" of that very moment. (5)

To talk in terms of "heterotemporality" is to understand "modernity"

as a plurality of times coexisting in the common space of the present. It is too see, in other words, "... the plurality that inheres in the 'now', the lack of totality, the constant fragmentariness that constitutes one's present" (Chakrabarty 243). This is not quite the same thing as what has been called "uneven development," a theory, as James Chandler has shown, that originated in the philosophical histories of the Scottish Enlightenment and that continues to inform Marxist-inflected analyses of historical change. (6) Uneven development, like internal colonialism, implies separate "stages" of society--a higher and a lower--sharing a common moment but divided across space. According to Michael Hechter, "[t]he spatially uneven wave of modernization over state territory creates relatively advanced and less advanced groups" (Internal Colonialism 9). "Heterotemporality" does not presuppose such a separation between the advanced and the less-advanced, the modern and the pre-modern. Instead, it points to the unevenness of a modernity that is itself "out of joint" (Chakrabarty 16).

This difference has important implications for postcolonial criticism, and, more particularly, for understanding how Scottish writers in the Romantic period engaged with an Enlightenment history that tended to see Scotland as less advanced than its neighbor to the south. What it suggests is that modernity is not merely something against which colonies--and internal colonies--can be defined, but is rather a product of colonial encounter. The fragmentation or micro-historical plurality that is often attributed in postcolonial criticism to colonized peoples thus becomes an indispensable tool for understanding the colonizer nations of Europe; it helps make visible the "disjuncture" at the heart of "advanced" or "modern" societies. (7) At the same time, colonial and postcolonial histories should not--indeed, cannot--be understood separately from the universalizing categories of Enlightenment, even though these categories "... bear the burden of European thought and history" (Chakrabarty 4). Enlightenment categories remain necessary for understanding how subaltern cultures are both part of and distinct from a globalized economy of capital and of signs. To be sure, historians of the subaltern must adopt a complicated stance toward such categories: to use them uncritically is to give way to a bland chronology--the "homogeneous empty time" of uneven development, whereby Europe achieves something first and the community, nation, or people in question achieve it later. But to highlight the limitations of this chronology, even while insisting on its descriptive necessity, is to reground "Europe." (8) It is to see the plurality that "inheres" in what is often taken to be a monolithic category.

The anomalous position of post-Union Scotland affords a useful example of the kind of encounter that underpins modernity, for some of modernity's key concepts were forged on the margins of the United Kingdom following the 1707 act. In the new national space created by the union it was obviously England that was the dominant--and advanced--partner. For many on both sides of the border (though certainly not for all), England's economic, political, and cultural institutions signified a more civilized state of existence, one which could not always accommodate the traditions of its partner to the north. As Colin Kidd explains, Scottish "Whig" historians like William Robertson and David Hume "subvert[ed]" Scotland's pre-Union past in the interest of a "sociological and Anglo-British mode of historical politics." (9) The result was a "philosophical history" which posited a number of stages through which different societies were said to pass--not always at the same rate. In his History of Scotland (1759), for instance, Robertson clearly distinguishes between a pre- and post-Union Scotland:

   At length the union having incorporated the two nations, and
   rendered them one people, the distinctions which had subsisted for
   many ages gradually wear away; peculiarities disappear; the same
   manners prevail in both parts of the island; the same authors are
   read and admired; the same entertainments are frequented by the
   elegant and polite; and the same standard of taste, and of purity
   of language, is established. The Scots, after being placed, during
   a whole century, in a situation no less fatal to the liberty than
   the taste and genius of the nation, were at once put in possession
   of privileges more valuable than those which their ancestors had
   formerly enjoyed. (10)

For Robertson, union with England provided an opportunity for Scotland to catch up or to pass more quickly, as it were, into a more advanced stage of society. In order to better assimilate, post-Union Scotland had to be cut off from its recent feudal past and from some of the traditional associations that had accrued from it.

But if Scotland's past was subverted in the interests of an English present, as Kidd argues, it is important to note as well that this English present was itself a product of Scottish Enlightenment history--literally, in that Hume's History of England (1754-1762) gave the English and Scottish alike the history of this modern entity; and figuratively in that Hume's original title (and goal) was a "History of Britain." Historians like Hume and Robertson were uniquely situated to develop a theory of historical stages, standing as they did at the threshold of a development that had every appearance of proceeding unevenly. Post-Union Scotland witnessed massive changes in commerce, industry, and the arts--changes that transformed landscape and culture, country and city. As Walter Scott exclaims at the end of Waverley (1814), "[t]here is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland." (11) When Samuel Johnson and James Boswell visited Scotland in 1773, Johnson seems to have expected sights befitting an age long past. But as he famously reports in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, "[w]e came thither too late to see what we expected, a people of peculiar appearance and a system of antiquated life." (12) There were still pockets of peculiarity--out of the way places where "antiquated life" persisted; but since the Union with Scotland and the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746, most of Scottish "life," says Johnson, "recommences upon new principles" (40). Johnson has almost nothing to say about the intellectual flowering taking place among Scotland's lowland literati. As Katie Trumpener has argued, though, the "new principles" he lauds are in fact appropriations of "Scottish Enlightenment paradigms and investigative procedures" (Trumpener 68).

Scottish Enlightenment historians, then, may have invented the "first in Europe, then elsewhere" logic that Johnson deploys and Chakrabarty challenges. But the historical rub is that these historians were closer to the "elsewhere" part of the equation. Their ideas about a modernity that was practically synonymous with "England" (and "Europe") were a product of the encounter between the economically advanced and the less-advanced. Modernity, in other words, was not the condition under which such an encounter became possible. Indeed, the central argument of Trumpener's groundbreaking study of "Bardic" nationalisms is that a kind of postcolonial--or anti-imperial--consciousness predates the formation of British nationalism (19-34). A bardic nationalism is one that is discontinuous with itself; it combines, absorbs, and embeds multiple materials and conditions, some of which challenge the imagined integrity of the nation and the imperial progress that follows from it. To speak of the modern nation in this sense, in relation to the materials and conditions out of which it was produced, is to speak of something more complicated than uneven development. It is to speak of heterotemporality.

That such materials and conditions are not readily apparent in the philosophical histories of the Scottish Enlightenment can be attributed to two factors. The first is genre. The sociological and Anglo-British mode described by Kidd worked by subverting the past and by ignoring conditions associated with the past that persisted in the present (despite Scotland's assimilation into a modern Britain). To account for such conditions requires a genre, or "history," that is less "sociological" and less "AngloBritish." The second factor is period. A "post-Enlightenment" ideology such as the one we now associate with Romanticism had begun to emerge in Enlightenment-era Scodand. The "Ossian" poems of James Macpherson offer a striking example. (13) But this post-Enlightenment ideology had not yet developed its own set of features and discourses. This is not to say that when such features and discourses did emerge (or can be said to have emerged) they negated everything that came before; rather, their emergence allows for a kind of vantage point from which Enlightenment discourses can be differently understood. One genre that highlights this separation--and which provides the kind of vantage point useful for recognizing this difference--is the tale. Unlike the philosophical histories of the Enlightenment, the regional tales of the Romantic era do make readily apparent the materials and conditions of Enlightenment modernity. The genre, in fact, was uniquely situated for the task of accommodating--not subverting--the historicist time of the Enlightenment to those local conditions that Enlightenment historicism itself often overlooked.

The regional tale in part grew out of the "nationalist discourses of the post-Enlightenment" which Duncan, Davis, and Sorensen identify as "antiquarianism, vernacular poetry [and] prose fiction" (13). But it also followed from those Enlightenment discourses that fueled the novel and the professionalized sphere of letters institutionalized in post-Enlightenment Edinburgh: conjectural history, political economy, and what would come to be called realism. The tale is thus a product of the encounter between these different discourses--post-Enlightenment (or nationalist) and Enlightenment--and of the different notions of time implied by each. The term "heterotemporality," then, which Chakrabarty uses to characterize modernity itself, can also characterize the complex time of the Romantic-period tale. (14) To characterize it as such, however, is to suggest a historical specificity and a formal complexity beyond that usually attributed to this "secondary" (or minor) formation. It is also to distance the genre from the more overtly counter-Enlightenment ideology of Blackwood's Magazine, the publication through which, in large part, the tale rose to dominance.

Recent publication figures suggest that in the Romantic period itself the tale was anything but a secondary form--unless by "secondary" one means "short." Overtaking both "novel" and "romance," the generic title "tale" became, by 1820, the most common classification for a fictional work, accounting, as Peter Garside has shown, for over 34% of all fiction titles published in the decade. (16) Scott's Waverley novels--themselves indebted to Mafia Edgeworth's Tales of Fashionable Life--helped to create a demand for a kind of fiction that tales in particular were poised to deliver. As with the Gothic, this kind of fiction was a version of romance-after-novels--or romance highly self-conscious of the presence and power of novels. But where the Gothic fiction of Ann Radcliffe highlighted the marvelous, the psychological, and the borders of the real, regional fiction focused on the common, the local, and the borders of the nation. Indeed, in Scott as in Hogg, it is often the local that appears marvelous; thus we might say of regional fiction generally what the narrator of Rob Roy, Frank Osbaldistone, says of his nurse Mabel's stories, in which "the inhabitants of [Scotland] served ... to fill up the parts which ogres and giants with seven-leagued boots occupy in the ordinary nursery tales." (17)

Scott called some of his works "tales": the first series of his Tales of my Landlord, for example, which included Old Mortality and The Black Dwarf, was published in 1816 by William Blackwood. But these works read much more like novels. (18) For one thing, novels were longer than tales (usually by at least two volumes). More importantly, the two genres differed in their use of time. Scott's early fiction--which helped make the word "tale" so popular--in many respects recapitulates the progressive-historicist time of the Scottish Enlightenment. In works like Waverley and Old Mortality, for example, the local and the minute are introduced only to be swept up into a much larger representation of history--a history defined by larger moments of national development like the Jacobite Uprising of 1745 or the Glorious Revolution. (19) One effect of this historicism is that certain values associated with the past (honor, loyalty, valor) get romanticized in a present moment thought of as cut off from the conditions that originally produced them (the feudal organization of Highland culture, say). Regional tales, by contrast, resist the assimilation of the local into the larger sweep of capital "H" History. What they highlight instead is the continuing presence of those conditions thought to have disappeared. As Tim Killick notes, "[b]y a process of re-engaging with the material that could be considered as common cultural property and which predated contemporary society, much short fiction [of the later Romantic period] contested the assumption of the primacy of progressive, urban, and rationalist thought brought about in part by the arrival of the Scottian historical novel." (20)

Blackwood's catered to the demand for regional fiction created by Scott's works. Indeed, the magazine's identity was based in part on the fact that it published original works of fiction. Unlike the Edinburgh (or its London-based Tory sibling, the Quarterly), Blackwood's was a magazine. And as Joan Milne and Willie Smith point out, the primary aim of a magazine was to introduce new literature, not merely to review it. (21) Given their size and their subject matter, tales were a perfect fit for a publication looking to do something new--to mix fact and fiction, review and literature--in order to preserve something quite old: the Tory values associated with rural life. But this is where things get tricky. Blackwood's commitment to preserving something old--Maga's Toryism, that is--is its other distinguishing feature. As critics from William Hazlitt and Georg Lukacs to Peter Garside and Ian Duncan have noted, this commitment makes for an uneasy fit with the philosophical historicism that underpins Scott's novels. I would suggest that it fits only marginally better with the regional tales published in the magazine's own pages--something John Gibson Lockhart himself practically admits. In the account of the magazine he provides in Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk, he explains that "... it was quite sufficient to insert in every Number, a certain number of articles, full of traces of proper feeling and thinking, and to fill up the rest with anything that would amuse any class of Magazine-readers, without the least concern about their agreement or disagreement with the main and presiding spirit of the book." (22) Tales helped increase readership by appealing to a wider audience than the magazine's rather strict focus on "Tory politics and High Church, aristocratic ethos" might otherwise allow for. (23) They were thus part of what Jon Klancher describes as a strategy to "[smudge] social differences among [magazine] readers" (50).

The "presiding spirit" mentioned by Lockhart aimed to "oppose on all occasions," as one of his fictional spokespersons says, the "vile spirit" of the Edinburgh Review (2: 191). By "vile spirit" Lockhart means "Whig." But for Lockhart and for his fellow Blackwoodians, "Whig" signified something quite complicated: on the one hand, a political allegiance (the Edinburgh Review was founded in 1802 by four Whig advocates), on the other, a "scepticism" that betrayed too great a debt to the "philosophers of the last age" (2: 128). "The system of political opinions, inculcated in the Edinburgh Review is," Lockhart explains, "... admirably fitted to go hand in hand with a system of scepticism; but entirely irreconcilable with the notion of any fervent love and attachment for a religion, which is, above all other things, the religion of feeling" (2: 136). Lockhart is not alone in remarking the close connections between the Whiggism of the Edinburgh and the philosophical historians of the Scottish Enlightenment. (24) Philip Flynn has shown that there are good reasons for the association. The "liberal Whig interpretation of history" that Edinburgh editor Francis Jeffrey brought to that periodical was acquired firsthand from John Millar, Professor of Civil Law at Glasgow University, and Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University. (25) Stewart's lectures on political economy--which were attended by Jeffrey and Walter Scott--served as a kind of "bridge" between the Enlightenment literati and Edinburgh reviewers. (26) His emphasis on a broad European perspective rather than on mere local concerns, an emphasis indebted to Adam Smith, aimed to unite the "sciences" of politics and Morals. (27)

Against the Edinburgh's discourse of political economy Blackwood's offered a discourse of "national culture." (28) Though a thoroughly modern conceit, this national culture offered an idea of the past which reaffirmed traditional associations lost in the new histories of the Enlightenment and degraded by the commercialism associated with the Edinburgh. The effect was a return to political emphases that were out of step with the present-day "manufacturing system," as Lockhart's fellow Tory, Robert Southey, termed it, and with the Smithian political economy that served as that system's "code, or confession of faith." (29) Attention was turned away from trade and industry and toward agriculture and rural affairs. These traditionally Tory emphases in turn served to ground the "particular set of feelings and principles" that gave the magazine its "presiding spirit" (2: 225). Lockhart's own "Remarks on Schlegel's History of Literature" offers an example of this spirit. Employing the same word he uses in Peter's Letters to describe the Edinburgh's "system of politics," Lockhart writes that Schlegel's History "... inculcates throughout,"

   the necessity which there is, that literature should have reference
   to an established centre, namely, to religious faith, and to
   national history and character,--that its main employment should be
   to nurse and strengthen our associations in relation to these
   objects,--and that, instead of being applied at random as a
   stimulus to our faculties and emotions, as mere abstract human
   beings, it should bend all its powers towards tutoring and forming
   the feelings of men, destined to act a part as citizens of their
   respective communities. (30)

The emphasis here is not only on a national culture enacted in and through the local ("respective communities"), but also on the role that literature plays in mediating this relationship. Schlegel's History thus serves as an occasion for opposing the "presiding" spirit of Blackwood's with the "vile spirit" of the Edinburgh, the periodical most responsible, in Lockhart's opinion, for "vitiating national sentiment" and "mouldering down all large aggregates of association" (510-11).

With their own emphasis on rural associations and local settings, Blackwoodian regional tales in a sense embodied the magazine's presiding spirit. As such, they often overlapped with some of the pressing and substantial concerns of the magazine. For example, regional tales helped give Blackwood's a distinctly Scottish character, something thought to be missing in the more cosmopolitan Edinburgh. The "respective communities" that comprised this character, however, are not always the same as the national culture that defined the magazine's "Romantic ideology." The two overlap; they do not conform. I can offer a brief example by way of comparison. The canonical Romantic response to the modernity ushered in by Enlightenment is the attempt Wordsworth makes in his poetry to localize the nation. His notion of the spot of time and the Lake District with which it is associated are both provincial in the basic sense of the term: they lie at a distance from the commercial and political center of London and from the intellectual, economic, and imperial networks that modern London represents. But by and large this distance is registered, in Wordsworth's poetry, via an anxiety about proximity to that center. The enclosure laws of the late eighteenth century as well as new strategies for raising capital in the interest of economic expansion at home and abroad worked to bring a newly global center uncomfortably close for Wordsworth. Wordsworth's "Michael," for instance, begins by turning "from the public way" and toward "a struggling pile of unhewn stones." (31) This pile of stones--part of an unfinished sheepfold--holds a story, which the speaker of the poem communicates to readers. By the end of the communication, however, we find that we have nevertheless "reached," just as Michael's son, Luke, has, the "public way" (line 436). All roads, it seems, lead to the metropole.

Blackwood's often defended the poetry of the Lake School. In some respects the magazine's own emphasis on the local enacts the Lake-School turn from or "breach" with Enlightenment (and in this, perhaps, Blackwoodian Romanticism can be described as coming "late"). But the geopolitical situation that conditioned this Romantic gesture is quite different from the one faced by Wordsworth and his fellow Lake poets. The Enlightenment Wordsworth turned from was in large part a European, rationalist movement filtered through the dissenting tradition from which figures like William Godwin emerged. Members of this tradition distrusted the institutions of power, which barred nonconformists; and their critique was directed at blatant discrepancies inherent in institutional power. The much more institutionally-based Scottish Enlightenment, despite its cosmopolitan character and systematic reach, emerged in part to justify connection with these very institutions. Prior to Union, Edinburgh was the political center of the Scottish nation. But the transfer of power to London left in its wake a vibrant intellectual culture that wondered whether it might be too far away, so to speak, to be heard. To bridge the distance between a removed center of power and an important but provincial outpost became part of the program for Enlightenment in Scotland.

Like Wordsworth, the group of writers that surrounded William Blackwood certainly saw themselves as rebelling against a culture of political-economic progress, especially as it was articulated via the cosmopolitan ethos of the Edinburgh Review. This cosmopolitanism, which defined the Edinburgh and its Enlightenment forbears, left little room, or so Blackwood and company thought, for Scots themselves. (32) There was "... a powerful sense," writes Cairns Craig, "that Scotland was disappearing into a homogeneous and 'universal' English culture." (33) Although the Lake District was not so far from Scotland, a border separated the two (a tale like Scott's "The Two Drovers," for instance, highlights just how profound the distance could appear to those living on either side). This is not to say that Scottish fears of being swallowed up by English culture were not real. Clearly there was anxiety about proximity to the center like that which features in Wordsworth's poetry. But there is something more at work here, as well--something like a desire to maintain a connection with that center. In the "provincial" turn taken by Blackwood's, we see both an anxiety about proximity to the center as well as an anxiety about distance from that same center. (34) This double-sense of the provincial is registered in the regional tales. Sometimes, then, they did prove useful for negotiating the difficult issue of where Lockhart's "national history" was to be grounded (in a discourse of political economy, say, or in one of national culture). But they also proved capable of frustrating the ideological contours of such a project with a stance that saw national history in terms of political economy and national culture.

Take, for example, the following scene from the two-part "Storms," the first of Hogg's "Shepherd's Calendar" tales to appear in Blackwood's (in April 1819). The tale begins,

   These constitute the various aeras of the pastoral life. They are
   the red lines in the shepherd's manual--the remembrancers of years
   and ages that are past--the tablets of memory by which the ages of
   his children the times of his ancestors and the rise and downfall
   of families are invariably ascertained. Even the progress of
   improvement in Scots farming can be traced traditionally from
   these, and the rent of a farm or estate given with precision,
   before and after such and such a storm, though the narrator be
   uncertain in what century the said notable storm happened. "Mar's
   year" and "that year the heelanders raide" are but secondary
   mementos to the year nine and the year forty--these stand in bloody
   capitals in the annals of the pastoral life as well as many more
   than shall hereafter be mentioned. (35)

In this introductory passage, the national-historical moments of Scott's historical novels (the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745) are rendered "secondary" to a series of terrible storms that provides a more immediate register for memory and an alternative means of accounting for the passage of time. Calendar time here is nearly synonymous with moments of extreme weather; and the focus on such moments allows Hogg to connect what must have seemed to readers to be pre-modern conditions--here thrown into relief--with the contemporary moment. Though set in 1794 with allusions to the stormy political climate of t 819, Hogg's historical reference points (other storms from the distant past) go back to Robertson's pre-Union days of ignorance and violence.

It is possible to read the emphases in Hogg's tale as "post-Enlightenment": vernacular speech, agriculture, local affiliations, rural settings. But these emphases do not register a full or complete rejection of the historicism which the "presiding spirit" of Blackwood's seemed most intent on opposing. In the passage quoted above, for example, Enlightenment ("the progress of improvement") and political economy ("the rent of a farm or estate given with precision") feature prominently in the description, as they do in many of Hogg's tales. Each, however, is relocated: first, to a provincial setting--Hogg's native Ettrick; and second, to the provincial time indicated by the title for the series (the "Shepherd's Calendar"). Strangely, given its parochial basis, provincial time provides a wider view of the moment described than a more straightforward sociological history could. It is a time clearly impacted by Enlightenment history (the various encroachments by the market, enclosures of land, the need to improve the landscape), but not exhausted by it. In fact, modernity, as Hogg relates it, comes to seem a product of the mixing of the two--a product of the heterotemporal time of the tale, that is.

This is even more evident in "The Shepherd's Calendar: Class Second," published in March, 1823. This tale tells of a visit by a landlord, or master, to one of the shepherds who works on his estate. When the discussion turns to the subject of "a complete overthrow of the farmers," which occurred 140 years prior, the shepherd, Andrew, is asked by his master to explain "the cause" of such a decisive change. (36) As in "Storms," national-historical moments are invoked in order to be subordinated: "for the maist part," says Andrew, the change took place "afore the Revolution" (314). The historical narrative Hogg constructs makes for a diverse grouping of moments and dates: before the Revolution of 1688, after that Revolution, the recent war with France. This grouping spans periods and historical stages in ways that allow them to be meaningfully connected--not severed or subverted. More importantly, they are connected through the economic effects that accompanied changes in history and in the weather. Andrew continues. "Let me tell ye, master--for ye're but a young man, an' I wad aye fain have ye to see things in a right light--that ye may blame the wars; ye may blame the government; an' ye may blame the parliamenters; but there's a hand that rules higher than a' these ..." (315).

Andrew's statement about a higher power does not forestall explanation--as it might--by leading the story into religious fatalism. As in many of Hogg's tales, religious and superstitious explanations are followed by analyses of political economy:

   The lairds want naething better than for ye to rin in arrears; then
   they will get a' your stocks for neist to naething, and have the
   land stockit themselves as they had lang-syne; and you will be
   their keepers, or vassals, the same as we are to you at present. As
   to hinging on at the present rents, it is madness--the very
   extremity of madness. I hae been a herd here for fifty years, an' I
   ken as weel what ground will pay at every price of sheep as you do,
   and I daresay a great deal better. (316)

An analysis that begins with the hand of God culminates with something much closer to the invisible hand of the market. Andrew, for instance, offers the following "average": "that before the French war began, the sheep were dearer than they are now--the forms were not above one-third of the rents at an average, and the farmers were not making any money" (316). History is clearly invoked here (the Revolution of 1688, the French war). But so is something else--something a good deal harder to categorize (religious superstition, generational wisdom, a view from the economic bottom). The latter, though, does not cancel the former out. The form of the tale as Hogg develops it enables the two to coexist. When the master again asks if Andrew can state "with certainty" (316) the "cause" of a more recent event in Scots farming--one which occasioned "great loss" following a "burn" being "dammed up with dead carcasses" (316)--he reverts to the alternative calendrical time of lowland shepherds, where "fixing the date" is equivalent to telling a tale. "That was the year, master," he concludes, "on which our burn was dammed up wi' the dead sheep; and in fixing the date, you see, I hae been led into a lang story, and am just nae further wi' the main point than when I began."

Andrew may be correct in suggesting that his story does not develop his initial statement, but only if "develop" is read here as "progressive historicism." For his explanation has a clear effect on his listener, who comes to a fresh understanding of the present. "I wish from my heart," says the master, "that you would try to fix a great many dates in the same manner" (317). In addition, although Andrew's somewhat superstitious account suggests antipathy to the logic of political economy, he adds to this as well those lengthy bits of economic analysis. Here it may be important to remember Chakrabarty's point that one cannot fully reject the inheritance of the Enlightenment. One can recognize the limitations of Enlightenment categories in accounting for the plurality of times coexisting in the common space of the present; but the Enlightenment inheritance itself remains a distinctive part of this plurality.

Chakrabarty's "provincializing" gesture proves especially useful for negotiating the complex time of Hogg's tales, for as he himself notes, provincialized history is "nonsociological ...; it lends itself more easily to fiction, particularly of the nonrealist or magic realist variety practiced today" (86). It is not surprising that Chakrabarty would have to look beyond the discipline of History--and to literature in particular--to find a model for his radically new approach. (37) Institutional history, no matter its object of analysis, always and finally refers back to "Europe." More surprising is the example Chakrabarty uses to justify his new approach: Marx's Capital. From the perspective of a contemporary poststructuralism itself indebted to modernist ambiguity, Chakrabarty's theoretical justification might seem unlikely, if not absurd. But given the prehistory of the "Europe" Chakrabarty "provincializes"--a prehistory grounded in theories from the Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic reactions developed a generation later--the turn to Marx begins to sound more reasonable. Marx's Capital remains one of the most powerful critiques available of Scottish Enlightenment political economy. But while Marx is occasionally classed as a Romantic, he is anything but "counter-Enlightenment." His method, in fact, is often read as a kind of Enlightenment historicism in its own right. (38)

Chakrabarty, though, does not read Marx as a historicist. Or rather, he does not read him as just that. In Marx's Capital, Chakrabarty finds an alternative to the internal colonialism model and to the uneven development upon which so many Marxist histories themselves have depended. In Marx's Capital, says Chakrabarty, two different kinds of history are highlighted simultaneously. History i is the prehistory of capital. It is universalizing and "analytical"--its "abstracting categories ... eventually tend to make all places exchangeable with one another" (71). History 2s, on the other hand, are not fully separate from capital. They do however "interrupt and punctuate the run of capital's own logic" (64). These histories are "affective"; they are "life-worlds" native to specific locales, rituals, and traditions. Such life-worlds are integral to but not fully commensurate with the progress of capital. That is, they cannot be fully accounted for in any history of capital: when translated into a transition narrative like the one that usually accompanies discussions of capitalism or modernity, the local life-worlds will leave traces of "that which cannot be enclosed" (93) by any claim to universality. Thus "provincialized" history, the meeting of history 1 and history 2s, will have a "split" (93) running through it--a seam to mark the "irreducible plurality" of modernity.

Such a seam is clearly evident in Hogg's writing. One way to account for this seam is to see the anomalous place Hogg's Scotland occupies with regards to Romanticism as a product of the anomalous place Scotland occupies with regards to colonialism following the 1707 Act of Union. The regional tales of the Romantic period make this link visible. To the extent that Whig history came to be associated with English and European modernity, Hogg's interesting juxtapositions highlight a particularized Scottish history that cannot quite be assimilated. This history does not reject modernity. But it does challenge the progressive narrative of cultural imperialism that underpins it. (39) In the "Shepherd's Calendar" installment published in June 1823, for instance, two tales, equally strange, are told one after the other. The first concerns Mr. Adamson of Laverhope, a man "of ungovernable temper--of irritability so extreme, that no person could be for a moment certain to what excesses he might be hurried." (40) Adamson's irritability shows itself on a number of occasions in the story. First, after being provoked by a "thoughtless boy" who belonged to a neighbor's farm and who "dogged Adamson's cattle" (629), Adamson immediately seizes his neighbor for an unpaid debt. He then auctions his neighbor's possessions, despite the pleas of his neighbor's wife, Mrs. Irvine. The following day, "ill pleased with himself," Adamson "[strikes] a dog that belonged to one of his own shepherd boys." "When the boy comes running to his dog, inadvertently leaving open a fold-door, Adamson begins "threshing him unmercifully" (631). Adamson is eventually laid low himself when another shepherd stands up for the boy. Exiled from his own sheepfold, Adamson's final outrage is committed against a "gaberlunzie," Parle Maxwell, who "came up to the folds for his annual bequest of a fleece of wool, which had never before been denied him" (633). Not in the mood for charity, Adamson proceeds to attack the beggar as a Catholic and a Jacobite, instigating first a beating at the hands of "the auld papist," and then something that Hogg's shepherd-narrator describes as "divine justice" (629). The beggar, or possibly the devil himself, brings on a storm "passing the bounds ever witnessed in these northern climes" (637). While the storm is short-rived, the violence is as extreme as one of Adamson's outbursts. Those present conclude that Adamson is punished for his excessive temper; for he was "struck dead by the lightning; and, his right side having been torn open, his bowels were lying beside the body" (638). Though the dispossessed farmer's house "was five miles distant from the folds" where Adamson died, "his death," we are told, "was not so much as known of by mortal man until two hours after Mrs. Irvine" (639) received this information. Hogg concludes as follows: "It was a great convulsion of the elements, exceeding anything remembered, either for its violence or consequences, and these mysterious circumstances having been bruited abroad as connected with it, gave it a hold on the minds of the populace, never to be erased but by the erasure of existence. It fell out on the 12th of July, 1753" (639). So ends the story of Mrs. Adamson of Laverhope.

In the very next sentence, though, the narrator begins to discuss "[t]he death of Mr. Copland of Minnigess," which forms "another era of the same sort in Annandale" (639). Mr. Copland, too, it turns out, was struck by lightning--on July 18, 1804. A gentleman, handsome and well liked, Mr. Copland has the uncommon misfortune to be at his folds, shearing sheep with his neighbors, when a violent storm strikes. Far from divine judgment, Mr. Copland's story bespeaks a more arbitrary fate. "On the spot where he fell," we are told, "there is now an obelisk erected to his memory, with a warning text on it, relating to the shortness and uncertainty of human life" (640). So ends the much shorter account of Mr. Copland. Where the story of Mr. Adamson leaves readers with a sense of mystery and divine intervention, the story of Mr. Copland leaves the readers with something interesting but inconclusive. A witness explains that when Mr. Copland was struck, "he sprung a great height into the air, much higher ... than it was possible for any man to leap by his own exertion." The narrator suggests that "[t]he circumstance would argue that the electric matter that slew Mr. Copland had issued out of the earth" (640). Two somewhat related stories comprise this one tale. No attempt is made to transition between the two stories or to adjudicate their relation. This we must supply ourselves. As with the earlier "Storms," the dates given in the tale offer a useful place to begin. The juxtaposition of dates at the end of the first part and the beginning of the second part of the story suggests a kind of progressive movement, something akin to what Hume details in his controversial essay, "On Miracles." "When we peruse the first histories of all nations," writes Hume,

   we are apt to imagine ourselves transported into some new world;
   where the whole frame of nature is disjointed, and every element
   performs its operations in a different manner, from what it does at
   present. Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine, and death are
   never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience.
   Prodigies, omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural
   events that are intermingled with them. But as the former grow
   thinner every page, in proportion as we advance nearer the
   enlightened ages, we soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious
   or supernatural in the case.... (41)

The essay "On Miracles" exemplifies Hume's Enlightenment-Whig approach as it explains events from the past in terms of their distance from and antecedence to an enlightened present--a present where understanding is based on natural (that is, historical) rather than on supernatural (or religious) explanation.

If we compare Hume's reasoning with Hogg's tale we see that the first part depends upon something like the "Prodigies, omens, oracles, [and] judgments" which "obscure the few natural events that are intermingled with them." In the second part of the tale, as "we advance nearer the enlightened ages," these prodigies, etc. "grow thinner every page." The comparison with Hume works up to this point. But of course it does not exhaust the tale's complex structure. For while the two parts of the tale follow one after another in an assumed progression, the lack of transition between them, the overlapping subject, and the claim that both storms described "passed the bounds" of anything ever seen, all suggest something more like coexistence--the collapsed time of heterotemporality. In addition, while the latter story has the authority of a more rational explanation (and moral), as Douglas S. Mack has pointed out, this explanation does not provide the same aesthetic satisfaction as the one that precedes it. (42) Unlike the journalistic, or reportage-style of the latter tale, the story of Mr. Adamson is filled with the rustic speech, the local customs, and the roundabout explanation that readers came to expect from Hogg. "Whig" history is thus invoked and undermined. But it is not negated. A seam--represented here only by the typographical space between dates--marks a gap between the imaginative or provincial and the scientific or socio-historical. The result looks quite modern, as recent critics have started to note. As Penny Fielding explains, Hogg's tales offer a "continuation of oral tradition" precisely through the "modern storytelling" which new magazines like Blackwood's allowed for. (43)

Hogg is the progenitor of the Blackwoodian tale--a genre that might be characterized (in Hogg's own words) as "intermixing all things through other." (44) Given the multiple ways he "intermixes" the provincial and the Enlightenment, it is not surprising that critics like Pottinger and Kidd position Hogg as much in relation to the Enlightenment historicism of the Edinburgh as to the Romantic ideology of Blackwood's. Hogg, writes Pottinger, is "... at least half a sceptic, a man of Enlightenment," and this despite the fact that his was a central presence in an editorial group whose one "consistent aspect ... was its hostility towards economists." (45) Galt too is numbered among Pottinger's heirs of the Enlightenment. (46) I do not have the space here to offer a full account of Galt's own Blackwood's tales. By way of conclusion, however, I can point to a couple of brief examples to show that the regional tale's complex relation to Enlightenment historicism is not unique to Hogg but is rather a distinct feature of the genre. In Galt's attention to region (the west of Scotland), his literary use of Scots vernacular, and his peculiar mix of journalistic account and fictional portrait, we find another practitioner of the Blackwoodian tale as developed by Hogg. Galt's "philosophical sketches," as he called them, were equally innovative and forged new ground for the tale and for Scottish literature generally. In "The Ayrshire Legatees," for example, which was published in Blackwood's between June 1820 and February 1821, Galt adapts the epistolary technique of writers like Tobias Smollett in such a way that balances perspectives and resists a central outlook. Letters are exchanged between a family in London (there to collect a legacy left by a deceased cousin from India) and friends and parishioners back home in a small town in the west of Scotland. When the friends and parishioners get together to read the letters aloud, the contents of the letters and the responses offered by the friends and parishioners are reported back to the magazine by a Blackwood's correspondent. The technique allows Galt to do two things at once: first, he comments on the imperial and Enlightenment center of the nation from a provincial perspective; and second, he shows how present the forces of modernity are even in seemingly out of the way provincial places. In doing both simultaneously--via form--Gait registers the provincial in terms of proximity and distance. The forces of modernity he chronicles may overlap with the respective community of rural Garuock, but they never completely envelop it. The interest of these tales is in the ever-changing line of demarcation between the two.

While the sketches that comprise "The Ayrshire Legatees" were eventually collected and published as a single-volume novel, Galt himself did not care to be thought of as a novelist. His compositions, he said, "were deficient in that peculiarity of the novel" which he characterized as "consistency of fable." (47) Galt referred to his tales as "theoretical histories," a term that shows a debt to Dugald Stewart and to the conjectural mode of the Scottish Enlightenment historians who preceded him. But as with Hogg's tales, Galt's theoretical histories do not subvert Scotland's past; his narrators and characters consistently invoke connections with moments and communities prior to 1688 and 1707. In "The Covenanter," for instance, the last tale published in "The Steam-Boat" series (which ran from February to December, 1821), an austere young man offers a corrective to Scott's Old Mortality, a book that is said to have "laid an irreverent hand on the ark of our national cause." (48) The national cause referred to here is a distinctly Scottish one; it is not synonymous with the magazine's larger ideological commitments to a national British culture. (49) But even within Scotland the legacy of the Covenanters was a divided one. From the perspective of Enlightenment history (and of Scott's Old Mortality), the Covenanters were violent fanatics--pre-modem culture-warriors whose example was best left in the past. In Galt's tale, however, they are presented in respectful terms, as a people of "holy integrity" and who offer a sound example of conduct "[i]n this backsliding age" ("The Steam-Boat" 662). The somber tone of the young teller may be out of place with the jocular antics of the fellow passengers, who seem almost embarrassed by his seriousness. But the meaning of his tale is perfectly in keeping with the political views at the heart of Galt's series--views most clearly evident in the lengthy installment of August 1821, which features a sympathetic (and journalistic) account of the Coronation of George Iv as well as a debate about Jacobitism between Galt's narrator-persona, Thomas Duffle, and Walter Scott. The "martyr" of "The Covenanter" is at once a throwback to the pious values of Scotland's past and the progenitor of modern Whiggism (his son helps facilitate the landing of William and ends in his employ). The different times and versions of national cause here rest side-by-side, a product of the combined narrative possibilities of orality, print, and steam-travel.

A fuller account of Galt's diverse literary output would provide more examples to go along with those briefly mentioned here. But the point should, I hope, be clear enough by now: the regional tales published in Blackwood's betray an openness to and deep engagement with Enlightenment historicism--not a rejection of it. Given the important role these tales played in shaping the character of Blackwood's, such an engagement suggests a tension at the very heart of the magazine's identity--and, to the extent that this identity signals the coming of Romanticism to Scotland, at the heart of Romanticism itself.

University of South Carolina

(1.) Introduction, Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism, eds. Duncan, Davis, Sorensen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004): 1-19 (2). Hereafter cited in the text.

(2.) For a discussion of "internal colonialism" see Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1975) 3-14.

(3.) One notable exception to this tendency is Katie Trumpener's Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997). Trumpener's argument will be discussed below.

(4.) Wendell Harris, British Short Fiction in the Nineteenth Century: A Literary and Bibliographic Guide (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1979) 31.

(5.) Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000) 239. Hereafter cited in the text.

(6.) James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998) 130-31.

(7.) "The specific history of the colonial state," as Partha Chatterjee argues, "... reveals what is only hidden in the universal history of the modern regime of power." The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) 33.

(8.) The phrase "homogeneous, empty time" comes from Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," no. 13, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968) 261. Chakrabarty uses it on page 23 of Provincializing Europe.

(9.) Colin Kidd, 'Subverting' Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689-c. 1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993) 7.

(10.) William Robertson, The History of Scotland (London: T. Cadell, 1794) 313-14.

(11.) Walter Scott, Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) 340.

(12.) Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Peter Levi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) 73.

(13.) As Richard Sher describes it, the venture was "... a strange partnership between a brash young poet from Invernessshire and a group of Edinburgh literati...." Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985) 242-43. See also Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian: The Son of Fingal (London: T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, 1763), especially 1-22; and Duncan, Davis, Sorensen 3.

(14.) Trumpener describes the national tales that emerged in post-Union Ireland in terms of a "novelistic protomodernism." These tales, she writes, are marked by "... intermittent political radicalism, instability of tone, and alteration between formula and formal experimentation." A few pages later (in the same chapter), this "protomodernism" becomes interchange able with the "postcolonial novel[s]" of Charles Maturin, Sydney Owensen, and John Gait (132, 156). See also Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London: Verso, 1995) 147-48.

(15.) In an Edinburgh Review piece on "Secondary Scottish Novels," published in 1823, Francis Jeffrey characterizes the work of tale-writers like John Galt and John Wilson as imitations of the various parts that comprise the Scottian historical novel. Edinburgh Review 39: 158-95.

(16.) Peter Garside, "The English Novel in the Romantic Era: Consolidation and Dispersal," in The English Novel: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, Vol. 2: 1800-1829, eds. Peter Garside and Ranier Schowerling (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 50-51. See also Tim Killick, "The Rise of the Tale: A Preliminary Checklist of Collections of Short Fiction Published 1820-29 in the Corvey Collection," Cardiff Corvey articles ?http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/corvey/articles/cco7_no4.html?.

(17.) Scott, Rob Roy, ed. Ian Duncan (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) 95.

(18.) I address this point more fully in my Introduction to Blackwood's Magazine, 1817-1825, 6 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006), vol. 2: Selected Prose vii-xvi. The paragraphs that follow here briefly summarize some of the evidence presented in my introduction.

(19.) In his recent book, Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007), Duncan argues that a novel like Rob Roy "undoes the rhetorical hinges which articulate ... historicist certainty" (103). I am convinced by Duncan's argument, and do not wish to promote the "critical tendency" that makes Waverley "stand for Scott's work as a whole ..." (100). My remarks here, then, are specific to Waverley and Old Mortality-two novels that offer more historicist certainty than Duncan finds in Rob Roy (and which are alluded to and sometimes openly engaged by Hogg and Galt). If Scott continued to experiment with his own form and to explore different temporalities, so too did other writers in the period. And it is clear that they found in Waverley a powerful model both for imitation and for critique. Indeed, a later text like Chronicles of the Canongate (1827) suggests that Scott may have learned a thing or two from tale-writers like Hogg, Galt, and Washington Irving.

(20.) Tim Killick, "Hogg and the Collection of Short Fiction in the 1820s," Studies in Hogg and his World 15 (2004): 21-31 (21).

(21.) Joan Milne and Willie Smith, "Reviews and Magazines: Criticism and Polemic," in Douglas Gifford, ed., The History of Scottish Literature, Volume 3: Nineteenth Century (Aberdeen: Aberdeen UP, 1987): 189-201 089).

(22.) John Gibson Lockhart, Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1819) 2:224.

(23.) Jon P. Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790--1832 (Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1987) 51.

(24.) Kidd, for instance, describes the Edinburgh as the Romantic-period "organ" of Enlightenment Whiggism (255).

(25.) Philip Flynn, "Francis Jeffrey and the Scottish Critical Tradition," British Romanticism and the Edinburgh Review: Bicentenary Essays, eds. Massimiliano Demata and Duncan Wu (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002): 13-32 (26-27).

(26.) George Pottinger, Heirs of Enlightenment: Edinburgh Reviewers and Writers, 1800-1830 (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P, 1992) 6.

(27.) Dugald Stewart, Lectures on Political Economy (1855) 2 vols. (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968) 1: 17.

(28.) Duncan, Scott's Shadow 50-58. See also Duncan, Davis, Sorensen 13.

(29.) Robert Southey, "On the State of the Poor, the Principle of Mr. Malthus's Essay on Population, and the Manufacturing System" (1812), Essays, Moral and Political, vol. I (Shannon, Ireland: Irish UP, 1971) III, 113.

(30.) Lockhart, "Remarks on Schlegel's History of Literature," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 3 (August 1818): 500; nay emphasis.

(31.) Wordsworth, "Michael" (lines I, 18), in Wordsworth and Samuel T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, eds. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 1963).

(32.) Karen O'Brien argues that Scottish Enlightenment historians were "cosmopolitan" to the extent that they maintained "... an attitude of detachment towards national prejudice ... and an intellectual investment in the idea of a common European civilization." Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History flora Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge LIP, 1997) 2.

(33.) Craig, "Scotland and the Regional Novel," in K. D. M. Snell, ed., The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998): 221-56 (222).

(34.) This second sense is closer to the meaning of "provincial" that Susan Manning provides in her discussion of Scottish Enlightenment historians. See The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 38, 50.

(35.) "The Shepherd's Calendar: Storms," Blackwood's 5 (April 1819): 75.

(36.) Hogg, "The Shepherd's Calendar: Class Second. Deaths, Judgments, and Providences," Blackwood's 13 (March, 1823): 314. Hereafter cited in the text.

(37.) Chakrabarty's own best example of what nonsociological history looks like comes from the "late Romanticism" of Rabindranath Tagore. See Provincializing Europe 163-72. See also Srinivas Aravamudan, "The Colonial Logic of Late Romanticism," South Atlantic Quarterly 102.1 (Winter 2003): 179-214.

(38.) For example, in Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," especially nos. I and 13.

(39.) Karen Fang, for instance, describes Hogg's work as "... a complicated instance of Scottish resistance to English colonization by way of print capitalism...." See "A Printing Devil, a Scottish Mummy, and an Edinburgh Book of the Dead: James Hogg's Napoleonic Complex," SiR 43.2 (Summer 2004): 161-85 (163).

(40.) "The Shepherd's Calendar: Class Second. Deaths, Judgments, and Providences," Blackwood's 13 (June 1823): 629. Hereafter cited in the text.

(41.) David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977) 80.

(42.) Douglas Mack, Introduction and ed., The Shepherd's Calendar (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2002) xiii.

(43.) Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Scottish Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) 122.

(44.) James Hogg to William Blackwood, 19 October 1817, The Collected Letters of James Hogg, Volume 1: 1800-1809, ed. Gillian Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004). See also Jarrells, Introduction, Blackwood's Magazine 2: xiii.

(45.) Pottinger 211, 194. See also Kidd 203.

(46.) "Galt," says Porringer, "was first of all a man of the Enlightenment, a sceptic ..." (211). John Macqueen would seem to agree. "[Gait's] outlook," he writes, "was philosophical and historical; he was a business man, but also a student of The Wealth of Nations and The History of Civil Society." The Rise of the Historical Novel (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic P, 1989) 110.

(47.) The Autobiography of John Gait, 2 vols. (London: Cochrane and M'Crone, 1833) 2: 219.

(48.) Galt, "The Steam-Boat," No. viii, Blackwood's 10 (December 1821): 662.

(49.) See Duncan, Scott's Shadow 47.