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RVSG Guest Speaker: Alex Dick

Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/14/2024
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Location
4010 JFSB

Category(ies)


The Romantic and Victorian Studies Group welcomes Alex Dick from the University of British Columbia on Thursday, November 14 at 4:00 pm in 4010 JFSB.

Title:  “Walter Scott, the Highland Clearances, and the Trial of Patrick Sellar

The Highland Clearances, the mass eviction and deportation of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders from their farms and communities in the North of Scotland to the coasts and colonies of the Empire, was one of the most controversial events in British history and remains a bone of contention not only in Scottish politics but also in ongoing debates about indigeneity, colonialism, and property rights. In the Romantic period, conversations about the Clearances came to a head in 1816 when Patrick Sellar, a wealthy farmer and estate manager for the Countess of Sutherland, was tried—and acquitted—for the “culpable homicide” of two elderly Highlanders during a particularly violent eviction. In this chapter, part of a book-length study, Highland Dispossession and Scottish Romanticism: Writing the Clearances 1745–1840 (now in review with Edinburgh UP), I examine several of Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels to trace his response to this event and to consider his role in both exposing and ameliorating the conundrum that the Clearances represented for Scottish property and criminal law. While Scott—himself a prominent lawyer—was sympathetic to the Highlanders’ plight, he also recognized the threats Sellar’s potential conviction entailed to the property system. Accordingly, in Guy Mannering, Rob RoyThe Heart of Midlothian, and The Legends of the Wars of Montrose, Scott developed an aesthetic mode—the historical novel—that could mediate questions of criminality and property rights to produce a legally expedient if politically unsatisfactory excuse for Highland dispossession.
About our guest:
Alexander Dick is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is the author of Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790–1830 (Palgrave 2013) and of many articles and chapters on literature, philosophy, and political economy. He has co-edited two collections of essays, Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (Toronto 2009) and Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century: Writing Between Philosophy and Literature (Pickering and Chatto 2008), as well as the Broadview edition of Sheridan’s Pizarro (2018). He is now researching eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature on the Highland Clearances and the Hebridean islands as well as on the literary, cultural, and intellectual legacies of Sir Walter Scott.

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