Improvement and romance: the Scottish Highlands in British writing after the forty-five

The romance of the Scottish Highlands came into existence as a theme within the ideology which governed the region's assimilation into the British Empire: Improvement. The elements of the Improving programme, and of the romance too, were faintly present from the beginning of the eighteenth century, but the form of both was decisively arrived at during the sixty years between the suppression of the Forty-Five and the rise of Sir Walter Scott. An early, though persistent caricature of the defeated enemy as ridiculous, blinkered and subversive was steadily overtaken by a series of more or less positive images: the society of the region was adopted as an example of an early stage of universal human history; its natural scenery inspired a complex mixture of fear and delight; the superstitions of its inhabitants came to seem a type of the poetic imagination; the warmth and antiquity of its social relations took on a nostalgic glow in an age of industrial and political revolution; its fighting men were made over by degrees from appalling barbarians into imperial heroes. All of these revaluations, however, continued to be compromised by the underlying negativity of the Highland myth, and to legitimate the subordination of the region to the logic of British capitalism and British state power. At the opening of the nineteenth century, these themes and contradictions are variously exhibited in a range of literary texts: in Wordsworth' s Tour poetry of 1803, which subtly links two characteristic Highland motifs - holidays and death; in the prose historical romances which set their scene in the Highlands and make of them a territory of fantasy and freedom; in Scott's The Lady of the Lake and the contemporary writings which elucidate its status as a national myth; and in the moralistic fiction for which the region furnishes a beguiling imagery of domesticity. The artistic tensions within some of these projects almost have the effect of transforming romance into realism, but not quite