Sarah Sharp. Kirkyard Romanticism: Death, Modernity and Scottish Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Death, according to Sigmund Freud and later Jacques Derrida, is fundamentally unimaginable: ‘It is not enough, in order to have access to death […] to pronounce the word “death,” […] our thoughts of our death are always, structurally, thoughts of survival’ (Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign). Might this be true not only of the individual struggling to reckon with the prospect of their own death but also of a community at large—so that processes of grief and mourning work to rehabilitate the semantic vacuum of death in a more usable form?

Sarah Sharp’s book argues that a specific way of thinking about the utility of the dead was crystallized in Scottish literature in the 1810s, 1820s and 1830s by a circle of writers orbiting the publisher William Blackwood and his eponymous Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Death and burial, Sharp observes, had been recurrent literary concerns in the eighteenth century, including in graveyard poetry, sentimental fictions and the Gothic novel. However, she argues that the Blackwood’s set—particularly John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart—developed a new, highly characteristic topos that she terms ‘kirkyard Romanticism’. This involved an idealization of Scottish rural graveyards as imagined memorial sites for an evolving cultural nationalism: ‘By placing a nationally representative dead in Britain’s peripheral spaces, these texts imagine a role for Scotland as a repository for the values that maintain the cultural distinctiveness and colonial supremacy of the still newly formed British nation’ (pp. 2–3). ‘The kirkyard [came] to represent an organic, stable relationship between past and present’ (p. 47) in this context, although one that seemed perpetually under threat from ‘unchecked development, rationalism and globalisation’ (p. 151). Indeed, as a repository of collective identity and survival of the premodern, the kirkyard in Sharp’s account was meaningful partly because of this fragility—always under threat of being disrespected, neglected or even disturbed.

Kirkyard Romanticism takes its cue from Ian Duncan’s 2007 monograph Scott’s Shadow, notably Duncan’s handling of a passage in John Gibson Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819) that sees Lockhart’s narrator attend a ‘country sacrament’ in rural Scotland. ‘His aloofness from the ceremony enables him to harmonize its parts’, Duncan explains, offering ‘an epiphany of national character’, which crucially reveals that ‘absence and death constitute tradition’. Sharp too sees Lockhart and other key Blackwoodians leveraging an idea of Scottish rural life, or rather Scottish rural death, as the premise for a conservatively oriented national aesthetic. In this, they were informed by the Romantic nationalism of Friedrich Schlegel, whose lectures had been translated by Lockhart for Blackwood the year before Peter’s Letters; and by the political writings of Edmund Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) forged for Sharp ‘an alliance between conservative ideas of nationhood and the binary of disturbed and undisturbed grave’ (p. 5). Closer to home, they were following a trail established by Walter Scott: the first instalment of the Tales of my Landlord (1816) made Scott briefly a Blackwood author and, in The Tale of Old Mortality, offered a template for this house style and its obsession with historically symbolic local gravesites.

Sharp displays an impressive range in a first book, shifting across a long nineteenth century and looking beyond Scotland to several colonial contexts in her pursuit of the influence of this Blackwoodian mode. It is a sign of the purchase of the book’s argument that readers familiar with the period will be able to think of additional examples: Susan Ferrier, for instance, another Blackwood novelist whose hit novel Marriage (1818) contains a set-piece funeral and dilation on the subject of death early in the second volume. Sharp’s core focus is on Tory sentimental fictions by Wilson and Lockhart that anticipate the pejoratively so-called ‘kailyard’ school of Scottish regional fiction in the later nineteenth century. In this respect, she is commendably dealing with unfashionable material that many critics have chosen to gloss over or dismiss outright. The book finds rather more nuance or ‘ambivalence’ (p. 62) in Lockhart (who is currently undergoing major critical reappraisal through an Edinburgh University Press edition) than Wilson, so that the latter emerges as the primary source of ‘kirkyard’ style in its pure form. Caroline Southey Bowles is a notable female participant, but ‘kirkyard Romanticism’ as a whole emerges as a deeply patriarchal phenomenon, idealizing a Burkean ‘patriarchal order founded on Church, throne and the father’s hearth-side chair’ (p. 46). Still, the discourse was internally contested and the book devotes much of its energy to adaptations, complications and rejections of kirkyardism across a nineteenth-century line of influence that includes, for example, the destabilizing Gothic of James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824 but really only attaining canonical status much later) and the subversively sinister localism of John Buchan’s Witch Wood (1927).

Kirkyard Romanticism underlines a notable aspect of Scotland’s contribution to the Anglophone literary culture of the nineteenth century. It does so by attending to a form of cultural nationalism that was advanced by one of the period’s leading periodicals (Blackwood’s) and then adapted around the British colonial world in the evolving structure of a ‘Romantic imperialism’ (p. 164), in which repackaged ‘kirkyard’ ideas of belonging helped to justify colonial expansion. There are productive links here to Paul Westover’s work on an obsession with death in the period as ‘necromanticism’ and Kenneth McNeil’s work on Scottish Romanticism as a projection of collective memory. Sharp’s useful, accomplished study builds on such material by offering a focused account of this morbid vein of literary nationalism that she plausibly tracks from eighteenth-century precursors, through the Blackwood’s set, and onwards to a role in providing ‘emotion, history and stability to the faceless sweep of colonial expansion, often without critiquing its progress’ (p. 172). Some readers will find the frequency of copyediting errors in the book distracting, though the press is to be commended for the beautiful design job on its covers. More importantly, what emerges here improves our understanding of the absent presence of the dead in the developing forms of nineteenth-century nationalism. The kirkyard topos offered (as in Benedict Anderson’s account of ‘tombs of Unknown Soldiers’) a version of that ‘something more’ (p. 9) that extends the merely administrative power of nations, mobilizing those ‘thoughts of death’ that for Derrida are always already ‘thoughts of survival’ as part of the ideological edifice of the nation state.