Abstract: “Settler Pastoral: Scotland in South Africa”
The accelerated transformation of rural economies in late eighteenth-century Scotland (the Highland Clearances, the Lowland agricultural revolution), abolishing traditional subsistence farming, provoked waves of emigration to the British settler colonies. Landlords and politicians debated whether to encourage and subsidize emigration, or else to invest in schemes of internal resettlement and managed autarky (see Jonsson). Among the literary effects of this transformation was a notable revival of pastoral in Romantic-period Scottish poetry and fiction, from Robert Burns’s elegiac tribute to the vanishing “runrig” economy in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” (see Leask) to the domestic idylls of Highland resettlement in Scottish National Tales (see Womack; Sussman). My paper considers the export of Scots pastoral, a key genre of “internal colonialism,” to the British colonies, in what Lawrence Buell has called “settler pastoral.” My case study, Thomas Pringle (1789–1834), emigrated to the South African Cape Colony (one of the spoils of the Napoleonic Wars) after the setback of his literary career in Edinburgh. During his African sojourn (1820-26), Pringle produced a body of poems, along with a memoir, in which he attempts to conform settler experience to Scottish poetic and aesthetic as well as social and economic conventions (see Shum; Klopper). I shall focus on a group of dramatic monologues in which Pringle impersonates indigenous (San and Xhosa) speakers, to ventriloquize a fierce resistance to the colonial project he elsewhere endorses. “The Song of the Wild Bushman,” the best of these, pitches one version of pastoral – the scientific or political-economic account developed in Scottish Enlightenment historiography – against the other, the poetic idyll (a refuge from history) of Scots pastoral romance.
References:
Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Harvard University Press, 1996.
Fredrick Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism. Yale University Press, 2013.
Dirk Klopper, “Politics of the Pastoral: The Poetry of Thomas Pringle.” English in Africa 17: 1 (1990), 21-59.
Nigel Leask, Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late-18th Century Scotland Oxford University Press, 2010.
Matthew Shum, Improvisations of Empire: Thomas Pringle in Scotland, the Cape Colony and London, 1789–1834. Anthem, 2010.
Charlotte Sussman, Peopling the World: Representing Human Mobility from Milton to Malthus. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
Peter Womack, Improvement and Romance: Constructing the Myth of the Highlands. Macmillan, 1989.
Bio: University of California, Berkeley, USA “Settler Pastoral: Scotland in South Africa”
Ian Duncan is Florence Green Bixby Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge, 1992); Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, 2007); and Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (Princeton, 2019). He is currently editing The Cambridge History of Scottish Literature and The Cambridge Companion to Walter Scott(both for Cambridge University Press).