Chapter 3 analyzes how, within a newly expanded marketplace for print, a combination of manuscript and printed letters helped shape the ways in which the Company of Scotland’s Darien venture (1695–1700) and its subsequent failure came to be understood in cultural memory. Letters in both manuscript and printed form helped establish the company. Letters also served to connect the company directors with the colonists in Darien, and, when published in pamphlet form, they provided information and propaganda about the new colony to the nation back home. After the collapse of the Darien settlement, letters also became the evidence used to shape the cultural memory of the disaster. The chapter traces how, over the course of the eighteenth century, the cultural memory of Darien was erased by the bigger controversies surrounding the implications of the Acts of Union (1707) for the Scottish nation. Lastly, it considers how the rediscovery and publication of the Darien papers by John Hill Burton in 1849 brought them back into focus as a site of cultural memory.

Chapter 2 considers the archipelagic impact of the 1688 Revolution by examining the the War of the Two Kings in Ireland (1688–91). It analyzes how Irish events were mediated in newspapers such as the Orange Gazette and the London Gazette, both in the news stories and in advertisements for printed works such as maps, Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana (1689) and James Farewell’s The Irish Hudibras (1689). It focuses on how the media event surrounding the relief of the siege of Derry shaped English perceptions of the rest of the conflict in Ireland. The importance of Derry was amplified by the visit of George Walker to London and by thanksgiving services held in churches in London. By examining the representation of the siege in John Mitchelburne’s Ireland Preserv’d (1705), this chapter also assesses how Ireland was subsequently erased from the memory of the so-called “Glorious Revolution” in Britain.

The Introduction situates the book within the theoretical parameters of Cultural Memory Studies, Print Culture Studies and British Studies. It provides a short history of Memory Studies, focusing on Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory) as well as Aleida Assmann’s, Astrid Erll’s and Ann Rigney’s focus on media and memory. It surveys the complex media ecology of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that the role that printed texts played in articulating sites of memory changed between 1688 and 1745 as the meaning of print itself changed in relation to oral and manuscript cultures. It compares the media environments of the beginning and end of this period by focusing on the creation and circulation of two documents – the Declaration of William of Orange (1688) and the Particulars of the Victory regarding the Battle of Culloden (1746). The Introduction concludes by suggesting that Michael Rothberg’s concept of noeuds de mémoire (knots of memory) provides a useful model for examining printed works of British national memory in the mid-eighteenth century.

Chapter 4 examines the early mediation of the events of 1715 Rising within the context of a mediascape for news consisting of both the older form of manuscript newsletters and an increasing number of printed newspapers and periodicals. It compares reports about the developing conflict found in the manuscript newsletters sent to the Newdigate family between May 30 and September 29, 1715 with those printed in five newspapers during the same time period, suggesting that the affordances of the newspaper form both amplified the sense of discontinuity in the news about the Rising as it was unfolding and made that information available to a larger and anonymous audience. It explores the subsequent treatment of the conflict in two periodical essays published in 1715 and 1716: Richard Steele’s The Town-Talk and Joseph Addison’s The Free-Holder. It concludes by considering popular histories written in the immediate aftermath of the 1715 which reprinted information originally found in newsletters and newspapers. These histories both minimized what had been the threat of the 1715 Rising and helped to circulate Jacobite counter-memories.

Chapter 1 begins by comparing Gilbert Burnet’s focus on the song “Liliburlero” as the media event of the 1688 Revolution with what contemporary scholars have written about the importance of printed works at the time. It asserts the importance of adopting a multi-media perspective on the 1688 Revolution. It analyzes James II/VII’s shifting use of media in the context of challenges to his throne by the Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Argyll in 1685 and William of Orange in 1688. It assesses William’s Declaration outlining “the Reasons Inducing him, to Appear in Armes in the Kingdome of England” and suggests that the document gained its authority as a printed text by being represented in oral and manuscript forms. It concludes by suggesting that the initial mediation of the 1688 Revolution impacted its later re-inscription as a site of “Glorious” cultural memory when William’s Declaration was reprinted in early eighteenth-century histories of recent events such as those by Edmund Bohun and Abel Boyer.

Chapter 5 examines in the 1745 Jacobite Rising in the context of the expansion of the periodical press and the print marketplace in the mid-eighteenth century. Information about the events of the 1745 Rising was made available to readers in a more continuous and a more pervasive way than during the 1715 Rising. The chapter explores how this expanding circulation of information prompted greater concern not just about the trustworthiness of the genres of the newspaper and the political pamphlet but also about how citizens were consuming information. It next focuses on three genres of printed works produced after the Battle of Culloden (1746) that reworked newspaper reports into their narratives: accounts of the trials and executions of the rebels, “Chevalier” or “Pretender” narratives about the escape of Charles Edward Stuart, and popular histories. With their conscious and unconscious intertextual borrowings, these printed works, like those of the 1715 Rising, inscribe the cultural memory of the 1745 as a series of complicated knots of memory.

The Conclusion traces the afterlife of the knots of memory examined in earlier chapters in two printed genres: the multi-volume histories of the nation that became popular in the late eighteenth century and the historical novel in the hands of Walter Scott. Works such as David Hume’s and Tobias Smollett’s histories replicate some of the counter-memories that were produced in the earlier printed discourse on the nation. Scott, however, transforms the complicated knots of memories and counter-memories by drawing attention to and framing them. Waverley, for example, both acknowledges the power of counter-memories and prevents their re-activation by including them within a narrative that connects a progressive sense of a consolidated British cultural memory with a model of media succession.

Charlotte Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) has long been recognized as the first printed collection of Gaelic poetry translated into English. In Mere Irish and Fíor-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior to the Nineteenth Century, Joep Leerson calls her ‘the first mediator of importance between the Irish-Gaelic and the Anglo-Irish literary traditions’. Critical discussion of the Reliques has centred exclusively on the work's poetry, however, ignoring Brooke's interventions in another medium of Irish-Gaelic culture: music. In fact, Brooke's first published work was a translation of a song by Turlough Carolan that she supplied to Joseph Cooper Walker for his Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786). Brooke included this and other songs in her Reliques of Irish Poetry, along with an extensive commentary entitled ‘Thoughts on Irish Song’. This essay examines how the Reliques negotiates with perceptions of ‘Irish song’ that appeared in popular and antiquarian discourses in late eighteenth-century British and Irish venues. It will suggest that Brooke's reconfiguration of the lyrical productions of her nation offered a new perspective on the subject of ‘Irish song’ to contemporary readers, while, at the same time, constituting an important comment on the media culture of the eighteenth century. For unlike contemporary works supposedly representing ‘Irish song’, Brooke registered what I will identify as a marked ambivalence to the attempt to ‘remediate’ Gaelic musical culture through the technology of print.

The use of the term ‘media’ in an eighteenth-century context is a matter of some contention. On one extreme, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin trace continuities in the ideas of media ‘throughout the last several hundred years’. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, however, counter that an investigation of the history of media must ‘grapple with the ways that mediums have changed, rather than concentrating on the remarkable yet overdetermined similarities between entities now considered media’.

In his now classic The Paradox of Scottish Culture: The Eighteenth-Century Experience (1964), David Daiches divides Scottish writers after the Union into two camps, arguing that ‘Those poets who did not emigrate to England and write in English in an English tradition either wrote in Scotland in English for an English audience or turned to a regional vernacular poetry in a spirit of sociological condescension, patriotic feeling, or antiquarian revival.’ Influenced by the notion of a ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ proposed in G. Gregory Smith’s Scottish Literature: Character and Influence as well as T. S. Eliot’s account of ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Daiches also suggests that writers after the Union suffered from a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ caused by thinking in one language (Scots) and writing in another (English, the language of power). Daiches’s assessment was initially important in helping to raise awareness of some of the socio-political factors influencing eighteenth-century Scottish literature and has proved extremely influential over the years as critics have grappled with its implications and revised it accordingly. In the Grammar of Empire, for example, Janet Sorensen comments that this assessment of a Scottish ‘split [schiz] mind [phrene]’ pathologises Scottish literature by positing a central, organic national identity against which Scottish national identity appears always already flawed. More recently, in Scottish and Irish Romanticism, Murray Pittock characterises post-Union Scottish writing not in terms of a lack or a splitting but in terms of doubleness: ‘Scottish doubleness was a cultural language, both participative in the British public sphere and withdrawn from it.’

SCOTLAND IN ROMANTICISM

“What a hobbling pace the Scottish Pegasus seems to have adopted in these days,” grumbled William Wordsworth in a letter to R. P. Gillies (February 14, 1815). Wordsworth condemns the “insupportable slovenliness and neglect of syntax and grammar, by which James Hogg's writings are disfigured”; such solecisms may be “excusable in [Hogg] from his education, but Walter Scott knows, and ought to do, better.” Both poets can be summarily dismissed: “They neither of them write a language which has any pretension to be called English.” Wordsworth's complaint cuts across distinct if overlapping conceptions of the institutional framework of British Romantic literature: as a market, in which Scottish writing enjoys a notable success, and as a canon, from which it must be purged – on the grounds of a national deficiency, a linguistic unfitness “to be called English.”

Wordsworth's verdict has proven remarkably durable. Modern literary criticism in Great Britain and North America adopted the view of Romanticism as a unitary phenomenon, the agon of a mighty handful of lyric poets with a Kantian (later Heideggerian) problematic of the transcendental imagination. Some Romanticisms are more Romantic than others: some are the real thing, while others are premature or belated, or simply false – anachronistic or fraudulent simulacra. British Romanticism is English, from Blake and Lyrical Ballads in the 1790s to Keats, Shelley, and Byron (cut off from his own Scottish roots), prematurely dead in the early 1820s.