This book explores the development of print media in Britain from the Revolution of 1688 to the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745, offering an effective study of the ways in which a developing news media influenced historical memory. It also considers the increasing dominance of printed texts and publication, and the disappearance of such media as the manuscript newsletter, as the arena for debate and for commemoration changed.
It is the argument of this book that the Anglo-centric cultural memories that have come to dominate the United Kingdom over the past several centuries, and, more generally, the notion of cultural memory itself, have their origin in the consolidation (and contestation) of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British nation as it was becoming saturated by print.
The book then goes on to develop a convincing argument for the unique place which print culture occupied in the process of making historical memory, and thus bringing the British nation state into being. The book begins with William of Orange’s printed Declaration (and with the steps which he took as soon as he had secured power, to ensure that no dissident voice could obtain as wide an audience as he had done himself) and concludes with the radically changed media environment into which Particulars of the Victory at Culloden was launched in 1746, having encompassed “a changing…sense of the connection between memory and collective identity.” As Professor Leith observes, considering the shift from the combination of private newsletters and newspapers in 1715, to the absolute domination of the newspaper in 1745/6: This is strikingly symbolised by the case of Charles Edward Stuart, who…when he was fleeing after the battle of Culloden, read ‘in the newspapers’ about the direction which the troops pursuing him expected him to take and, accordingly decided to alter his plans.
The topics selected for particular coverage, chapter by chapter, are the Revolution of 1688, ‘The War of the Two Kings’ in Ireland (a chapter which includes a useful section on the part played by maps in forming memory), the Scottish colonial fiasco at Darien, and the Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745, which are given a chapter each.
The chapter on the ‘War of the Two Kings’ in Ireland is of particular interest to scholars of Catholic history, since it traces in some detail the handling of anti-Catholic material issued during the conflict, in the wake of James VII and II’s ‘elaborate reform programme across England, Scotland and Ireland, to promote Catholic interests.’ The simple anti-Catholic scare-tactics of the viral song ‘Lillibulero,’ are contrasted with a complex piece of writing arising from the conflict, James Farewell’s The Irish Hudibras or the Fingallian Prince, published at London in 1689. In the simplest sense this is an Irish travesty of Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, with St Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg taking the place of the Classical underworld, Nees an ‘Old English’ prince is Aeneas, the nun and soothsayer Shela is the Sibyl. The satiric strategy is that the Irish Catholic community should appear vainglorious and ineffectual, and the prediction of the future heard in the underworld is of the victory of William of Orange. But matters are as complex in this satire as they were in Ireland itself: the glosses ‘for the English Reader’ take on a life of their own, growing more and more intensely Hibernian and Hibernophone: ‘even as it draws attention to Gaelic difference, the poem itself interpolates the ‘English Reader’ into that Gaelic world.’
The case for print media of the Jacobite era as a defining element in the formation of Anglo-centric historical memory is well made, and the project is carried through with considerable success and commendable thoroughness. The increasing dominance of print is shown to move in step with an increasingly Anglo-centric account of events, shaped by the increasingly public nature of a ‘mediascape’ where the victors control the press. Naturally this print-dominated victors’ history, goes beyond London and England to encompass Edinburgh, and all of protestant lowland Britain. Walter Scott’s Waverley, for all that it may convey some reservations about the absolute deadness of the past, is chosen by Professor Davis as a fitting point of closure for this majority narrative. Written after the death in 1807 of Henry Benedict, the last lineal descendent of James VII and II, it certainly appears to draw a line under a whole era of contested kingship, to relegate the Jacobite and Catholic highlands to the past. The vehemence, indeed violence, with which Catholic Emancipation was opposed a decade later, however, suggests that many British protestants still retained lively reservations about the deadness of the past and its conflicts.
Inevitably a near-exclusive focus on print culture in English has to omit some items of Jacobite record, particularly the dissident cultures of those parts of upland Britain where history was remembered differently, and in different media. In the manuscript collection of ballads collected in Glenbuchat in upland Aberdeenshire in the years leading up to 1818, for example, the Jacobite point of view prevails and local memory is shown to be very long indeed. Commendably, however, Professor Davis draws attention, albeit briefly, to a diversity of works in different languages and media. The Latin epic of 1688, James Phillip’s Graemid, circulated in manuscript (it is a poem of genuine quality and epic scope). She draws attention also to the remarkable memorial manuscript The Lyon in Mourning compiled by the Scottish Episcopalian clergyman Robert Forbes. She also touches on the rich repertory of oral and written memorials in Gaelic verse, and on the rich manuscript and Latin-language culture of the Scottish Jacobites.
It might be debated how the strangely bitter Jacobite songs printed in Edinburgh at the end of the eighteenth century, in versions collated by Robert Burns in the Scots Musical Museum, fit into the patterns of memory which Professor Davis describes so ably. There are other media too which preserve minority memory, and which fall outside the scope of this fine study, particularly painting and glass engraving, those more private arts found in backwoods gentry houses from Fingask in Perthshire to Stonyhurst in Lancashire, with their white rose glasses and their parlours hung with Stuart portraits. Nevertheless, majority memory, the memory of news and record in the public sphere, is exceptionally well served by this comprehensive and cogent study of the print cultures of the long Jacobite era.
