The Sottish novel, written as it was in English (albeit with strong infusions of spoken Lowland Scots dialogue and local, often Gaelic, names for features of landscape or society) functioned in large part within the greater English literary system. It was rarely used for nation-raising purposes (unlike verse – from Burns’s Scots wha hae to Hugh MacDiarmid); indeed, the influence of the towering Sir Walter Scott was such that the literary proclamation of Scottish identity aimed mainly at establishing a subsidiary autonomy for Scottish traditions within a British-imperial Reichspatriotismus. Many Scottish-born authors refrained from using Scottish themes (e.g. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), others wrote Scottish-set narratives specifically for an English readership, e.g. J.M. Barrie (Auld licht idylls, 1888; A window in Thrums, 1890; The little minister, 1891). Barrie’s writing, along with idylls like Robert Williams Buchanan’s Idyls and legends of Inverburn (1865), were later to be denounced as the “Kailyard” school.
Scottish themes (its turbulent history) and settings (its sublime landscapes) were eagerly drawn on for Romantic local colour. While Scott was still addressing the country’s history in dramatic poems (Marmion, 1808; The Lady of the Lake, 1810); he would only turn to the genre of the novel in 1814 with his Waverley), Durham-born Jane Porter (1775-1850), who had spent part of her youth in Edinburgh and was acquainted with Scott, wrote a historical novel glorifying the life and deeds of William Wallace. Porter’s The Irish Chiefs (1810) foreshadowed Scott’s Waverley Novels and also initiated the romantic cult of Wallace as a Scottish national hero. Alexander Balfour also used Scottish themes and settings for his Campbell, or, the Scottish probationer (1819), The foundling of Glenthorn, or, the smuggler’s cave: A romance (1823) and Highland Mary (1827); so did John Galt (Glenfell, or Macdonalds and Campbells, 1820; Ringan Gilhaize, or the covenanters, 1823; The last of the lairds, 1826). But all this was overshadowed by the towering figure of Scott.
While Scott, a committed Tory, fully endorsed the United Kingdom under its Hanover dynasty and de facto Anglocentrism, and regarded Scottish resistance against this dispensation as a triumph of chivalrous sentiment over rational good sense, he nonetheless insisted on the value of Scotland’s culture and history within this frame, and lovingly evoked Scottishness in his public role, his verse and his novels. As a result he managed to elevate the cultural imagery of Scotland, emphatically including the Highlands, into a heightened and special, regionally distinct aspect of Britishness, something which readers could simultaneously appreciate for its exoticism and its close kinship. (He employed the same mixture of exoticization and familiarization in his evocations of the national past.) As a result, Scott came to be denounced as much as celebrated by the more acerbic writers from the post-Victorian generation.
The local-colour-particularism that Scott patented also affected the two most popular Scottish novelists after him: Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan. Besides galvanizing the Victorian imagination with the classic Treasure island (1883), Stevenson (1850–1894) was especially popular for his Scottish-set novels, which often revolved around the vestigial loyalty felt throughout the 18th century for the ousted House of Stuart (also thematized in Scott’s first novel, Waverley). Kidnapped and its sequel Catriona (1886-93) were historical adventure-romances set in 18th-century Scotland, and so was his key work The Master of Ballantrae (1889), involving the competing claims on a noble inheritance by two doppelgänger brothers, who chose opposing sides in the dynastic conflict between Stuart loyalists and Hanoverians. Written as it is by the author of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the two brother-enemies of The Master of Ballantrae embody the mixed feelings or even split personality of Scotland, as a recalcitrant rebel against English domination or as a loyal collaborator in the British Empire.
The cultivation of Scottish particularism under a British-imperial aegis reached its acme in the adventure tales of John Buchan (1875–1940), who himself reached the highest offices the Empire had to offer, and who proclaimed imperial supremacism as chauvinistically as Kipling. His adventure romances (The thirty-nine steps, 1915; Greenmantle, 1916) invariably invoke pernicious plots by German and/or Turkish foreigners against the Empire, as well as long, lovingly-evoked scenes of ramblings and pursuits across the author’s native Scotland. In the process, the Highlands are represented as both the most wildly scenic and the most stalwartly British part of the UK.
Buchan edited The northern muse: An anthology of Scots vernacular poetry in 1924, signalling the more literary prominence that Lowland Scots was beginning to reach. In its wake emerged an anti-sentimental and anti-Victorian “Scottish Renaissance”, around the poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978; A drunk man looks at the thistle, 1926) and the poet/novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1901–1935; the trilogy A Scots quair, 1932-34). It was modernist in its literary outlook (anti-Victorian, anti-sentimental and anti-Walter-Scott) and more overtly nationalistic politically.
