This chapter discusses Darwin’s lifelong interest in unconscious agency and instinct. Darwin typically treats instinct as a rational action that has become habitual and thus heritable; instinct embodies a cognitive process that does not know itself as such. His discussion of instinct is thus connected to other moments in his work where he uses the term ‘unconscious’; his treatment of previous taxonomists of species as unconsciously providing evidence for species transmutation, and his discussion of unconscious selection as an analogy for the effect of aesthetic preference in sexual selection. Darwin’s unconscious anticipates Freud’s as the embodiment of human agency in biological history.

The fifth chapter explores how concepts of caricature interacted with historical romance in the critical reception and writing of Walter Scott’s characters. I explore Scott’s association of pictorial caricature with accuracy, particularity and referentiality, looking in particular at The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Guy Mannering, and suggesting the implications of John Kay’s caricatures for Scott’s ’compendious realism’. Scott’s defences of historical ’caricature’ – in his essay on Tobias Smollett and in the Magnum Opus edition of The Monastery – are a counterpoint to the anti-caricature rhetoric used to disparage his novels. Returning to the realist device of the ’explained caricature’, I differentiate national caricatures of the Scots and Jewish ’body-corporate’ in Rob Roy, The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Ivanhoe.

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 sixth and final chapter considers horror writing’s appropriation of flesh-caricature from writing descriptive of the human body, dismantling character’s place in formal realism. I explore the grotesquing of the disproportioned body in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and her short story ’Transformation’, and in Walter Scott’s dwarf characters, where the aesthetic type of the ’gigantic dwarf’ gives rise to a mode of writing I call ’horrid realism’. The second part of the chapter grounds horrid realism in eighteenth-century texts that imagine the literalisation of caricatúra, such as Thomas Browne’s depiction of the Hippocratic face, and the effects of swaddling bands and foundation garments as pictured by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Buchan, William Cadogan, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and J. P. Malcolm.

This chapter tracks the emergence and evolution of the concept of the British nation from the twelfth century through to the present, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s first attempt to fashion an image of a distinct British nation to the severe challenges the national unit of the United Kingdom has faced in the wake of Brexit and other recent developments. The chapter explores the issue of how the nation is constituted and constructed and, specifically, the role that literature (and culture more generally) plays both in facilitating that construction and in interrogating it. The particular – often fraught – place of Wales, Scotland and Ireland within a formation dominated by England is also explored, together with issues relating to internal colonialism and global imperialism. Among the other issues touched on are class, education, gender and race.

In this chapter, attention turns to The White Doe of Rylstone, a poem arising out of familial grief whose engagement with the melancholic afterlife of war was brought into sharp relief following its publication in the year of Waterloo. Whether encountered in the love between the human and the non-human, in the slow effacement of Rylstone Hall, or in the merging of the sacred and the profane, the chapter argues that The White Doe offered a way for post-war readers to imagine peace as a form of aesthetic play that, even as it risks jettisoning actually existing peace to the realm of transcendental inaccessibility, discovers in the comingling of absence and presence, lack and plenitude, finitude and infinitude the preconditions for a life no longer marked by the struggle for self-definition.

This chapter shows how the best-selling novelist Walter Scott turned the era’s rhetoric of excess to his own commercial ends. Scott’s novels were frequently and directly compared with those published by the Minerva Press in the previous two decades; Scott’s defenders marked the 1814 publication of Waverley as the death knell of Minerva, while his detractors habitually remarked upon the parallels between his numerous, voluminous novels and those produced in equally large quantities by the Press. In readings of Scott’s early novels and his self-conscious paratexts, the chapter shows how his novels explore an antiquarian system of valuation in which even the most uninteresting document becomes valuable to posterity as soon as it’s rare. Scott uses this logic to offer a unique defence of the ‘innumerable’ popular novels that flowed from his pen and from the Minerva’s printing presses: their great numbers, he suggests, increase their chance of long-term survival. As both Scott and the Minerva Press authors who wrote alongside him argue in various ways, prolificity may ultimately lead to literary prestige rather than undermine it.

In the post-Waterloo era a large body of military tales were published in Britain that recounted veterans’ experiences of the Napoleonic Wars for the general reading public. Chapter 5 examines Thomas Hamilton’s The Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton (1827), a fictionalised treatment of the author’s military service. This chapter argues for the central importance of Cyril Thornton not only in inaugurating the genre of military novel, but also for its formative role in the rise of modern war novels more broadly. While war novels are traditionally associated with soldier-authors of the First World War, Hamilton’s novel was nonetheless the first to offer what Paul Fussell views as the basis of all modern war stories – the reformulation of the romance of war around the physical survival of the soldier. By narrating the traumatic tale of the junior military officer, the novel may have quite literally enabled a subaltern to speak, but the novel also simultaneously reduces the officer to a suffering body in ways that reveal the total hold of a militarized biopower over discourses of war, a bio-aesthetics that has continued to reverberate across modern war writing.

In the early nineteenth century, honor and disrepute were increasingly synonymous with terms like credit and debt. In Austen’s Emma, credit becomes a primary figure for the broader speculations about the inhabitants of Highbury. Long affiliated with a Whiggish ideology of commerce and its supposed levelling effects, credit, in Austen’s representation, turns out to be an elitist phenomenon, something made available only to those who already have honor, members of a “neofeudal” vanguard such as George Knightley, who can distribute credit at their discretion. However, Scott’s Rob Roy seems to rebuff Austen’s approach to credit and honor. Featuring a young protagonist who throws himself into the 1715 Jacobite uprising, rescues errant bills of credit from his father’s stock-brokerage, redeems family honor, and tries to impress his love interest, the novel at first appears to be an ideal neofeudal text, blending chivalric romance with modern commerce. But Rob Roy himself challenges the merger of these two paradigms. By decoupling honor from credit and disrupting the financialization of social value, the highlander becomes an unlikely scourge of incipient global finance capitalism.

“Revolution and Nostalgia: Walter Scott, and the Forms of Jacobite Nostalgia,” examines the concept of revolution in relation to the events of 1688–89 by way of thinking about why this paradigmatic event of modernity – the first “modern” revolution on some accounts – only very hesitantly embraces the idea of revolution. It examines the figure of the Jacobite in Walter Scott’s Waverley, in order to argue that historical fiction works by a logic of nostalgia, structuring the past as the place of the fantasies of the present. This chapter explains why revolution becomes the central if disavowed political fantasy of secular modernity; why nostalgia, a word invented in 1688 and reaching its apotheosis and its formal incarnation as historical fiction over a hundred years later, haunts the project of secularity; and why the Jacobite is at once the exemplary revolutionary, the prototypical nostalgic, and the object of nostalgic investment. This chapter also explains why representations of the “revolution” of 1688–89 tend to allegorize it in terms of racial or colonial conflict and thus how the invention of the Highland rebel managed England’s ambivalence about its own experience with revolution and its colonization projects.

The Conclusion traces the afterlife of the knots of memory examined in earlier chapters in two printed genres: the multi-volume histories of the nation that became popular in the late eighteenth century and the historical novel in the hands of Walter Scott. Works such as David Hume’s and Tobias Smollett’s histories replicate some of the counter-memories that were produced in the earlier printed discourse on the nation. Scott, however, transforms the complicated knots of memories and counter-memories by drawing attention to and framing them. Waverley, for example, both acknowledges the power of counter-memories and prevents their re-activation by including them within a narrative that connects a progressive sense of a consolidated British cultural memory with a model of media succession.

Judaism in Britain during the Romantic era shaped tradition to suit the requirements of modernity and the challenges of “Englishing” an ancient religion. Jewish novelists, poets, and theologians promoted emancipation and mutual understanding with a Christian-majority society. David Levi, Hyman Hurwitz, and Grace Aguilar made especially important contributions.

Introduction: Walter Scott’s tales of chivalry and adventure inaugurated a masculinized Scottish romance tradition that celebrated a sublime and heroic version of Scotland. Nineteenth-century Scotswomen responded to Scott’s influence by establishing a countertradition of unromantic or even antiromantic representations of Scotland. Their novels challenge the long-standing claim that Scotland lacked any equivalent to the English realist novel. In turning from the past to the present and from the sublimity of Scott’s Highland landscapes to farmhouses, factories, and suburban villas, Scottish women writers brought romance to everyday life, illuminating the magnificence of the mundane. Drawing on the evangelical discourses emerging from the splintering of the Presbyterian Church in 1843, they represented fiction as a form of spiritual comfort, an antidote to the dreary monotony and petty frustrations of daily existence.

CH 1: Margaret Oliphant, one of the first Scotswomen to make a living as a professional writer, looked to Walter Scott to legitimate her pragmatic understandings of authorship as a skilled trade and literature as a form of entertainment rather than a source of spiritual truths. In her autobiography and her novels, Oliphant drew on Scott’s example to explore the inverse relationship between literature’s aesthetic and economic value. Both her sentimental Scottish romances and her masterfully ironic Chronicles of Carlingford declare the superiority of skilled craftmanship to inspired genius as source of literary and artistic production. The Chronicles of Carlingford became a touchstone for later Scottish women writers by articulating an aesthetics of the ordinary and affirming the vast importance that seemingly mundane events occupy in the lives of most people. But it was in her romances that Oliphant defined her own relationship to Scottish literary tradition by feminizing the chivalric adventures of Walter Scott’s Waverley novels.

The third chapter analyses Forster’s transformation of the opera-box literary trope of seduction into a riotous opera scene in his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread. Describing a performance of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammemoor, the scene is liberally scattered with allusions to nineteenth-century literary texts (such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Scott's Bride of Lammermoor) and to national stereotypes about musical idiosyncrasies (such as those described in Baedeker's guidebook and in Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad). Arguing that Forster’s parodic use of these allusions reflects both his negotiation of the weightiness of literary heritage and his participation in topical debates about national character, the chapter considers his stylistic and ideological ambitions for his debut novel. The chapter brings together considerations of the novel’s literary history and its national politics. Unearthing what lies beneath the beguiling social comedy of the novel, the chapter puts its emphasis on the intertextual and contextual resonances of the opera scene, analysing them as evidence of Forster’s strategy of writing against existing material to distinguish his debut work from others.

Legends about the vampire and the development of Gothic fiction took separate tracks throughout the eighteenth century in England and the rest of Europe. But they united decisively in S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (composed 1799–1800; published 1816), which then inspired the more symbolic uses of the vampire-figure in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). These works showed that the vampire could be a symbolic site for ‘abjecting’ (in Julia Kristeva’s sense of ‘throwing-off’) the most feared inconsistencies and conflicts at the heart of individuals and their whole culture. From there, this mating of fictive schemes, empowered by the Janus-faced nature of Gothic symbol-making, proliferated across the nineteenth century in plays, penny dreadfuls and fully-fledged novels. As these versions of the Gothic vampire progressed, so the range of deep conflicts that this figure could abject, individual and social, grew exponentially, as we can still see in texts ranging from Sir Walter Scott’s novels and Charles Nodier’s French plays in the 1810s and 1820s to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire in the 1890s.

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.

The question of realism helps us zero in on a certain puzzle about perhaps the most important Irish writer working in this important period of transition. On the face of it, Edgeworth’s relation to anything called fictional realism might seem distant. Her narratives often tend to allegory and didacticism; they tend to be highly reflexive; she often adapts or incorporates non-realist genres, such as the fairy tale or legend; and, for some critics, she belongs to an Irish tradition in which realism is thought to be impossible on social and cultural grounds. And yet Edgeworth was a leading influence on the two British novelists – Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen – who, in their contrasting ways, are often considered as key figures in the shaping of the modern realist novel. This chapter develops a solution to this puzzle by identifying Edgeworth with ‘scientific realism’, and showing that she shaped a distinctive kind of fictional practice out of her well-established commitments to experiment, observation, and the inductive method.

By examining a constellation of writings originating in the years 1822 to 1824, this chapter brings together various forms of mobility and speculation. Galt’s Sir Andrew Wylie, of that Ilk depicts an enterprising protagonist’s move from rural Scotland to London and back again, once he has undergone a performative process of identity construction in a series of socio–economic fields. Published first in periodicals and then collected into volumes entitled Our Village, Mitford’s prose sketches about life in rural Berkshire document changes caused by speculation on property and new modes of transportation that increase both voluntary and involuntary mobility. Saint Ronan’s Well, Scott’s only novel set in the nineteenth century, presents the related but contrasting scenario of a Scottish village disrupted by the speculative development of a fashionable spa; it interweaves themes of gambling and identity theft with a critique of contemporary print culture and reading habits. Recurring motifs in these works show how authors and characters respond to changes in socio-economic relations as increased mobility affects their capacity to control literary, personal, and real property.