130 Years
Scott and the World in 1824
On Thursday 29th November 2018 we had a talk by Prof. Angela Esterhammer. She was introduced by our Chairman, Prof. Peter Garside.
A warm welcome everyone to this, the last in the present sequence of talks to the Club, and I can think of nobody better equipped to fill the spot than our present speaker. Angela Esterhammer is Principal of Victoria College and Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto (positions incidentally in which she follows in the wake of the great Scott scholar Professor Jane Millgate). She works in the areas of British, German, and European Romanticism and nineteenth-century culture, from perspectives that emphasize performance, improvisation, and print culture. She is the author of Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William Blake (1994), The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (2000), and Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850 (2008). Professor Esterhammer is also the General Editor of The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt, an international project to publish a 15-volume critical edition of Galt’s fiction and related non-fictional prose.
Tonight’s talk relates to her new book entitled Print and Performance in the 1820s: The Late-Romantic Information Age, which is forthcoming from Cambridge U.P. in 2019. This book examines interrelations among popular fiction, literary magazines, and innovative forms of theatre during the 1820s, a decade of rapid transformations in media, mobility, consumerism, and reading habits.
Specifically, the present talk will relate Saint Ronan’s Well and Redgauntlet to current events of the mid-1820s, especially the climate of speculation that dominated financial and literary markets.
Synopsis: With rapid changes taking place in mobility, communications, technology, and lifestyle, the 1820s felt like an era of transformation – and the year 1824 may be regarded as the crux of that volatile decade. This talk surveys events of 1824 in the literary-cultural centres of Edinburgh and London in conjunction with the era’s socioeconomic context, which was marked by rampant financial speculation that led to financial crisis by the end of the year. Against this background, the two novels that Scott published in 1824 reflect the spirit of the age. Saint Ronan’s Well, his only novel with a nineteenth-century setting, thematizes land speculation, marriage-market speculation, and gambling; responding to the risky economics that dominated the mid-1820s, it also critiques the publication practices and reading habits of its day. Appearing in June of 1824, Redgauntlet: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century approaches the theme of speculation in a different way, constructing an alternate history of the mid-eighteenth century by raising the possibility that a third Jacobite uprising might have started in 1765. Setting Redgauntlet in the context of real-life speculations of the 1820s suggests that – despite being himself caught up in the investment mania of the 1820s – Scott was an insightful analyst of the speculative spirit of the age.
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