Visions of Britain, 1730-1830

Anglo-Scottish Writing and Representation

Sebastian Mitchell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349450398, 9781137290106
• eBook ISBN: 9781137290113
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

Thisis a revisionist study of the literary and visual representation of the nation in the century following the formation of the British state. It argues that the most engaging accounts of Great Britainsubject their imagery to sustained artistic pressure, threatening to dismantle the national vision at the moment of its construction.

1

Thomson’s Vision of Britannia

I

There is an evocative account of James Thomson’s bicentenary celebrations at Southdean in the Scottish borders in the Jedburgh Gazette of 25 September 1900. The correspondent describes the setting up of the platform, its decoration with flags, and the speeches praising Thomson, as the son of the local minister, as poet of the borders, as a Scottish patriot, and as the celebrator of an expansive pacific Britishness. The brass band, we are told, played stirringly; there were renditions of British and Scottish anthems by the 400-strong audience; and the closing tea was held under the expert superintendence of Mrs J. W. Scott of the Spread Eagle Hotel, Jedburgh.¹

The event was an evident success, but it did also represent just about the last moment when Thomson could plausibly be described as a popular author. His stock had risen steadily from the late eighteenth century until the later part of the nineteenth, by which time he was the most extensively published poet in the United Kingdom and America, with the possible exception of Milton.² There is a well-worn anecdote about Coleridge and Hazlitt finding a shabby copy of Thomson’s The Seasons on a bench in a West Country alehouse in 1803. Coleridge seized it and exclaimed with possibly only a hint of irony: ‘that is true fame’.³ The correspondent of The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge affirmed Thomson’s widespread appeal in 1842, insisting, rather prematurely as it turned out, that he was ‘popular in the best meaning of the word, that is, to be universally read and understood long after all temporary tastes and influences have ceased to act’.⁴ Thomson even inspired cultish adherents. David Steuart Erskine, eleventh Earl of Buchan, erected an obelisk and a classical temple to his memory, held public celebrations of his birthday at Ednam throughout the 1790s (crowning a copy of The Seasons with a laurel wreath on one occasion) and commissioned a memorial tablet to the poet in Richmond Church.⁵ John Evans visited Thomson’s former home in Kew-Foot lane, Richmond in July 1822 (for the purposes of compiling a travel guide) and found that the villa had been turned into a kind of incidental shrine, with a steady stream of admirers calling on the off chance of being admitted by the housekeeper.⁶ And in 1867, Thomson’s Victorian namesake and fellow London-based Scottish poet James ‘B. V.’ Thomson improbably claimed his unmarried and childless predecessor as an ancestor: ‘as the lineal heir I’m blessed/ With all the property’.⁷

Much of the eighteenth-century criticism had regarded Thomson’s poetry as an effective distillation of the author’s more appealing attributes. Its heartfelt candour left Patrick Murdoch wondering whether he should ‘more admire the poet, or love the man’. One obituarist observed in 1748 that his works bore witness to the ‘Goodness of his Heart, which overflowed with Benevolence, Humanity, universal Charity and every amiable Virtue’; and Tobias Smollett similarly opined that Thomson was ‘one of those happy poets, whose writings inspired personal love and esteem’.⁸ In addition to the praise for the perfect encapsulation of a generous personality, there were two significant interpretative positions on his writings in this period. Samuel Johnson thought that the most striking quality of Thomson’s poetry was its fine-grained perception, such that the most mundane objects were illuminated in a strikingly original light; Joseph Warton also noticed Thomson’s remarkable capacity for visualisation, producing an argument which would run well into the nineteenth century, that the poet was the most imagistic, the most painterly of modern authors, whose vivid and sometimes overwhelming natural descriptions stood comparison with the wild and romantic landscapes of Salvator Rosa. Not all commentators, however, were so well disposed to Thomson.⁹ John Pinkerton objected to his convoluted syntax; Hazlitt did not think that he could string two good ideas together; and in a wholesale dismantling of the terms in which Thomson was usually lauded, the author of some ‘Critical Observations’ argued that the poetry was much too populist and mechanistic, and the poet too much given to the expression of ‘a lofty and complacent sentiment, which plays upon the feelings like the ineffable power of solemn harmony, but has no reference to the quality of our belief, to the dispositions of the heart, or to the habitual tendency of the character’.¹⁰

If one approach to the bicentenary celebrations at Southdene is to regard them as a kind of endpoint of Thomson as popular writer, then another is to see them as the start of the period of specialist academic study. In the early and middle part of the twentieth century, scholars Herbert Drennon, Marjory Hope Nicholson and Alan McKillop set about detailing the exceptional range of ideas expressed in Thomson’s poetry, from Newtonian science to fantastical Portuguese travel writing.¹¹ In the same period, Jean Hagstum challenged Warton’s argument on Thomson’s romantic modern tendencies by suggesting that the author’s own artistic interests were almost exclusively classical, neo-classical and baroque; and James Sambrook produced, as the crowning achievement of the tradition of exacting empirical scholarship on this writer, two standard modern editions of the verse and an authoritative biography.¹² By the later part of the twentieth century, the principal aim of the academic study of Thomson was to historicise his works, to consider them for their immediate political, national and ideological significance. Christine Gerrard, for example, approached Thomson’s poetry as though it were a straightforward conduit for the various views and policies of Whig politicians and their clients; Mary Jane Scott argued for the Scottish distinctiveness of Thomson’s writings; and John Barrell, in an extensively theorised and conceptually self-aware approach, examined Thomson’s verse as an ever-ingenious, subtle and sometimes contradictory endorsement of the dominant ideology of the English land-owning class.¹³

In the eighteenth century, then, the main interest in Thomson was in the personal artistic attributes of his verse; and when the historical and political components became so obvious that they could no longer be ignored, that was the point to lose interest in the works as poetry. It was not merely that Johnson disliked the republicanism of Liberty, Thomson’s most overtly political poem, it was that the overwhelming presence of politics and history in this work left almost no room for the consideration of anything else. However, by the end of the twentieth century, politics and history had become the central concern of the study of Thomson’s poetry, leaving little space for a consideration of such matters as art, image and literary expression. The most interesting aspect of Thomson’s verse, as I will suggest in what follows, is situated between these poles, in the examination of the ways in which politics, national allegiances and historical formulations are subjected to considerable artistic and psychological pressure in the course of his writings. Linda Colley, as remarked in the Introduction, uses the example of Thomson’s ‘Rule Britannia’, and its famous refrain about Britons never being slaves, to illustrate her point on the difficulty of finding a national imagery with sufficient imaginative purchase to appeal to all British subjects. One might add that the same nullifying principles seem to apply to Thomson’s anglicising historiography, which conveniently dispenses with any Scottish history prior to the Act of Union, save for the occasional noteworthy exception, such as William Wallace, retained as a plausible opponent to Plantagenet tyranny. It is also the case, however, that Thomson did produce in his verse an inordinate amount of positive British imagery, even if he struggled to maintain imagistic and ideological consistency in his projections of the united kingdom.

We can consider Thomson’s poetical national representation in terms of three phases, each associated with one of his major poems. The Seasons required the fitting together of domestic and international prospects with observations on notable military and naval campaigns, and recent social and economic policy. Thomson clearly attempted to consider the poem in terms of a set of structuring modes, but the problem was always that the vision of one segment would be undermined by the vision of another; this is most evident in the struggle to maintain the key distinction in the poem between the essentially harmonious and ordered prospect of domestic Britain and the extreme and frequently destructive conditions of the imaginative and amalgamated area he terms the Torrid Zone. Thomson thought Liberty his best poem, perhaps because it seemed to him to have resolved some of the more pressing historical and integrative difficulties of The Seasons through the introduction of a conceptual model of universal cyclical history. Yet its narrative and especially its dispiriting conclusion also seem to encourage a reading against the grain of its ostensible celebration of progressive Britishness. The problems of the extended treatment of conceptual history in poetical form seem to have been resolved in his final work, The Castle of Indolence, by the simple expedient of offering essentially the same case in a more concise form and refashioning it as entertaining Spenserian allegory. The apparent cohesiveness and persuasiveness of the national narrative in this poem, however, was then undermined by Thomson’s introduction for the first and last time of a prominent confessional component.

II

Thomson provided an exceptionally wide range of ways of conceiving of objects and experience in The Seasons. The central scientific positions in the poem are Newton’s, taken directly and indirectly from his gravitational, optical and astronomical writings. The central theological and social perspectives are from Shaftesbury, occasionally combined with Bacon’s pyramid (in which the understanding moves from the particular to higher degrees of generality) and the Great Chain of Being. There are views of country taverns, rolling hills and foxhunting, some moral interludes, modern technological discussions of animal and vegetable husbandry (occasionally merged with Virgil’s descriptions from the Georgics), extensive imaginative panoramas drawn from recent British and European travel literature, meteorological explanations, and reflections on domestic industry and social reform which have their origins in contemporary pamphlets. When Thomson wished to consider the psychological basis of perception, he generally did so by making a Lockean distinction between primary and secondary qualities. However, just as The Seasons is filled with objects and ideas from the universally abstract to the microscopically concrete, so the poem self-reflexively indicates its myriad ways of seeing by providing a whole host of epithets to qualify the eye’s optical function in literal and figurative terms, such as ‘Reason’s Eye’ (Winter, 1049), ‘Sacred Eye’ (Summer, 916), ‘cherish’d Eye’ (Spring, 89), ‘raptur’d Eye’ (Spring, 111), ‘licentious Eye’ (Summer, 1344), ‘creative Eye’ (Autumn, 1016) and ‘microscopic Eye’ (Summer, 288).¹⁴

Given this poem’s conceptual range, it is not surprising that Thomson’s consideration of the work’s national ideological aspects is intermittent. He discusses Great Britain in each of the seasons, but his most sustained treatment is the national panegyric, which follows the description of the Torrid Zone in Summer. He uses a limited number of terms to describe Britain and its constituent parts, and does not explicitly refer to the nation as a ‘united kingdom’, although he does conclude the account of Scotland in Autumn with a periphrastic reformulation of this term (considered in due course). Similarly, he does not employ the terms ‘Scotland’, ‘Scottish’, ‘Scotsmen’ or ‘Scots’, preferring the Latin ‘Caledonia’ to introduce the Scottish section. As was standard for domestic national discussions in this period, he pays little attention to Wales (not a kingdom and therefore not worth extended consideration), limiting himself to a few lines on the mountains, Caernarfon, Penmaenmawr and Snowdon, in Summer (1161–6). More surprisingly, there is no mention of ‘English’ or ‘Englishman’ in the poem, and only a solitary adjectival use of ‘England’ in an account of the conversation during a feast after a hunt in Autumn, where the revellers ‘talk the while/ Of ENGLAND’s Glory, ne’er to be defac’d’ (506–7). The use of ‘England’ alongside images of excessive consumption perhaps suggests disapproval at such narrow partisanship. When Thomson considers the domestic nation, he almost always employs the term ‘Britain’, alongside its cognates of ‘Briton’ and ‘British’, and the personification of ‘Britannia’. As he explained to close friend and sometime collaborator David Mallet in 1726, he used ‘Britannia’ precisely because ‘it included our native country, Scotland’.¹⁵ In keeping with his Scottish-Whig Presbyterian background, Thomson is a resolute economic integrationist, and believes that the success of the new nation should be founded on widespread prosperity. He makes this position clear in the first mention of ‘Britain’ in the poem, as part of a description of the remains of a border hill fort:

And now the sprightly Race
Invites them forth; when swift, the Signal given,
They start away, and sweep the massy Mound
That runs around the Hill; the Rampart once
Of iron War, in ancient barbarous Times,
When disunited BRITAIN ever bled,
Lost in eternal Broil: ere yet she grew
To this deep-laid indissoluble State,
Where Wealth and Commerce lifts the golden Head;
And o’er our Labours, Liberty and Law,
Impartial, watch, the Wonder of a World!

(Spring, 838–48)

Thomson’s indicative anthropomorphic periphrasis, ‘sprightly Race’, describes the sheepdogs sent to round up sheep grazing around the remains of the iron-age fort. He contrasts the mound’s current picturesque circumstances with its original military function, and this fort provides a salient reminder of the long tradition of internal conflict in the British Isles (he probably had in mind the remnant of the fort north of Southdean, which would have a particular suggestion of cross-border hostilities). The current ‘deep-laid indissoluble State’ has three central components: the settlement of the Glorious Revolution; the Act of Union; and economic enterprise, made possible by freedoms of thought and action (Liberty) and the statutory protection afforded to persons and property (Law). In this episode the reflection on the pastoral scene leads to an abstract vision of the commercial nation. Elsewhere in Spring, the landscape is conceived as a material resource. Thomson follows Virgil in the Georgics and urges his fellow ‘generous BRITONS [to] venerate the Plow’ (67). As Monica Gale has suggested, successful agrarian production can be understood in Virgil’s poem both as a celebration of recent Italian unification, and as the necessary condition for the continuing security of the domestic state and empire.¹⁶ Thomson, however, further stresses the economic advantages of modern agriculture when properly managed, as the episode concludes with a celebration of the export of surplus grain from the recently unified kingdom of Great Britain as ‘th’exhaustless Granary of a World’ (77).

In keeping with the expectations of topographical descriptions of Whig grandees’ estates, the prospect of Stowe in Autumn provides both a more formal and a more contemplative national vision. Cobham’s garden combines ordered aesthetic principles and horticultural expertise, so that ‘All-beauteous Nature fears to be outdone’ (1047). In this view, it is the garden’s harmony, rather than the prospect of agricultural efficiency, which best exemplifies British virtue. Thomson demands that his muse should ‘o’er the Garden and the rural Seat/ Preside, which shining thro’ the chearful Land/ In countless Numbers blest BRITANNIA sees;/ O lead me to the wide-extended Walks,/ The fair Majestic Paradise of STOWE’ (1038–42). He subsequently ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Thomson’s Vision of Britannia
• 2 Smollett and Dialectical Nationalism
• 3 Ramsay, Hume and British Portraiture
• 4 Ossian, Wolfe and the Death of Heroism
• 5 Boswell: Self, Text, Nation
• 6 Scott, Turner and the Vision of North Britain
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index