Stands Scotland Where It Did?

Abstract

Chapter 3 investigates the most popular genre of Victorian Scottish poetry, nostalgic pastoral in a sentimental mode. It argues that this kind of poetry should not be dismissed, because it intervenes in different ways in politicized arguments about land ownership and access. The chapter is divided into three subsections. The first shows how pastoral poetry in the newspaper press intervened directly in rights of way debates. Scotland experienced a number of significant legal cases in the nineteenth century over rights of way, and these were usually couched in terms of the poor versus the wealthy landowner or aristocrat. It shows that poetry played an important role in represented and commenting on these cases. The second section follows the debate about agricultural improvement in Victorian Scotland, and considers both poems that reject modern ‘improvements’ (e.g. the reclamation of wild land through draining and new agricultural techniques), and those that support it. The final part of the chapter turns to the ways in which emigrant poets represented Scotland’s landscape and figured the same questions about change, progress (or lack of), and land rights from positions outside Scotland.