Scott, History, and the Augustan Public Sphere.

BURGESS, MIRANDA J.

IN DECEMBER 1819, WALTER SCOTT WROTE TO LORD MELVILLE AND LORD Montagu outlining plans for a militia of local smallholders and laborers to counter the approach of radical insurrection in Scotland and "civil war" in Britain.(1) The letters made two in a series Scott sent to his neighbors and colleagues, in which, in identical language, he preached the modern uses of a reinvented feudal loyalty and clothed himself romantically as the quasi-Highland chief of a "clan regiment" (L 6: 113). In seeking the support of his neighbors, Scott catalogued the benefits the militias would bestow:

 the influence on the morale of the common people by the display of such a
 force ... will make loyalty the fashion with the young and able bodied
 check the progress of discontent and intimidate the radicals who will thus
 see enemies among those on whom they reckond as secret well wishers....(L
 6: 71)

 [W]e should give them a jacket & pantaloons of Galashiels grey cloth which
 would aid the manufacturers of the place--highland bonnets with a short
 feather their own grey plaids in case of sleeping out black crossbelts and
 musquets.(L 6: 61)

Scott's Scotland is caught between a past framed as Jacobite and a threatening Jacobin future. In response, he levels a Jacobite vernacular of belted plaids and tenant-soldiers against Jacobin aggression. What is apparent in his letters, as in his Waverley novels, is the insignificance of military force when compared with the mediated power of "fashion" and "display." The best defense against "national crisis" is for Scotland's "common people" to parade their "loyalty" to their British king and country, marshalled by cultural producers who orchestrate the cohesive processes of sympathy and emulation (L 6: 63). Thus in drawing up plans for his corps of volunteers Scott offers more details of the nostalgic uniforms he has invented than of recruitment, arming, or command. His plans demand that laboring-class militiamen and their gentlemen-sponsors alike buy into the cultural producer's fictions, conspicuously consuming the signs he authorizes, from the "paper pellets" of a literary "battery" to the theatrically traditional costume and weaponry of his projected Highland soldiers (L 6: 58). In this way Scott forges a cultural route out of the distinctive stalemate of his romantic Scotland and into a British modernity where Scotland's distinctness and history thrive precisely in their cosmopolitan consumption.

Scott was to realize his prescription for social order two years later, during the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822. He planned a weeklong pageant, which he marketed to the intended participants in broadside poems and pamphlets that translated into popular, practical, reproducible terms the historical processes of reconciliation his novels depict.(2) The king paraded through streets lined by ordered rows of soldiers, Highland militiamen, gentlemen-volunteers, and dignitaries.(3) The sartorial distinction and spatial distribution of the players according to rank, class, trade, and place of origin emblematized both their loyalty to the British crown and their ethnic and class diversity.(4) Scott's staging of this festival of Britain iconographically confirmed the inclusive Hanoverian Britishness of Scotland while setting rigorous limits to protest and disruption.(5) Like the volunteers' riposte to radical dissent proposed in Scott's letters, these limits were simultaneously performative and economic. Rooted in production and consumption of avowedly historical costume and artifact, they stimulated the local economy and took part in the circulation of Scottish national sentiments throughout Britain in printed form.

This essay addresses the mix of tradition with economic and cultural production that characterizes Scott's practices of national identity. It brings together two turns in the cultural history of romantic Scotland. One is the moment at which economic production gives way to the cultural production it enables. But it is also here that the local performance of Scottish tradition begins to conduct the insertion of Scotland into an explicitly modern, inclusive conception of Britain. The practice that guides Scotland across both these intersections is antiquarianism, which I discuss in terms specific to Scott's thinking about the encounter of history with modernity, of economies with culture--about Scotland within Britain. As Scott theorizes it in his 1816 novel The Antiquary, antiquarianism is elegiacally national in its relation to the material fragments of the past, as Katie Trumpener and Yoon Sun Lee have noted.(6) Responding in pageantry to the Radical War of 1819-20, and in The Antiquary, as we will see, to the precursor threat of French invasion in the 1790s, antiquarianism pits what it declares is Scotland's traditional strength against a radicalism it invariably construes as foreign. But, in Scott's hands, antiquarianism is also cosmopolitan in its reconstruction and circulation of the fragments of the past, and commercial and literary in practice. As the historically self-conscious man of letters moves between the fields of commerce and letters, his antiquarianism bridges cultural preservation and cultural production, erasing the lines between them.

As a practice of cultural production, I will suggest, Scott's distinctive mix of the outward-, inward-, and backward-looking, and of commerce, letters, and antiquarian discovery, proved powerful, but not irresistible. Literary and commercial production worked together to shape a body of consumers of the past. These consumers, in turn, were required to appear in public as citizens, a function defined by what their purchases declared were their traditions of political consent, harmony across ethnic and class differences, and commercial free choice. The creation of such a British public from Scottish subjects demanded their acceptance--indeed, their embrace--of a coherent national history and of that history's status as a literary and commercial product. In Scott's hands, antiquarianism becomes a key tool in the historical production of Scotland's British modernity. As such, it is easily threatened by competitor histories that refuse their confinement within the fractured remainders of the past. These histories may be enacted by those who refuse to buy and display the artifacts of an invented traditional harmony, and who thus appear in public bearing signs of a history of their own making. Such reluctant performers reveal, by declining to take part, the fragility of the commercial relations that have been annexed by Scott's orchestrated displays of public consensus. Scott's cosmopolitan national public, the putative end of Enlightenment and progress, collapses as soon as consumer support is withdrawn: as soon as readers refuse to buy in.

In many, if not most, of the Waverley novels, Scott symbolically resolves questions of Scottish and British inheritance and legitimacy.(7) That he does so by means of cultural production names the reading public of his modern Britain, the participants in the marketplace, as the heirs of Scotland's traditional order, and places these works firmly on the border between Scotland's past and Britain's future (Duncan 118-19). In The Antiquary, these threads of inheritance and cultural production come explicitly together. In a restoration plot that mirrors that of the companion work Guy Mannering (1815), the lost heir to the earls of Glenallan is discovered and restored to his title and estate. But the restoration is not brought about, as in Guy Mannering, by sympathy between the hero's race-memory, his tenants' feudal loyalty, and the romantic visibility of inherited blood. Rather, it results from a self-conscious cooperation between traditional claims and literary production. Like the gypsy Meg Merrilies of Guy Mannering, the "sibyl" Elspeth Mucklebackit provides the oral-traditional knowledge needed to identify and restore the missing heir.(8) Ultimately, however, the heir's restoration is made possible by Scott's cultural production of the novel's resolution, which is enacted within the novel by the acts of cultural producers. He is legitimated by the artifacts and narratives of a historiography--at once archeological and highly literary, and thus antiquarian in Scott's sense--retailed by the titular antiquary in partnership with the heir, and with Scott himself.

The narrative of the heir's restoration in The Antiquary enacts in miniature Scott's narrative of Scotland in Britain. The novel's climactic moment, the revelation of its hero's birth, comes as a town on the northeast coast of Scotland convinces itself that the revolutionary French have landed and made contact with Jacobin radicals at home:

 The watch ... lighted the beacon ... which threw up to the sky a long
 wavering train of light, startling the sea-fowl from their nests, and
 reflected far beneath by the reddening billows of the sea. The brother
 warders ... caught and repeated his signal. The lights glanced on headlands
 and capes and inland hills, and the whole district was alarmed by the
 signal of invasion. (A 6: 323)

The beacon fires of the local militia recall the signal for the gathering of the Jacobite clans in Scott's Waverley (1: 175-77, 2: 162-63). In response, the townspeople and gentry marshal their resources to repel an invading force. The community's response to the combined threat of French invasion and Jacobin rebellion unites historical with commercial impulses. The yeomanry and merchants group themselves into a series of "separate corps" under the direction of their landlords. The landowners outfit themselves nostalgically for command of their "volunteers," who are outfitted after the manner Scott was to revive in his letters to Montagu and Melville. Jonathan Oldbuck, staunch Whig and eponymous antiquary, unearths several ancient weapons before girding on "`the sword ... my father wore in the year forty-five'" against the Jacobite army (A 6: 323-24). He detaches the artifact of the Hanoverian past from the undifferentiated archive to which it has been consigned, and rededicates it to modern loyalist use. But his neighbor Sir Arthur Wardour, scion of a Jacobite line, is equally fervent in a new "lieutenancy uniform," and the Catholic arch-Jacobite Glenallan appears "in uniform" in command of his "feudal dependents"--"a handsome and well-mounted squadron ... of five hundred men, completely equipped in the Highland dress" (A 6: 325, 327-28). The lairds are aided by two career soldiers, Oldbuck's nephew and Glenallan's long-lost Protestant heir, both also in "handsome uniform" (A 6: 328).

The volunteers quickly learn that "the courage and zeal which they had displayed were entirely thrown away, unless in so far as they afforded an acceptable proof of their spirit and promptitude" (A 6: 329). Scott's military climax begets a military anti-climax. Yet, Scott suggests, the "spirit" of volunteerism, and its outpouring as "the substance of the wealthy, with the persons of ... all ranks," defines the strength of Scotland and thus British social order as well (A 6: 326). A "general confusion" initially prevails:

 The women of lower rank assembled and clamoured in the marketplace. The
 yeomanry, pouring from their different glens, galloped through the streets,
 some individually, some in parties of five or six as they had met on the
 road. The drums and fifes of the volunteers ... blended with the voice of
 the officers, the sound of the bugles, and the tolling of the bells from
 the steeple. (A 6: 325)

But this blending of genders, classes, and origins gives way to "good order" once the participants are "assembled" in "the principal square": "the good sense and firmness of the people" make up for "the deficiencies of inexperience" (A 6: 326). The career soldiers find "the different corps in good order, considering the irregular materials of which they were composed, in great force of numbers, and high confidence and spirits" (A 6: 327). Uniformed and equipped according to their origin and profession, and with reference to the historical allegiances of their ancestors, the "general" mix of the people of Fairport resolves itself into a cohesive public before regrouping as a series of discrete but cooperating military bodies. The public and its constituent parts, Scott seems to suggest, are fully convertible and easily controlled by national sentiment, commerce, and pageantry.

There are two elements in this scene that I wish to stress in characterizing Scott's antiquarian nationalism. The first is the conflation of Jacobite and `jacobin impulses that precedes Scott's reduction of both to costume, consumption, and public display. For the imaginary invasion of Jacobins whose arrival occasions the Fairport volunteers depends on a `jacobite history. The watch on the cliffs is established on the belief that French forces may land on the Scottish coast because Franco-Scottish, Jacobites did so in 1745, when Charles Edward Stuart commenced his invasion of Britain with a voyage from France to Glenfinnan. Without this history, the sea route from France to Scotland with a presumable goal of London is too circuitous to take seriously; with it, the belief that invasion has occurred assumes the legitimacy of a historical return.(9) The mixing of Jacobins with Jacobites is further complicated, moreover, when the expected invaders are met with the surviving artifacts of avowedly traditional `jacobite defenses--the beacons, the Highland-costumed volunteers, the fervent loyalties of Wardour and Glenallan. These artifacts are taken out of history to be revived and recontextualized as theatrical trappings of a Hanoverian Scotland. Scotland demonstrates its distinct character, and flexes its domestic economic muscles, in theatrically displaying its "general" fealty, the consensus of a diverse but unified people, to the British crown and Union. By collapsing `jacobite with Jacobin in his simulacrum of invasion and volunteerism, Scott breaks out of the opposition between them and reassigns Scotland's history to the evolutionary past of the British commercial present.(10)

Scott's break with this characteristic stalemate of Scottish romantic history, and with the oppositional version of Scottish nationhood the Jacobite-Jacobin dyad holds in place, is made possible, in turn, by an explicitly developmental economic history of Scotland:

 In a country which has neither foreign commerce, nor any of the finer
 manufactures, a great proprietor, having nothing for which he can exchange
 the greater part of the produce of his lands ... consumes the whole in
 rustick hospitality at home.... A hospitality nearly of the same kind was
 exercised not many years ago in ... the highlands of Scotland.(11)

According to Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, this hospitality has a military aspect, for the tenants of each estate make up a "highland militia" that "served under its own chieftains" to constitute "standing armies" (W 701). For Smith, however, Scotland has evolved into commercial modernity, in which a surplus of paper credit and an embrace of manufacture enable one another. He insists that it is

 the enterprizing and projecting spirit of the people, their desire of
 employing all the stock which they can get as active and productive stock,
 which has occasioned this redundancy of paper money.(W 941)

Union, with its concomitant opening of Scotland's economic borders, is the motor of the change. But it is also the occasion for a moment of nostalgia. "What all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected," Smith remarks,

 foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about. Those gradually
 furnished the great proprietors with something for which they could
 exchange the whole surplus produce of their lands, and which they could
 consume themselves without sharing it either with tenants or retainers. All
 for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the
 world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.... For a pair
 of diamond buckles ... or for something as frivolous and useless, they
 exchanged the maintenance ... of a thousand men for a year, and with it the
 whole weight and authority which it could give them.(W 418-19)

Like Scott, Smith insists that cultural transformation is more efficient than political or military force, and that commerce is the instrument of cultural transformation and progress. Yet he also mourns what is lost as progress moves ahead. The history of economic progress has run "contrary to the natural course of things," for the "childish vanity" of the landowners has made mercantile self-interest the primary agent of social and economic progress (W 422). Smith's history of economic progress is also an elegy for what he construes as Scotland's traditional, and now irrecoverable, forms of domestic authority and national civility.

As Scott revises Smith's economic history, he retains its caudalocephalic portrait of a Scotland evolving from Lowlands to Highlands and a Britain evolving from the commercial south to the north. The north and the Highlands appear, in The Antiquary as in Waverley and Rob Roy, as the last museumlike bastion of social arrangements once common to Saxon, Norman, and Gael (W 413). Throughout his portrait of the Fairport volunteers, Scott echoes Smith's praise of Scotland's enterprising "spirit." Unlike Smith, however, Scott does not mourn the hospitality or heroism of the past, but suggests instead that what defines tradition, and what gives it the continuing life that defines it as tradition, is the artifacts it leaves behind. The past for Scott is not, as for Smith, irrecoverably lost, though its artifacts are no use on their own, providing no metonymic window on tradition. Scott fills in gaps that Smith does not fill: he provides an account of the evolutionary process by which customary social relations give way to commerce and by which the relation of the past to the present becomes a national tradition. He insists that antiquarian remnants of the unproductive but hospitable and military past must be manufactured, retailed, and consumed by the enterprising present. The move from past to present is seamless, because the present reproduces and consumes the artifacts of the past. Authenticity, at least in the sense of historical provenance, is entirely beside the point.

The evolutionary movement of Scott's rewriting of Smith's economics is emblematized in the eclaircissement that follows the invasion scare and begins the conclusion of The Antiquary. The fires the watch believes to be French beacons are in fact the burning ruins of " machinery" built by Oldbuck and Wardour as dupes of the German confidence trickster Dousterswivel. The destroyed "engines, and wheels" have been produced for the purposes of gold mining, which Scott represents as one of Dousterswivel's alchemical sleights-of-hand, "convert[ing] ... lead into gold" (A 6: 267, 319). The French provide a catalyst for the coalescence of Scotland, that is, only as they appear in the shattered illusions of a Scottish landowner who gives up nostalgic dreams of "treasure" and "troops of liveried menials ... marshalled in his halls" to break and burn his machines for the production of specie (6: 265). What Fairport's citizens and landlords embrace instead is the modern apparatus of manufacture--the looms that produce tartan uniforms for local consumption and export, the forges that make weaponry for Britain's Scottish defenders. And what these latter machines make possible is a generalized public consumption of the trappings of nationhood. For Scott as for Smith, such a shared theatrical usage of the nation's artifacts is the natural end of national progress.

Highlighting the cultural character of Fairport's commercial production and consumption is the framing of Scott's scene within his thematic consideration, and his structural enactment, of the machines of literary manufacture that are a primary concern of The Antiquary. Scott emphasizes Oldbuck's role in producing the patriotic formation that characterizes Hanoverian Scotland, and a synecdochic relation ties Oldbuck's antiquarian activities to the work of the novel itself. For The Antiquary is an antiquarian novel, in Scott's dialectical sense, at least as much as it is a novel concerned with antiquarianism. Its affiliations are broadcast when Scott appears in his guise as "the author" to footnote his sympathy in Oldbuck's bibliomania (A 5: 41n). But Oldbuck is not driven to prove the authenticity of his ancient tracts or artifacts. Rather, the conjunction of Scott's with Oldbuck's antiquarian desire suggests that there is more to Oldbuck's love of fragmented, displaced ancient objects than the drive to recapture lost national glories, or to keep the past at bay by encountering it at a distance mediated by metonymy.(12) For even as Scott depicts what ought to be a crushing demystification of antiquarian fantasies, his narration recapitulates Oldbuck's easy acceptance of the failures. Oldbuck's consolations include Scottish bankruptcy law, an ancient "legal fiction" in which the king is said to be offended by debtors, who are declared "rebel[s]" and imprisoned for their country's good (A 6: 243). The narrator's own pleasure in this fiction, and the commercial nationalist overtones of his pleasure, appear in a footnote avowing that "Scottish law is ... more jealous of the personal liberty of the subject than any other code in Europe" (A 6: 243n). Even Elspeth Mucklebackit "`speak[s] like a prent buke'" of ancient allegiances and genealogical memory (A 6: 72-73). The product of antiquarian failure to regain a heroic national past in this novel is a new ideological control of Scotland's past--which emerges in public out of the bond between cultural producer and consumer--and so of the British future as well. Oldbuck's will to unearth the genuine traces of history is displaced by his joy, and Scott's, in the power of imagination, and in the literary legitimation and print circulation of their shared imaginings.

The power of the cultural producer to move between past and present, and between artifact and manufacture, is made most explicit in Oldbuck's proprietory interest in the long poem, the Caledoniad, which he encourages Glenallan's son Lovel to write. Oldbuck offers to supply learned notes, framing Lovel's romantic fictions of the Scottish past with an air of authenticity, despite his insistence that the Scots as portrayed in the poem fight off Agricola's Roman invaders. The notes, modern cultural and commercial products, become artifacts backing up an invented antiquarian narrative of history, which (like Scott's own heavily annotated poems) will naturalize itself as national history in the imaginations of its readers. "`You are a poet,'" Oldbuck tells the scrupulous Lovel, "`free of the corporation, and as little down to truth or probability as Virgil himself--You may defeat the Romans in spite of Tacitus'" (A 5: 195). The defeat of antiquarian truth gives way to the most magisterial of nationalist, triumphalist historiographies precisely because it is the most avowedly artificial, demanding the acquiescence of writer and reader. The character of Scotland's self-imaginings is relocated from the discovery of buried histories to the nationalist author's production and circulation processes.

The Caledoniad is never written, but then, it doesn't need to be. By uniting the rediscovered heir to a Jacobite title with the iconoclastic descendant of Protestant printers, whose veins "run with printer's ink," in a network of what Scott calls "antiquarian societies" of "national concern," the poem has served its patriotic purpose (A 5: 44, 47, 275). The writers' union of Oldbuck and Lovel is founded on shared classical literacy, Protestantism, cultural production and "civility," which provide foundations for Scott's Scottish ideal of Britain's public. Scott carefully distinguishes this civility, "`a word that perhaps belongs only to a collector of antiquities'" and "`one of the old school,'" from sociability, a feminized trait that unites "the club of Royal True Blues" with the "society of the soi-disant Friends of the People" (A 5: 59, 152). The (literal) Augustanism of Oldbuck's preoccupation with Roman artifacts is best understood in this context. Oldbuck's, and Scott's, promotion of classic letters and civic virtue hearkens back to the early-eighteenth-century London of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, with its mix of literary professionalism and masculine coterie. For a nineteenth-century Britain modelled on Scottish public life, Oldbuck (and Scott) recapitulate that particular form of social relation.(13) Scott's civility, like Pope's and Swift's, is entrepreneurial and productive rather than corporate or speculative in its commercial sympathy--but no less commercial for that.(14)

The rubric of the community forged by the unwritten poem is the Oldbuck family motto, "Kunst macht Gunst" (A 5: 156). This motto names cultural production at once a rival "pedigree" to the "Saxon, Norman, or Celtic genealogies" claimed by Wardour and such forebears as Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, and Richard Hurd, and a counterweight to the radical corresponding societies, with their rejection of tradition.(15) In a double sense, the motto betokens "the diffusion of knowledge, not the effusion of blood" (A 5: 156). The union of Oldbuck and Lovel can produce no children save its cultural productions. Its masculine civic character, its union of men in a chain of productive imaginations, at once utterly local and "free of the corporation," undoes the necessity for inherited traditions of the kind mourned by Smith.(16) But it also supersedes the need for loyalist or patriotic violence. Because antiquaries "`are eternally exercising their genius and research upon trifles,'" it is "`impossible they can be baffled in affairs of importance,'" for "`the corps that is most frequently drilled upon the parade, will be most prompt in its exercise upon the day of battle'" (A 6: 195). There is less power in recovering, inheriting, or defending past traditions, or so Scott seems to conclude, than in the invention of them. It is not merely, for Scott, that an authentic history is unrecoverable, but that no history or artifacts exist before cultural producers draw up the marketing plan.

Taken together, the production narratives of the Caledoniad and the Fairport volunteers' festival enact the close ties between Scott's production of the Waverley novels and marketing of the royal visit of 1822. Scott, too, naturalizes in narrative and in public theater a traditionalized Scotland that lacks a demonstrably authentic source. Yet his Scotland, and the Britain to which it dedicates itself, is more than an imagined community. It is a culture produced and consumed in accordance with principles of sympathy and emulation outlined in Scottish Enlightenment accounts of human nature such as those of Adam Smith. Its influence, as Scott presents it, is almost irresistible. In the Magnum Opus preface to Tales of the Crusaders, even Dousterswivel reappears at the next stage of Smithian economic evolution: as a convert from coining to manufacture. He has adapted a "mechanical process like that by which weavers of damask alter their patterns" to literary labor on those "parts of the narrative ... composed out of commonplaces."(17) When the "joint-stock company ... for the purpose of writing and publishing the class of works called the Waverley Novels" reject the proposals Scott has called them together to consider, the "Author of Waverley" castigates them for their "`modern antiques, and ... antiquated moderns'" and departs in order to "write HISTORY" (B 37: xxxix). Scotland's historical and cultural character lies not simply in the mixing of modernity with antiquity, but rather in the seamless manufacture and naturalized consumption of the past by the cosmopolitan readers and writers of the British present.

Even so, the antiquarian cultural production and retailing of a public can have no effect without a paying audience, whose function is not only to observe but also to take part in the process of nation-formation. In positing volunteerism and production as an escape from the violent dichotomy between the Jacobite and Jacobin histories of Scotland, and a pathway to Scotland's British modernity, Scott's narrative acknowledges the possibility of resistance, and so forecloses the possibility of escaping Scotland's past. Oldbuck's willingness to acknowledge that the Scotland he desires is a product of his own imaginings, and that it depends on the support of its retailers and consumers, first appears as he attempts to bribe Edie Ochiltree, the "`news-carrier, the minstrel, and ... historian of the district,'" to continue to circulate his antiquarian fictions even after Ochiltree announces that the Roman ruins on Oldbuck's estate are merely the remains of a twenty-year-old temporary shelter (A 5: 51-53). As a blue-gown mendicant, Ochiltree is the surviving artifact of the ancient patronage of Scotland's crown, but he refuses to become a museum piece. He is the chief purveyor, by means of old roads, of news and of class dissent in the form of gossip and balladry. His intrusion as Oldbuck shows off his pretorium to Lovel--"`Praetorian here, Praetorian there, I mind the bigging o't'"--is an "uncivil ... interruption" that marks a strong contrast to the civility Oldbuck and Lovel share and makes him an alternative "public" figure (A 5: 49, 169). Ochiltree refuses to be drawn into Oldbuck's fictional production, however the latter tries to claim him for his feudal, and literary, demesne. As the "`privileged nuisance'" of the neighborhood, Ochiltree registers the failure of Scott's British Scotland wholly to generalize itself (A 5: 56).(18) His fate in the novel finally constrains him, his body bent and locked arthritically into place before his landlord's fire. Yet his restraint cannot wholly displace earlier images of his circulation through the countryside in a parallel, sub-commercial economy, trafficking in oral tales (Scott never repeats them) and refusing all but the tiniest sums of money. His modern laboring-class intransigence, wearing the antiquarian garb of a stubborn feudal survival, refuses to bow to Oldbuck's production of the present, in which production and an entrepreneurial print-culture replace, by incorporating, Scotland's histories, and in which the public consent is demonstrated by votes with the pocketbook.

Unlike Wardour's Jacobite pretensions, which are dismissed as "the shadow of a shade," Ochiltree's "voice from behind" appears as the voice of real history (A 5: 49). It endangers Oldbuck's version of a Scotland founded on the fantasy of defeating Agricola--on the merging of martial values and their commercial reinventions. It represents a free-ranging anxiety about the connections between Scotland's imperfectly metonymized past and its ongoing national and class dissension. The anxiety was to be realized in the counter-discourse to George IV'S Edinburgh visit five years later, as Scott's opponents reproduced his Jacobite trappings for their own political purposes, and as Scott's unified public threatened to fracture under the pressure of competing histories dressed in identical clothes.(19) But the Highlanders, beggars, and gypsies who populate the Waverley novels are neither inevitably the carriers of Scott's national fictions nor the importers of Scotland's past into the literary and commercial present. In opting out of cultural consumption during the action of any novel, they can opt out of Scott's cultural production, even as Scott seeks to draft them back into his resolutions. Thus they market the possibility that readers might find and consume, even in Scott's fictions, competing versions of Scotland's, and Britain's past; that they might contest Scott's projected Scottish future, past, and public in politically diverse ways.

(1.) Walter Scott, Letters, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1934) 6: 57. Subsequently in the text, abbreviated L.

(2.) Scott, Hints Addressed to the Inhabitants of Edinburgh and Others, in Prospect of his Majesty's Visit, by an Old Citizen (Edinburgh: Bell, 1822); Carle, Now the King's Come (Stirling: Macnie, 1822). For the Waverley novels as reconciling nostalgia with progress and the formation of Britain with Scottish nationalism, see Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) 11-51; for the relation of reconciliation to Jacobitism, see James Kerr, Fiction Against History: Scott as Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 38, 43. James Buzard, "Translation and Tourism: Scott's Waverley and the Rendering of Culture," The Yale Journal of Criticism 8 (1995): 31, 53, and Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), especially 13-15, address the potential for dialectical reversal latent in Scott's reconciliations.

(3.) See Historical Account of His Majesty's Visit to Scotland (Edinburgh: Oliver, 1822).

(4.) For a map, see Edinburgh Gazette (14 August 1822): n.p.

(5.) Buzard 41, traces a related dynamic in Waverley.

(6.) Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997) 123; Yoon Sun Lee, "A Divided Inheritance: Scott's Antiquarian Novel and the British Nation," ELH 64 (1997): 539.

(7.) On Scott, fiction, and legitimacy, see Judith Wilt, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985) 18-48; Fiona Robertson, Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) 1-30.

(8.) Scott, The Antiquary, Waverley Novels, 48 vols. (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1829-32) 6: 72-73. Subsequently in the text, abbreviated A. On the role of peasant women, see Duncan 131.

(9.) The fear of Jacobite returns corresponds with the typological readings of Jacobitism that Murray Pittock discusses in The Invention of Scotland: The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1991).

(10.) On the continuity of Jacobin with Jacobite in romantic fiction, see Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994); in Scott, see David Kaufmann, The Business of Common Life: Novels and Classical Economics between Revolution and Reform (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) 113. On Jacobites as a figure for British culture, see Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998) 82-87.

(11.) Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Works and Correspondence, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976) 413. Subsequently in the text, abbreviated W.

(12.) See Trumpener 28; Lee 563.

(13.) On civility and its distinctness from sociability, which take on a conservative force by the late eighteenth century, see J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP) 69-70, 215-253. On nineteenth-century reclamations of civility, see Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992) 334-38.

(14.) See Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994).

(15.) See R.J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest: Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688-1863 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987).

(16.) See Ina Ferns, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 91-94, on the "masculinity" of Scott's sympathetic and reading communities.

(17.) Scott, The Betrothed, Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1832) 37: xxxix.

(18.) His role resembles Theodor Adorno's cultural critic in "Cultural Criticism and Society," Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) 20, 29: the "salaried and honoured nuisance" of culture who can, nevertheless, "retain ... mobility in regard to culture by recognizing the latter's position within the whole."

(19.) For example, J. L. Marks, The English Irish Highlander (London: Marks, n.d.); A New Song (n.p.p.: n.p., n.d.), George IV's Visit to Scotland, BL fol. 1876. E. 24.

MIRANDA J. BURGESS is Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830 (Cambridge UP, 2000) and of essays on eighteenth-century and romantic fiction.