The Association for Scottish
Literary Studies
Salute to an Adventurerby David MenziesScotLit 35, 2007 The great writers, those who still resonate down the generations, do so because their vision was not confined by or restricted to the circumstances of the age in which they lived. But should we not make space occasionally to celebrate some of the humbler hewers of words? Those who, in their own day and in their own way brought the pleasures of reading to many, but whose appeal has not outlived them? They too have things to tell us: of the causes and concerns of their times, of the ebb and flow of literary fashions and, if only by default perhaps, of the art of writing. An apposite candidate is, I would suggest, James Grant, novelist, historian and lifelong champion of Scottish rights. Grant was born in Edinburgh in 1822 and died in London in 1887. He came of Highland stock, his forebears being Grants of Corrimony in Glen Urquart, a Jacobite-leaning cadet branch of the powerful Strathspey clan. His paternal grandfather was a highly respected advocate, doyen of the Edinburgh bar, while his father was an officer in the Gordons, a veteran of Wellington’s Peninsular campaigns. His maternal grandfather, Captain Andrew Watson, was a second cousin of Sir Walter Scott. James set out to follow his father’s profession, taking up a commission in the
62 Its success with the growing readership for novels of adventure, and at that time especially
for military novels, led to its inclusion in Routledge’s Railway Library –
one-volume inexpensive reprints sold on W.H. Smith’s new station bookstalls. By 1857,
Smith’s sales figures showed that the Library’s most popular authors, after
Bulwer Lytton and Captain Marryat, were Miss Austen, the Mesdames Gaskell and Trollope,
and James Grant.
After The Romance of War and Adventures of an Aide-de-Camp (1848), Grant was
regarded as one of the masters of his chosen genre. Many of his subsequent novels were
based on campaigns in which Scottish regiments had featured prominently and his title pages
often identified him as ‘The author of Adventures of an Aide-de-Camp’
or ‘James Grant of the 62 This early success persuaded Grant to make a living entirely by his pen. He wrote a further
fifty or so novels, short stories, articles, biographies and miscellaneous works on
historical or antiquarian topics, his inspiration usually Scotland’s past, occasionally
its present. But competition in his chosen market was intense, and though his energy never
flagged, changing tastes and the proliferation of new practitioners gradually sidelined him.
The Scottish themes had to give way to rousing tales set in the expanding Empire, and
increasingly his audience was a juvenile one: enthusiastic readers of his fiction in their
boyhood years included Thomas Hardy and Neil Munro. While his works were reprinted often
in his lifetime and some achieved foreign translation, he never repeated his early
success, dying ‘destitute’ as one of his obituarists dolefully claimed.
A few of his titles lingered in print into the twentieth century – The Romance of
War, The Yellow Frigate (1854) – in such collections of
‘classics’ as those brought out by Nelson and Collins. Indeed, the
Frigate, some of the action of which is set in medieval Dundee, was relaunched in
a 1984 paperback edition by a local publisher. His Old and New Edinburgh remained
a respected work of reference for years after Grant’s death. Beyond these little is
left. His two sons died childless; Routledge, his first publishers, did not preserve
records of their association with him. He has become a footnote, a literary mini-Ozymandias,
his stone toppled, face down, in St Mary’s R.C. Cemetery, Kensal Green.
It has to be acknowledged that, even applying the most generous critical standards, one could
not claim that Grant advanced the craft of fiction. His novels are a hard read today: they
scarcely qualify as Scott Lite, far less Scot. Lit. Plots are perfunctory (there is
effectively only one, which, with minor variations, serves them all); character and action
are only haphazardly related; and the narratives are overloaded with historical and
antiquarian detail. He regularly interposes his opinions as well as his learning, often
blatantly diverting his storyline to provide opportunities for outraged animadversions on
the plight of Scotland. Nonetheless, his yarns do not lack pace, rushing on as they do
from one dramatic incident to the next, propelled by either the chronology of historical
events or, where structurally necessary, by shameless coincidence. ‘Dashing’
is the word favoured by the kindlier contemporary reviewers.
Of course it is easy to point up the weaknesses: they are the weaknesses of writing against
the clock to feed a public greedy for this kind of stuff, a new readership increasingly
able to afford increasingly affordable book prices. Grant was no worse than the more
fashionable Lytton and Ainsworth, and while one critic reviewing the achievements of the
leading writers of romantic fiction in the mid-century said of Grant:
he nevertheless conceded that he had:
And it is this capability, tantalisingly discernible amid the fustian, that can be cited as
one justification for commemorating his work. For it is not difficult to find passages in
most of the novels and in his non-fiction where Grant drops sensationalism for realism;
where he achieves such imaginative penetration of a scene or an incident – a riot,
the High Street of Edinburgh in the sixteenth century, a military column complete with
camp-followers trudging through a winter rainstorm, the red dye seeping out of the
soldiers’ greatcoats – that the effect of his crisp description is positively
filmic. This, from Oliver Ellis (1861), is part of the description of the
battlefield of Fontenoy:
The paper is a masterly touch.
Other rewarding discoveries the patient reader will come across are a talent for poker-faced
satire, the more surprising since his obligatory ‘comic’ characters and
situations are achingly unfunny.
Admittedly it is pointless to speculate that, had he enjoyed the financial security of some
of his rivals and freedom from the restrictive conventions that limited authorial scope in
his day, Grant could have raised his game, so to speak, and acquired real literary stature.
Nevertheless it is possible to sense from his treatment of, for example, the relations
between men and women, that Grant, writing two generations on, would have been more
interested in and more interesting on this topic. As it is he takes risks: his heroes and
his secondary heroines are at least unmistakably sexual beings.
The heroes are usually soldiers, and for much of the story are on active service abroad.
After they depart, news from home brings them word that their insipid fiancées have
married a rival, or letters miscarry or some misunderstanding arises which leaves the
young men ostensibly fancy-free. Thereupon, military duties permitting, they
enthusiastically woo exotic ladies who, being foreign, do nothing to discourage them.
In describing these encounters, Grant allows himself interesting liberties. In The
Romance of War, Ronald Stuart attempts to seduce a nun, for heaven’s
sake; Allan MacInnon in Laura Everingham (1857), enjoys a full-blown adulterous
affair. To maintain the proper Victorian double standard these various mesdemoiselles and
signorine have, of course, to meet dreadful fates (a handy cholera outbreak carries off
Sister Antoinette) leaving the hero free to return to Scotland and his true love
emotionally unencumbered: ‘––but that was in another country / And
beside the wench is dead.’
Of course, such episodes have always been narrative clichés in picaresque fiction and
thrillers (think Bond girls). Grant can do better than this, however. Fanny Clavering is
friend and temporarily sister-in-law to the eponymous Stepford heroine in Laura
Everingham, and is clearly intended to represent a healthier attitude to the
man-woman thing. She is beautiful: ‘Lola Montes-looking’, ‘Di
Vernon-looking’; rich; witty; ‘painfully outspoken’; athletic
(point-to-point, archery and billiards); and a merciless coquette: ‘the pet of the
Household Brigade’. An intriguing blend of Becky Sharp and Joan Hunter-Dunn –
but the care with which Grant works Fanny into the events of the novel signals her
importance.
She ruthlessly dismisses Laura’s romantic sentiments:
and is quite clear as to her beau ideal...
Despite being kidnapped by Turkish bandits, Fanny survives intact (whether intacta
has been unclear throughout) and marries the only other character in the novel with
creative credibility – a violent, saturnine man below her social station. The reader
– this reader anyway – finds this convincing and quite satisfactory... and
hankers to know how it works for them.
However, the case for rescuing James Grant from obscurity and acknowledging his modest
contribution does not depend only on glimpses of what might have been. Another –
and probably more cogent – argument derives from his relationship with Scotland and
from the influence of that relationship on his writing. His consistent aim is to
memorialise the values and traditions he saw as unique to Scotland and which he feared
were threatened by the arrogant indifference of her English neighbours and the uncaring
acquiescence of the Scottish mercantile and professional classes (his denunciation of the
bourgeoisie resounds through every tale).
This decision to follow an almost exclusively Scottish muse was mirrored by his one foray
into political action when, in 1852, he and his brother John were founder members of the
National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights. The NAVSR began respectably
enough under the patronage of the Earl of Eglinton and with the support of W.E. Aytoun,
Hugh Miller, eminent churchmen and several royal burghs and the wildly enthusiastic
encouragement of the student bodies of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Its demands were reasonable
enough: more Parliamentary time for Scottish affairs and the rectification of various
breaches of the Treaty of Union. The campaign failed to fire the interest of the Scottish
public or the Scottish press, however, and a series of rowdy meetings in the two cities
incurred the opprobrium of the aforementioned bourgeoisie. The movement faltered and died,
though many of its claims were met over the succeeding decades. (Grant continued to raise
grievances, most of which related to the improper use of heraldic devices on flags and
coinage, another of his fields of expertise).
It is likely that Grant’s reputation as a lightweight – if successful –
novelist did not help to make the movement popular among the thinking classes; it is
equally probable that his reputation as an activist did little to enhance his standing as
a man of letters. Yet this concern to define ourselves in terms of an honourable balance
of past dignity and present pragmatism is a gowping nerve in the Scottish body politic to
this day, and Grant was brave enough to probe it in his life and in his literature,
however clumsily.
And while ‘clumsy’ may be one of the words that comes readily to mind in summing
up his literary crusade in Scotland’s name, there can be no doubting his genuine
love for his native land. Sentimentalised it may be, uncritical the use of sources and
over-lavish the detail, the real relish with which he sets about recreating a scene from
Scottish history is unmistakable. Many of his vignettes linger in the memory long after
the daft plots they grace are forgotten. His fictional characters may be one-dimensional,
but his real heroine was Scotland.
To these two claims that can be made on Grant’s behalf – that he could write well
even if his reach exceeded his grasp; and that he can at his best convey enough of the
essence of our history to make us want to re-explore it for ourselves – could be
added the recognition that his writing life covered those extraordinary forty years in
which Scotland expanded as an industrial nation, extended itself as a partner in
empire-building yet shrank as road, rail and steamship opened up its ancient fastnesses.
Grant’s novels set in his own times offer fascinating perspectives on the Victorian
world view. A salute is surely due to one of our first modern professional writers nearly
one hundred and twenty years after his death. He got few in his lifetime.
Copyright © David Menzies 2007
Last updated 24 August 2007.
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