The second chapter explores how literary writing in the Romantic period denies and decries caricature. I describe a ’caricature talk’, dominated by anti-caricature rhetoric, that seeks to establish the quality, verisimilitude and representational justice of textual characterisations; and I explore how caricature talk constitutes formal realism in the literary criticism of the Romantic period. The second part of the chapter positions imaginative literary caricature in relation to anxiety about prospographic and personal caricature describing real people, providing essential context for Chapter 3’s discussion of character originality and realism.

The chapter examines one of the most intriguing fiction stories about Greenland’s ‘lost colony’: the Scottish author James Hogg’s The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon (1837). The analysis shows that Hogg’s novella is loosely based on The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). Using this template, Hogg’s story gives narrative form to the colonial anxieties about isolation and succumbing to nature. The story starts out as a romance only later to turn into an account of gritty hardships that ends in final tragedy. Offering an alternative explanation of how the European colonists vanished from Greenland, the settlers (whom the protagonist finds and joins) are eventually overcome and devoured by polar bears. In the last section of the chapter, it is argued that Hogg uses the ‘lost colony’ narrative as a mirror for communities in remote parts of Scotland. This exemplifies how the image of the settlers of Greenland were used in fiction to raise present concerns. Hogg’s novella is the first of many nineteenth-century stories imagining an encounter with the vanished settlers. Such storylines story will be further examined in the chapters that follow.

This chapter discusses the use of Gothic convention in four nineteenth-century Scottish writers: Walter Scott, James Hogg, Margaret Oliphant and Robert Louis Stevenson. Proceeding by means of an account of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s recitation of William Taylor’s English translation of Gottfried August Bürger’s supernatural ballad ‘Lenore’ in Edinburgh in 1794, it shows how Scottish writers from this moment onwards were inspired to merge the conventions of Gothic poetry with the balladic and folkloric traditions of their own country. What resulted, the chapter shows, was that distinctive form of textually complex writing that characterises much Scottish Gothic writing of the period, a mode that, in its preoccupations with dialogic voices, splitting and uncanny doubling, enacted some of the political and cultural tensions that lay at the heart of the nation itself.

A concluding discussion of personal and textual identities, doubling, and fraud centres on a constellation of Scottish novels. Galt’s Andrew of Padua, the Improvisatore (1820) is a pseudo–autobiography wrapped in a pseudo–translation that leads readers on into a multilayered, improvised hoax. Republished together with his novel Rothelan in 1824, Galt’s tale joins several novels about imitation and imposture published almost simultaneously in that year: Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Scott’s Redgauntlet, Susan Ferrier’s Inheritance, Sarah Green’s Scotch Novel Reading, and versions of Walladmor by Willibald Alexis and Thomas De Quincey. Together, these works show how not only personal identity but also historical events and books themselves can be fraudulently duplicated. From the psychologically fragmented identities and demonic doubling illustrated in Hogg’s Private Memoirs to the fraudulent pseudo–translation Walladmor, these novels interweave the practices of speculation and identity construction typical of late-Romantic print and performance culture.