Numéro 79, fall 2022 Scotland's Coastal Romanticisms Sous la direction de Anna Pilz et Penny Fielding

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This introductory article explores the opportunities opened up by a coastal turn in Romantic Studies. I analyse critical preoccupations in the connected fields of the environmental and blue humanities to make a case for the value of Coastal Studies to approach past and present coastal encounters. Scotland’s coast – the most expansive of Britain and Ireland – offers an exemplary case study to get into the prepositional ways of being on, of, by, and with the coast and to delve into the various forms through which they manifest in textual, visual, and material forms as lived-in environments that are shaped by artistic, colonial, economic, political, and scientific agendas. I suggest the year 1814 as a critical vantage point via readings of William Daniell and Walter Scott, whose works bring into focus the existence of multiple temporalities in coastal spaces, from the ancient to the ultra-modern and imagined future. By bringing together the voices of artists, critics, and curators and the material realities of Scotland’s coastal environments past and present, the special issue investigates the production of coastal knowledges two centuries ago as a process that informs twenty-first-century Romantic Studies. I argue that the coast emerges as a place and an environment that puts pressure on our understandings of genres, practices, and temporalities.

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Every few hours, the tide brings in treasure and takes it away, making the same beach new again, which I’m fairly certain is a large part of its appeal to me. It’s dizzying to think of all the ways the sea can touch a person, to the point that when asked what it means to me, my mind goes blank. Rather than using words, it feels more appropriate to hand over a pebble that’s been polished smooth by endless waves as if to say, like this. Or to show photograph after photograph of the ever-changing pattern of its surface. Like this.

Where do you begin with something that has no beginning and no end? There’s barely enough time in one life to describe the colour of water, let alone what it holds.

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This article is concerned with the fluid boundaries that challenged artists, natural philosophers, writers, reviewers, and readers to understand Scotland and its coastal, inshore environment in radically new ways. Those boundaries are material and disciplinary, existing, on the one hand, where land meets sea and, on the other hand, where the arts and sciences interact. My enquiry explores developing forms of knowledge pertaining to the Bass Rock and its surrounding coastal waters. The Scottish marine paintings of J. M. W. Turner provide a lens for that enquiry, embodying the imaginative curiosity that characterized Romanticism while visualizing innovative understanding in the natural sciences (geology, oceanography, meteorology, botany, zoology).

Interest in the Bass Rock from natural philosophers, writers, and artists during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries embodied what we now regard as interdisciplinary approaches to knowledge. Examples include geologist James Hutton’s literary-scientific prose, while palaeontologist Hugh Miller vividly imagined prehistoric sea creatures swimming around the Bass. This article argues that interacting categories of understanding emerge: a “knowledge ecology” and an “aesthetics of data,” each denoting advances in forms of understanding.

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This essay addresses visual and letterpress representations of the West Highlands and Islands in William Daniell’s Voyage Round Great Britain (1814–25), a patriotic celebration of the defensive coastal ramparts that had protected the nation from Napoleonic invasion. It describes Daniell’s career as an aquatint artist in India, his travels round Britain’s coast “sailing on horseback,” and the relationship between the plates and the letterpress text in relation to contemporary topographical art. The essay then turns to Daniell’s travels in the West Coast of Scotland in 1815, contrasting his georgic view of coastal improvements with the socioeconomic crisis afflicting the Scottish Gàidhealtachd in the postwar period. The influence of Thomas Pennant’s artist Moses Griffith, and of Walter Scott’s poetry and Pharos cruise are considered in relation to Daniell’s visual representation of Hebridean coastal scenery, and his notion of “moral electricity,” the transport revolution that has galvanised the nation. Daniell’s evasive account of Highland sheep clearances, and his dedication of his fourth volume to the Marchioness of Stafford, are compared with the critical strictures of earlier travellers like Pennant and Johnson. A final section considers a change in tone in which Daniell’s georgic idiom of improvement is replaced with the aesthetics of the sublime in his representations of “the lakes of terror” Lochs Scavaig and Coruisk in Skye. Owing a large debt to Scott’s Lord of the Isles, these images of the loch and mountain sublime serve to inculcate a disciplined, imperial masculinity. Daniell’s aquatints with their accompanying text provide important insights into the importance of Scotland’s coasts for early nineteenth-century improvement, as well as foreshadowing some of the ambivalent social, economic and environmental consequences that followed.

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This article explores the meanings of John Keats’s short-lived trip across the Irish sea in the summer of 1818. His encounters with Scottish and Irish coasts were shaped by a rapidly changing travel infrastructure, including roads, bridges, and harbours. They also resulted in a remarkably vivid description of an impoverished Irish woman whose body and presence challenge romantic aesthetics while also calling up a more contingent, watery Romanticism.

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This essay delves into the history of two stuffed fish in London’s Natural History Museum. These fish came from opposite ends of the earth: one from southern Australia, the other from northern Canada. But they were both documented and named by a Scotsman, Sir John Richardson (1787–1865). Richardson’s encounters with these fish shed light on different aspects of his career as a naval surgeon, polar explorer, and natural historian. More importantly, though, these encounters also reveal how European knowledge of the world’s coastal environments was created during the Romantic era. In considering the context and consequences of these encounters, this essay reflects on how the subject of this special issue, though nationally defined, connects with broader histories of nineteenth-century exploration and empire. The places where these fish were caught lay well beyond Scotland. Nonetheless, these fish are relevant to the study of Scotland’s coastal Romanticisms, and tracing their history invites us to rethink the geographical assumptions that often govern the study of national pasts.

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In 1809, Elizabeth Mackay was walking on the beach a short distance from her home in Reay, Caithness, when she saw a mermaid in the water. Her detailed and deeply mysterious account of what she saw caused a national sensation when it appeared in the press. Whether a hoax intended to draw investment and tourists to Caithness or a genuine document, Elizabeth Mackay’s testimony is worthy of close reading, as it documents a rare coastal encounter between a human and a marine animal and the partial connections forged between them. The first part of this article sets her observations in the context of other “strange” phenomena encountered on Scotland’s northern coastline and draws on feminist materialist approaches to read her testimony as an example of what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledges”—partial, subjective, and most importantly, embodied encounters that oppose an Enlightenment model of all-seeing, detached objectivity. The second part traces the influence of the Caithness mermaid on literary production during the following decade by Christian Isobel Johnstone, Thomas Love Peacock, and Walter Scott. Despite attempts to memorialise the Caithness mermaid in verse, the sighting had a stronger literary afterlife in satirical fiction than it did in poetry.

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This article discusses the cultural geography developed by John Galt across several decades in his writing, from his travel writing in the early 1810s, through his 1820s fiction, to his autobiographies and North American novels in the 1830s. At the centre of this are Galt’s influential accounts of the southern side of the Firth of Clyde in the 1820s, described here in terms of a dialectical regionalism that is rarefied under the pressure of migration and mobility. Place, in this context, is a social text brought into being by the negotiation of its horizons. The article situates Galt’s attention to this coastal region of Scotland—in and beyond his “Tales of the West”—within British imperial, European, and transatlantic contexts, while examining the early nineteenth century’s culture of literary home-longing. Despite continuities with his earlier writing, Galt’s best-known work reflects a distinctively 1820s cultural watershed, suffused as it is by ethnographic and autoethnographic versions of regional difference. In fact, Galt’s system of local-global attachment potentially relegates the nation to subordinate status, so that “Scotland” where it appears presents a synecdoche for a portion of the western seaboard, rather than the other way around. As it progresses, the article brings Galt’s development of home-longing into dialogue with his active colonialism, concluding that this marks the sharp horizons of sympathy, and the unequal power relations, in this version of literary belonging.