Novel reading and self-improvement in Scotland, c.1800–37

Abstract

This thesis analyses the relationship between novel reading and self-improvement in Scotland during the early nineteenth century, focusing on the novels of Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier, and Elizabeth Hamilton. It contends that, through their self-conscious engagement with discourses on mental and moral improvement, these female novelists contributed something different to the novel from their male contemporaries – including John Galt, James Hogg, and, most famously, Walter Scott – thereby expanding the proliferation of alternative Scottish fiction that Scott’s Waverley Novels enabled. It complements the often male-centric studies of the novel in Romantic-period Scotland to date by elucidating Brunton, Ferrier, and Hamilton’s hitherto underappreciated development of the novel, identifying them as strategic, impactful participants in its generic evolution, whose legacies extend into Victoria’s reign. I argue that Brunton, Ferrier, and Hamilton redeploy longstanding antinovel stereotypes within their novels in satirical, sophisticated, and implicit ways, in order to promote a model of active reading, centring on distance, self-reflection, and critical readerly engagement. This enables their works to provide antidotes to the ostensibly corrosive effects of novel reading. I argue further that these novelists engage in complicated, performative, often subversive ways with familiar stereotypes pertaining to national identity and mental cultivation. In doing so, they encourage careful reading and present self-improvement as an iterative process comprising education and application. The first four chapters analyse this process and the distinction between what I term true and false improvement within the novels, alongside their treatment of common prejudices. The final chapter analyses historical readers’ responses to demonstrate the ways in which these novels were recognised as tools for self-improvement. Ultimately, this thesis argues that paying closer attention to the works of Brunton, Ferrier, and Hamilton, and especially the model of reading they promote, provides us with a new understanding of a pivotal phase in the novel’s development.