Thomas Pennant's A Tour in Scotland, 1769 (1771) and A Tour in Scotland, and Voyage to the Hebrides, MDCCLXXII (1774, 1776) played a key role, along with James Macpherson's Ossian poems of the 1760s, in representing the Highlands and Islands of Scotland as attractive places for a growing number of travellers and tourists. Brian D. Osborne claims in his introduction to a modern edition of A Tour in Scotland, 1769 that ‘to Pennant must go much of the credit for the non- Scottish world's discovery of Scotland and its development as a destination for travellers in search of the picturesque’. For Osborne, Pennant's appreciation of ‘the grandeur and natural beauty of Scotland’ made him ‘one of the first generation of travellers who saw in wild mountain scenes anything more than an awful wilderness’. Yet, as Charles W. J. Withers stresses in his introduction to a recent edition of A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772, although ‘Pennant was certainly aware of Scotland's visual grandeur, […] it is not a central theme of his Tour’. Pennant's central theme, I suggest, is the natural history of Scotland, and his tours helped to make the Highlands and Islands into primary destinations for travellers in search of the natural history of the northern wilds of Britain. Pennant attended to all aspects of Scotland's natural history, but in this chapter I focus on his geological observations, especially his discovery of impressive basaltic formations in the Inner Hebrides and what he took to be the remains of ancient volcanoes in various parts of Scotland – discoveries for which Pennant has not received any credit. I will also suggest, however, that there are significant interconnections between Pennant's observations of Scotland's geomorphology and his aesthetic response to its landscape.

Pennant was one of the foremost natural historians in eighteenth- century Britain. According to G. R. de Beer, he was ‘the leading British zoologist after [John] Ray and before [Charles] Darwin’.

Everyone knows that it was Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake (1810) that made the Trossachs and Loch Katrine into the epitome of Romantic Scotland for readers, writers and tourists from Britain and Europe. But I want to suggest here that the cultural work of turning these places into an exemplary Romantic locality was begun nearly two decades earlier in the parish report on Callander that was included in the massive twenty-one-volume Statistical Account of Scotland, edited by Sir John Sinclair and published in Edinburgh between 1791 and 1799. Although some nineteenth-century writers suggested that the Reverend James Robertson of Callander was the first writer to ‘discover’ the Trossachs, the bulk of academic work on the explosion of interest in the people, culture and localities of Highland Scotland in the second half of the eighteenth century has focused on the increasing number of published tours and guide books in the period. While some of these tours and guidebooks were written by Scots, they were usually, like the increasing number of English and European travellers to the Scottish Highlands, merely visitors to the localities they wrote about. The distinctive feature of the 938 parish reports in the Statistical Account of Scotland is that they were written by parish ministers who typically combined intimate local knowledge with a university education in one of the centres of the Scottish Enlightenment.

When the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 signaled to the world that something extraordinary was taking place in France, Mary Wollstonecraft was already in a position, intellectually and socially, to respond with enthusiasm. From 1784 to 1785 she had lived in Newington Green, where she came under the influence of the Dissenting preacher Dr. Richard Price, then in his sixties, who was one of the leading radical intellectuals of the day. In 1787 she began working as a writer and translator for Joseph Johnson, a Dissenter and radical publisher whose home and bookshop at St. Paul's Churchyard was a focal point for London Dissenters and radicals. As a kind of surrogate daughter to Johnson, Wollstonecraft became part of one of the most forward-looking intellectual circles in Britain. Members of Johnson's circle hurried to Paris in the summer of 1789 and returned with enthusiastic accounts, hoping that a similar revolution might take place in Britain. The joy occasioned by the French Revolution's early phase bound this circle together, as Claire Tomalin puts it, “in the certainty that they knew the truth and that it was bound to prevail.”

The French Revolution was a drawn-out process rather than a single event. But the dramatic events of the Revolution’s early phase provoked one of the most important political debates in British history. The “Revolution Controversy” of 1789–95 was as much about the implications of the Revolution for Britain as it was about the Revolution itself.

In Burke's Enquiry, the causes of the sublime may be various – vastness, solitude, silence, obscurity, power – but its characteristic effect (in its highest degree) is an astonishment which pre-emptively disables reason:

The sublime ‘anticipates’ our reasonings – at once prefiguring and pre-empting, looking forward to and forestalling, reason's powers and insights. This implicit, though perhaps ambivalent, attack on reason reinforces our sense that the Burkean sublime is constituted in resistance to the Enlightenment. But in suspending reason, it seems that the sublime might have contradictory social effects: if, in its highest degree, the sublime induces an astonishment which ‘hurries us on by an irresistible force’, then it might unleash potentially disruptive, unpredictable energies; on the other hand, its inferior effects, such as admiration, reverence, and respect, apparently promise and promote social stability.

We have seen that standard accounts of the sublime in the eighteenth century suggest that it undergoes a significant transition – culminating in Burke's Enquiry – from rhetorical technique to psychological response in face of natural phenomena. We have also seen, however, that what is presented in Burke as an immediate response to nature in the raw turns out to involve a strategy which may be described as rhetorical. Given this continued, if covert, relation between the sublime and rhetoric, and given the fact that so much of the Revolution Controversy turns around issues of language, the present chapter devotes specific attention to the last section of the Enquiry which concentrates on language as a source of aesthetic affect. This discussion will pave the way for a subsequent analysis of the rhetorical strategies in the Reflections and of Burke's ‘rage’ against radical rhetoric.

My argument about the Enquiry has been built upon a reading of the physiological, and therefore ideological, theory which governs the observations Burke makes about particular aesthetic instances and which he is so tenacious in defending against his critics. This theory argues that aesthetic affect is triggered by natural phenomena in one of two ways: either by generating psychological experiences (terror, love) which have corresponding effects on the body, or by inducing physical experiences (pain, pleasure) which affect the mind. Such processes are given authenticity through reference to Burke's observations about his own sensations and through the assumption that human responses are uniform. This empirical, experiential basis is central to the requirements of Burke's ideological project, but we have seen that it also needs to be framed by the supplementary notion of taste.

My reading of the Reflections thus far has been largely confined to a limited number of paragraphs and passages (whose complexity has demanded the extensive reading they have been given). Much the greater part of Burke's text is taken up not with confronting the French queen with the revolutionary mob but with discussions of British history, comparisons between British and French economics, and reflections on the relative merits of the systems of political representation on either side of the English Channel. Yet I want to show that the patterns, paradigms, and problems that have emerged in my articulation of the Enquiry and the Reflections shape Burke's discussions of economics, the law, political representation, and language as well as his emotive response to the events at Versailles. Regardless of Burke's manner or topic, the crisis he identifies himself as facing affects every facet of the socio-economic formation he defends and each discursive manner he attempts to defend it with.

The Reflections worries at a series of issues, each of which can be understood as paradigmatic of a general crisis in representation: the question of whether a king or a parliament may legitimately represent a nation; the concern that paper currency ought to be convertible into ‘real’ money; and the desire that language's representative power might not be perverted or undermined in any way. (It is significant that Paine responds to Burke on all these fronts, reproducing each of his anxieties yet locating proper and improper representation in quite different textual and political places.)

This book concentrates on two pivotal moments in Edmund Burke's writing career and in the history of Britain in the eighteenth century – the publication of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757/9) during the Seven Years War, and the publication of the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) in response to the way the French Revolution was being admired by radicals in Britain. Although the book is divided into two parts which focus on each of these moments in turn, the interpretive strategy adopted throughout is continuously to read each text in terms of the other. I move forwards and backwards between the Enquiry and the Reflections in order to establish and complicate the relationship between them, showing that a rereading of the former demands and enables a reinterpretation of the latter. Simultaneously with this close attention to Burke's texts, I attempt to read the various ways in which they interact with a range of texts which constitute their different historical and discursive moments.

In the first part of the book, ‘Aesthetics for a bourgeois revolution’, I claim that Burke's early aesthetic treatise needs to be read not simply as a ground-breaking intervention within the proliferating discussion of aesthetics in Britain, but as a contribution to the hegemonic struggle of the rising middle class in the first half of the eighteenth century. This involves developing a reading of the Enquiry which foregrounds embedded relations there between aesthetics, politics, and economics.

According to Foucault, one of the problems which faced physiocratic economic thought in the second half of the eighteenth century concerned the creation of value. While all commodities could be said to originate in the land, they only assume the status of wealth through being exchanged. Wealth, then, is construed out of those goods which exceed the agricultural capitalist's immediate needs. This excess has to be derived from a source which will not be depleted by the process of continually yielding a profit. In Foucault's analysis of physiocratic thought, neither trade nor industry is capable of providing ‘this necessary supplement’ – on the contrary, entrepreneurial activity creates wealth only at the expense of others, and the value it creates ‘arises only where goods have disappeared’ (Order of Things, pp. 193–4). Foucault's use of the term ‘necessary supplement’, in the year before the publication of Derrida's Of Grammatology, seems unaware of its contradictory possibilities, yet we can see how these reassert themselves in Foucault's analysis. While manufacturing capitalism creates profit by depleting ‘natural’ wealth, agricultural capitalism derives its surplus from a nature regarded as ‘an inexhaustible source of the goods that exchange transforms into values’ (Order of Things, p. 195). Nature is inexhaustible because it is backed by what Mirabeau calls ‘the Author of nature, the Producer of all goods and all wealth’. As Foucault suggests, the agricultural labourer or farmer enters into partnership in this productivity, becoming a ‘Co-Author’ in an agrariancum- literary economy (Order of Things, p. 194).

The first edition of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful appeared in 1757. Its critical reception prompted Burke to publish a second and substantially revised text in 1759. In the introduction to his modern edition of the Enquiry, James T. Boulton informs us that although ‘each critic acknowledged the newness of many of Burke's assertions, and praised his perspicuity and provocative method of presentation … none fully accepted his theory’ (Boulton, p. xxiii). A good example of this is found in the most critical review which the first edition of the Enquiry received – that by Arthur Murphy in Johnson's Literary Magazine:

The second edition of the Enquiry included a new preface, an introductory essay ‘On Taste’, and a section on ‘Power’, as well as additions which meet attacks on the theory by dogmatically reiterating the initial argument. In the new preface, Burke explains that ‘though I have not found sufficient reason, or what appeared to me sufficient, for making any material change in my theory, I have found it necessary in many places to explain, illustrate and enforce it’ (Enquiry, p. 3).

We have seen that Burke's hostility towards the French Revolution was primarily aroused not by the events of the Revolution themselves but by reading Price's sermon in January 1790. Burke's response to the events at Versailles on 5–6 October 1789, which forms the central scene in the Reflections, was therefore a belated one. It was primarily triggered, I suggest, not by the events themselves but by the way Price appeared to represent them as the heroic climax of the people's struggle for liberty in which they led their king ‘in triumph’. In order to facilitate the following discussion of Burke's version of the events at Versailles, I quote from Alfred Cobban's vivid account of them:

Cora Kaplan argues that instabilities of class and gender, opened up by republican and liberal political philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century, became the central concern of a range of bourgeois discourses in the nineteenth century. In the novel, for example,

A notion of ‘true womanhood’ had therefore to be constructed which was differentiated both from masculinity and from subordinated races and classes: ‘The difference between men and women in the ruling class had to be written so that a slippage into categories reserved for lesser humanities could be averted.’ At the same time, however, the subordination of women through ascribing to them a ‘primitive’ propensity for passion, means that ‘The line between the primitive and the degraded feminine is a thin one.’ Women of the ruling class are therefore assigned an incoherent place and meaning: they at once epitomize the distinctive quality of their class and represent its vulnerability to internal subversion.

The account of the sublime developed in the previous chapter suggests that it functions as a mode through which women and femininity are both defined and repressed in the discourse which ushers in the bourgeois capitalist epoch. This might enable an understanding of the way that patriarchal values were taken up by, and became implicated within, the new order's attempt to legitimize its quest for political power. It might also contribute new inflections to recent research into the growing sexual division of labour from the mid eighteenth century which defined ‘the world of work as the prerogative of men’. But I want to argue that we need to read this gendering of aesthetic categories in this period in terms of class and national distinctions as well as sexual difference. This is based on the assumption that, as Cora Kaplan puts it,

In England in the first half of the eighteenth century, questions of class difference became crucial as a consequence of the financial revolution which gathered momentum after 1688. This revolution entailed a hegemonic struggle over the moral and political nature and consequences of the new commercial class and its institutions.

According to J. G. A. Pocock, the term ‘political economy’ in the eighteenth century encompasses commentary on the administration of public revenue, ‘the emerging science of “the wealth of nations”’, and ‘a more complex, and more ideological, enterprise aimed at establishing the moral, political, cultural and economic conditions of life in advancing commercial societies’. I wish to show that Burke's criticism of radical thought, and especially of the Revolution's financial policy, is driven by the apprehension that it threatens to annihilate the very conditions of political economy in all these senses. Indeed, Pocock can argue that ‘it is not possible to read Burke's Reflections with both eyes open and doubt that it presents [the Assembly's creation of assignats on the basis of confiscated church property] – and not assaulting the bedchamber of Marie Antoinette – as the central, the absolute and the unforgivable crime of the Revolutionaries’ (Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 197). But if the Revolution is therefore inimical to the Whig order in Britain (which was for Burke the only possible model of a successful commercial society), its challenge disconcertingly arose, as Pocock puts it, ‘within the conditions that order made possible’. In responding to this challenge, Burke inevitably used a language which ‘revealed tensions within Whig society and its ideology’ (Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 194–5).

If Burke's aesthetics are shaped by economic and political paradigms, his politics and economics are endowed with affect through what we might call an ‘aesthetic ideology’.