This letter from Susan Ferrier to her younger brother, written ‘betwixt tea and cards’ on May Day 1810, marks the osmosis of improvement into Scottish society at the outset of the nineteenth century – a subject now of polite repartee, an ingrained vernacular worldview. It is from this context that the argument of the previous chapters emerges, that improvement was decisively at work in a series of aesthetic innovations comprehensible under the aegis of an updated Scottish Romanticism. For the Edinburgh novelist Ferrier, improvement is the root cause of ‘modern times’, a progressive source code that contracts time and space, with forty years now a day's journey in the landscape. The cost is in ‘appendages and encumbrances’, the process less synonymous with R. Buckminster Fuller's ‘ephemeralization’ – in which technology simplifies life towards a utopian vanishing point – than might be expected. Equally, Ferrier reminds us of the less quantifiable collateral effects of improvement: time-travel is exhausting, for one thing. This does not mean that improvement, in its plural forms orbiting around commercial productivity, had ceased to be a fundamentally desirable ideal in 1810. Rather, it is a sign of the complex dialectical unfolding of improvement as a phenomenon, possessed of a myriad forms and contested at all levels. Scottish literary Romanticism is of lingering value as a testing ground for this characteristic of our world.

These four case studies, stretching chronologically from Burns's 1786 Poems to Hogg's later contributions to Blackwood's across 1830–31, fill out some of the potential of improvement as a literaryhistorical phenomenon.