Imagining Great Britain: Union, Empire, and the burden of history, 1800–1830

Theodore Koditschek

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511975066.002

1 - Imagining Great Britain: Union, Empire, and the burden of history, 1800–1830

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2011

Theodore Koditschek

Show author details

Theodore Koditschek: Affiliation:
University of Missouri, Columbia

Book contents

Get access

Summary

There 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. The effects of the insurrection of 1745 – the destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs, the abolition of heritable jurisdictions of the lowland nobility and barons, the total eradication of the Jacobite party … commenced this innovation. The gradual influx of wealth and extension of commerce have since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth's time.

Walter Scott, Waverley [1814] (London, 1972), “Postscript,” 492

The history of colonies has in it some points of peculiar interest as illustrating human nature. On such occasions the extremes of civilized and savage life are suddenly and strongly brought into contact with each other, and the results are as interesting to the moral observer as those which take place on the mixture of chemical substances are to physical investigation.

Walter Scott to Robert Southey, March 23, 1818, in Scott, The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. J. C. Grierson (London, 1933), V: 115

On September 7, 1798, an Anglo-Irish gentleman, Richard Edgeworth, gathered his wife, eldest daughter Maria, and six other children. Abandoning their ancestral home in fear for their lives, the family hastened to the relative safety of the Protestant enclave of Longford Town with a train of mixed Protestant and Catholic yeomanry in tow.

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Liberalism, Imperialism, and the Historical Imagination
Nineteenth-Century Visions of a Greater Britain
, pp. 17 - 55

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975066.002 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

The Memoir of Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Begun by Himself, and Concluded by his Daughter, Maria Edgeworth, 2 vols. [1820] (Shannon, 1969), II: 205–38

Marianne, Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven, 1982), 165–240Google Scholar

Curtin, Nancy J., The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–1798 (Oxford, 1994).Google Scholar

Frances Anne, Edgeworth, A Memoir of Maria Edgeworth with Selections from her Lettters, 3 vols. (London, 1867), I: 83–93Google Scholar

Hare, Augustus J. C., The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, 2 vols. (Boston, 1894).Google Scholar

“is at this time engaged in the most momentous conflict that ever occurred in the history of the world. A conflict in which Great Britain is distinguished for having made the only manly and successful stand against the common enemy of civil society” (Cobbett's Parliamentary History of England (London, 1819), XXXIV: 267

Rose, J. Holland, William Pitt and the Great War (Westport, 1971), 299–320, 339–64Google Scholar

John, Ehrman, The Younger Pitt: The Consuming Struggle, III (London, 1996), 1–157, 258–64Google Scholar

Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), 472–97Google Scholar

Asa, Briggs, The Making of Modern England: Age of Improvement, 1783–1867 (New York, 1959), 129–83.Google Scholar

Patrick, Geoghegan, The Irish Act of Union: A Study in High Politics (New York, 1999)Google Scholar

Bolton, G. C., The Passing of the Irish Act of Union: A Study in Parliamentary Politics (Oxford, 1966).Google Scholar

Foster, R. F., Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1988), 3–286.Google Scholar

Jenny, Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends whose Curiosity Changed the World (New York, 2002)Google Scholar

Tom, Dunne, “A Gentleman's Estate should be a Moral School: Edgeworthstown in Fact and Fiction, 1760–1840,” in Gillespie, Raymond and Moran, Gerard (eds.), Longford: Essays in County History (Dublin, 1991), 95–122.Google Scholar

Oliver, MacDonagh, Ireland (Englewood Cliffs, 1968), 1–42Google Scholar

Keogh, Daire and Whelan, Kevin (eds.), Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union (Dublin, 2001)

Brown, Michael, Geoghegan, Patrick, and Kelly, James (eds.), The Irish Act of Union, 1800: Bicentennial Essays (Dublin, 2003)

Brotherstone, Terry, Clark, Anna, and Whelan, Kevin (eds.), These Fissured Isles (Edinburgh, 2005)

Maria, Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent [1800] (New York, 1965)Google Scholar

The Black Book of Edgeworthstown and other Edgeworth Memories, 1585–1817, ed. Butler, Harriet Jessie and Butler, Harold Edgeworth (London, 1927), 73–121

McCormack, W. J., Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford, 1985), 97–122CrossRef Google Scholar

Thomas, Flanagan, The Irish Novelists, 1600–1850 (New York, 1959), 53–79.Google Scholar

Terry, Eagleton, Heathcliffe and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London, 1995), 161–7Google Scholar

Brian, Hollingsworth, Maria Edgeworth's Irish Writing: Language, History, Politics (New York, 1997), 71–107Google Scholar

Ina, Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, 1991), 19–78, 105–36Google Scholar

Sharon, Murphy, Maria Edgeworth and Romance (Dublin, 2004), 151–65Google Scholar

Sydney, Owenson, Lady, Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl [1806] (Oxford, 1999)Google Scholar

Joep, Leerson, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the History and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin, 1997), 33–67Google Scholar

Mary Jean, Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870 (Cambridge, 2000), 51–81Google Scholar

Ian, Dennis, Nationalism and Desire: Early Historical Fiction (London, 1997), 45–86Google Scholar

Maria, Edgeworth, The Absentee [1812] (London, 1999)Google Scholar

Ina, Ferris, The Romantic National Tale and the Question of Ireland (Cambridge, 2002)Google Scholar

Maria, Edgeworth, Ormond [1817] (London, 1999)Google Scholar

Michael, Hurst, Maria Edgeworth and the Public Scene (Coral Gables, 1969), 56.Google Scholar

The Education of the Heart: The Correspondence of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus and Maria Edgeworth, ed. MacDonald, Edgar E. (Chapel Hill, 1977), 241

Oliver, MacDonagh, The Emancipist: Daniel O'Connell (London, 1989), 1–144, quote on 136Google Scholar

Feargus, O'Ferrall, Daniel O'Connell (Dublin, 1981)Google Scholar

Lockhart, J. G., Memoir of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, 9 vols. [1836–8] (Boston, 1887)Google Scholar

John, Sutherland, The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar

Georg, Lukacs, The Historical Novel (London, 1962)Google Scholar

David, Daiches, “Scott's Achievement as a Novelist,” in Devlin, D. D. (ed.), Modern Judgments: Walter Scott (London, 1968), 33–62Google Scholar

David, Brown, Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination (London, 1979)Google Scholar

Ian, Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, and Dickens (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar

Jane, Millgate, Walter Scott: The Making of a Novelist (Toronto, 1984)Google Scholar

Graham, McMaster, Scott and Society (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar

Caroline, McCracken-Flesher, Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar

Christopher, Harvie, “Scott and the Image of Scotland,” in Samuel, Raphael (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, II, Minorities and Outsiders (London, 1989), 173–92Google Scholar

Katie, Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar

Walter, Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (Edinburgh, 1806)Google Scholar

William, Macintosh, Scott and Goethe: German Influence on the Writings of Sir Walter Scott (Port Washington, 1970)Google Scholar

Benedict, Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), 1–46Google Scholar

Collins, A. S., The Profession of Letters: A Study of the Relation of Authors to Patrons, Publishers, and Public, 1780–1832 (London, 1928), 128–35, 155–60Google Scholar

John, Feather, A History of British Publishing (London, 1988), 1–584Google Scholar

Saree, Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge, 1998), 70–99Google Scholar

Adam, Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar

Philip, Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (New York, 2002), 35–66; SW, 492–4Google Scholar

Jane, Porter, The Scottish Chiefs [1809] (New York, 1956)Google Scholar

Devine, T. M., Clanship to Crofter's War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands (Manchester, 1994), 19–76.Google Scholar

Edwin, Emerson, A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year, 3 vols. (New York, 1902), I: 507–605.Google Scholar

Linda, Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), 321–75.Google Scholar

Walter, Scott, Guy Mannering [1815] (London, 2003)Google Scholar

Walter, Scott, The Antiquary [1816] (London, 1998)Google Scholar

Walter, Scott, Old Mortality [1816] (London, 1999), 1–118Google Scholar

Devine, T. M., The Scottish Nation (New York, 1999), 170–245Google Scholar

David, Daiches, “Introduction,” in Scott, Walter, The Heart of Mid-Lothian (New York, 1948)Google Scholar

James, Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, 1998), 309–21Google Scholar

Eric, Cregeen, “The Changing Role of the House of Argyll in the Scottish Highlands,” in Phillipson, N. T. and Mitchison, Rosalind (eds.), Scotland in the Age of Improvement (Edinburgh, 1970), 24–46Google Scholar

Morley, Edith J. (ed.), Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers (London, 1938), I: 277.

Hayden, John O. (ed.), Scott: The Critical Heritage (New York, 1970), 113–43

Francis, Jeffrey, Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 3 vols. (London, 1846), III: 32–102Google Scholar

Scott, P. H., “The Politics of Walter Scott,” in Alexander, J. H. and Hewitt, David (eds.), Scott and his Influence: The Papers of the Aberdeen Scott Conference, 1982 (Aberdeen, 1983), 208–17Google Scholar

Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader (Chicago, 1957), 217Google Scholar

Clair, William St., The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004), 632–44Google Scholar

Scott, , St. Ronan's Well [1823] (London, 1911)Google Scholar

Scott, , “The Surgeon's Daughter,” in The Waverley Novels (London, 1909), XXII: 591–854Google Scholar

James, Watt, “Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment and Romantic Orientalism,” in Davis, Leith, Duncan, Ian, and Sorenson, Janet (eds.), Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (Cambridge, 2004), 94–112Google Scholar

James, Fenimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales (New York, 1985)Google Scholar

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Why this information is here

This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.

Accessibility Information

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this chapter is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.