After Culloden: Anglo-Scottish Identity in the Wake of the 1745 Jacobite Rising

Abstract

This dissertation explores the literary representation and negotiation of Scottish identity and Anglo-Scottish Union during and immediately after the Jacobite Rising of 1745 (“the Forty-Five”). I argue that we can trace active attempts to renew a sense of Union through Anglo-Scottish cultural literary construction in the immediate aftermath of the Forty-Five. By examining and expanding upon the concept of “Scotophobia,” or anti-Scottish rhetoric and sentiment, I explore how Scottish and English writers addressed questions of national identity in the wake of the Forty-Five. This dissertation contributes to the scholarship of Anglo-Scottish Union and furthers studies of how eighteenth-century literature and media negotiate national identity in times of crisis. The Forty-Five, as a site of ideological crisis, presents a sharp contrast between English and Scottish national identities, but I intend to show how the selected texts function to redefine and renegotiate these distinct identities as part of a larger British national identity. My study begins in Chapter One with a deep examination and explication of race, prejudice, and Scotophobia in the eighteenth century, especially the links between Scotophobia and antisemitism. With Scotophobia as a lens, I then explore how the Scottish are represented during and immediately after the Forty-Five. I examine a variety of texts in a variety of genres, including poetry, periodicals, histories, plays, and novels. Chapter Two focuses on how Scottish identity is “framed” in the major monthly periodicals of the day—The Gentleman’s Magazine (1731-1907), The London Magazine (1732-85), and Scots Magazine (1739-1817). Chapter Three explores English writer Henry Fielding’s propagandistic political pamphlets of 1745 and 1747, his periodicals The True Patriot (1745-46) and The Jacobite’s Journal (1747-48), as well as his novel, Tom Jones (1749). Chapter Four examines Scottish author Tobias Smollett’s poem Tears of Scotland (1746) and his first novel Roderick Random (1748).