This chapter explores both the Scottish dimension of MacDonald’s biography and the ways Scotland is reflected in his writing. During his lifetime, Scotland itself underwent greater changes than the simple phrase ‘Victorian Scotland’ implies. In addition, MacDonald found himself in the position of feeling both intimately Scottish but also a distanced observer of the Scottish scene. His sense of his native land was compounded with his memories of his own early years there and with his reverence for Scotland’s previous literary achievements, particularly in the works of Burns, Scott, and Hogg. Scotland’s distinctiveness – indeed, its otherness – in the minds of his readers provided him with a means of articulating his own distinctive vision of reality, a vision which sought to relate the mundane world of Victorian Britain with the larger spiritual world of which (in his eyes) it was part. His fiction, therefore, encompassed both realism and fantasy; Scotland helped him bring the two into a fruitful relationship. By surveying the Scottish novels he wrote throughout his career, we can attain a more truthful understanding of his idiosyncratic contribution to nineteenth-century fiction.

This chapter studies the way in which MacDonald’s twelve Scottish novels relate to some of the dominant genres of Scottish literature in the nineteenth century, such as the national tale and the Kailyard school. It also analyses how MacDonald negotiates the tensions between nationalism and universalism in his works, since his ‘Scotch clannishness [was] a most elastic material & [he thought] of it as only a rudimental form of love to all men’ (letter to J. G. Holland, 27 May 1871). Finally, some attention is devoted to Adela Cathcart. While not usually included in MacDonald’s Scottish novels, Adela Cathcart can actually be read as a variation on the national tale and thus show how MacDonald’s works could exemplify Cairns Craig’s notion of a projective nationalism, whose aim was to make Scotland the spiritual core of the British Empire.

This chapter examines how ‘race’ took on its modern meaning in the second half of the eighteenth century. It shows how ideas of race were intertwined with the developing idea of civilization, highlights the contemporary comparative lack of knowledge about sub-Saharan Africa in Western thought, and illustrates how race came to feature as a subject of investigation in its own right in the ‘science of race’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Particular attention is devoted to ideas in the Scottish Enlightenment but places them within wider European and Atlantic contexts.

It was only after World War II that the writing of symphonies in Scotland became a feature of composers, despite earlier works by Erik Chisholm. Partly this reflected a greater confidence among Scottish composers, but also it reflected the movement of individuals into Scotland into academic positions in particular. Critics were very quick to point to what they perceived to be Scotticism in the works of various composers, but in the 1950s and 1960s continental influence was perhaps more obvious in the symphonies of Iain Hamilton, Robin Orr and to a lesser extent in those created by Thomas Wilson. Of the many composers who wrote symphonies before 2000, Wilson was probably the most influential on the younger generation, such as John Maxwell Geddes and James MacMillan. From an academic perspective, Kenneth Leighton’s work was also an important catalyst for the development of symphonic music in Scotland, which also reflected the musical traditions of the country.

In 2020 James MacMillan stated: ‘The symphonic tradition, and Beethoven’s monumental impact on it, is an imposing legacy which looms like a giant ghost over the shoulder of any living composer foolhardy enough to consider adding to it. Some turn away in terror … others can’t help themselves. Perhaps not fully knowing what writing a symphony ‘means’ anymore, some of us are drawn towards it like moths flapping around a candle flame.’ MacMillan has certainly been drawn to that flame, having produced five symphonies, from the epic Symphony, Vigil, to his most recent offering for choir and orchestra, Symphony No. 5, Le grand Inconnu. This chapter examines MacMillan’s symphonic output and places these pieces in his extensive oeuvre, discussing (among other things) the composer’s move to abstraction in his recent works and how this is a departure from his most celebrated compositions of the 1990s.

Chapter 4 examines Liberalism as a comprehensive ideology of foreign policy that goes beyond the doctrine of Free Trade to incorporate the associated values of peace and democracy. After examining the Dutch, Scottish, English, and American phases in the evolution of this ideology, the chapter considers how it shaped interstate relations in successive Anglo-American hegemonies. Whether or not trade truly reforms domestic politics and cements international cooperation, statesmen in the post-Cold War West certainly acted as if they believed that it does. Much of the later American shift away from multilateralism to Mercantilism can be attributed to the buyer’s remorse that policymakers felt over positive engagement with China.

Paul Cullen became Ireland’s first cardinal in 1866, an appointment which formalised his long-standing influence in the Propaganda Fide, especially in the appointment of bishops in the English-speaking world. This chapter considers two such interventions, in Scotland and Australia, where Cullen sought to use his influence, unsucessfully in the former and successfully in the latter. The chapter then turns to the first Vatican Council, where Cullen was an important voice in support of papal infalibility, ultimately providing the compromise language that was accepted as Catholic doctrine.

The story of Brexit in Scotland was about whether – and, if so, how – Scotland’s vote to Remain in the EU was to be acknowledged. In Albert Hirschman’s terminology, was it to be through the exercise of voice – a role for Scotland’s representatives in influencing the form of EU withdrawal and its domestic implications or through exit, by triggering a second independence referendum? In the end it was neither. The UK-wide majority to Leave the EU prevailed, with no concessions to the Scottish government’s preferred form of Brexit and no second independence referendum. This result exposed radically conflicting visions of the nature of the UK’s territorial constitution – a Union State based on Scottish popular sovereignty, or a Unitary State based on the sovereignty of the UK Parliament. A Brexit premised on the restoration of Parliamentary sovereignty and the desire to ‘take back control’ laid bare the subaltern nature of the Union-State account and the fragility of Scotland’s constitutional protections within the Union. Devolution in Scotland has been left diminished and the pathway towards independence mired in uncertainty.

Romanticism Bewitched concludes with a discussion of Joanna Baillie’s Gothic tragedy, Witchcraft, written as a response to what she believed to be a missed opportunity by Scott in his novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, to explore the psychological and social dimensions of the rise of witchcraft. The first section outlines the similarities between Scott’s novel and Macbeth. Both Scott’s novel and Shakespeare’s tragedy take place in Scotland in a politically precarious moment with squabbling factions and dwindling confidence in the central authority of the government. In the second section, Baillie argues that the decidedly unsympathetic treatment of the female supernatural by Scott and others perpetuates damaging stereotypes and diverts our attention from the real problem – a social structure founded on inequity. Baillie’s tragedy explores the outbreak of accusations of witchcraft as the consequence of a diseased patriarchy and the abdication of the responsibilities of fathers, literally within the family unit and figuratively as the representatives of the authority of church and state.

The presence of witches in Walter Scott’s Waverly novels is suggestive of social and occasionally political disorder, but their presence – like the context of revolutionary crises – also provides his male characters with an opportunity to confront something larger than themselves, a possibly inimical force, and to evolve in this process. Scott, not satisfied with collecting works of demonology, decided to write one himself. This chapter investigates the tensions in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft between Scott’s impartiality as a demonologist and a writer of historical fiction, his antiquarian impulse and the genuine sympathy he has for women accused of witchcraft.

Scott’s sympathy for the figure of the witch is put to the test in Guy Mannering with the introduction of Meg Merrilies, the Roma prophetess and witch. Merrilies’s status as a local sibyl and matriarchal leader within the Romany community is deliberately contrasted with Guy Mannering’s academic magic as an educated English astrologer, and, later, his social standing as a colonel and beloved father/patriarch. In addition, Merrilies’s powers as a storyteller or story-shaper are also in tension with Scott’s authorial control. It is not surprising, therefore, that the climactic resolution in Guy Mannering hinges on the death of Merrilies. Yet Scott’s effort to suppress and contain the disruptive presence of Merrilies by disposing of her is not entirely successful. This chapter concludes with a brief overview of the afterlife of Meg Merrilies in theatrical productions, Keats’s famous poem, and her influence on the aged Sarah Siddons.

Scott’s struggles to maintain authorial control against the incursions of Merrilies’s witchlike powers compels him to consciously assume the more distanced role of an antiquarian collecting stories of female enthusiasm in subsequent novels, offering up prognoses of mental instability for the witches in The Antiquary, The Pirate and Ivanhoe. This chapter also introduces an entirely new and different witch figure: Rebecca, a lovely young Jewish healer whose potential marriage to Ivanhoe is challenged by racial prejudice and misogynistic suspicions that brand her as a witch. Although Rebecca is rescued from her trial as a witch, she does not receive the happy ending she deserves. Scott writes her out of the narrative in the end when she and her father decide to leave England. Yet Ivanhoe’s choice of a bride – the mild and dutiful Rowena – pales by comparison to Rebecca, inviting readers to envision an alternative ending: the union of Rebecca and Ivanhoe, and the socially transformative potential of this marriage between a Christian and a Jew, the story’s hero, and a purported witch.

The Introduction situates Romanticism Bewitched within current historicist scholarship on gender and witchcraft, feminist political theory and recent scholarship on misogyny and women’s anger. In addition, it traces the trajectory of witchcraft belief from the seventeenth century down to the Romantic era, exploring the eighteenth-century fascination with Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the gendered politics of representations of Lady Macbeth. During the Romantic period, Siddons’s powers of enchantment in that role, and the effect it had on her audience, is an example of how the figure of the Romantic witch opened a space to imagine and explore the constructive and destructive uses of female magic. While some Romantic witches confirmed the worst fears regarding female magic and its pernicious influence, other Romantic witches invited more positive reactions, ranging from sympathy to the deep admiration bordering on awe that Siddons inspired.

This chapter examines the key principles of applying mental health and capacity legislation in the perinatal period. The four nations of the United Kingdom have different legislative frameworks. England and Wales are governed by the same legislation – the Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA) and the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA), although with some minor variations. Scotland has an entirely different framework – the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) Act 2003 and the Adults with Incapacity Act 2000. Northern Ireland is in a (slow) transition from having mental health legislation (the Mental Health (Northern Ireland) Order 1986) sitting alongside, in effect, no formal framework for thinking about capacity, to ‘fused’ legislation (the Mental Capacity Act (Northern Ireland) 2016) with no stand-alone mental health legislation. This chapter focuses on the position in England and Wales, primarily because it has the largest body of case law to help understand how to think through the dilemmas covered; for those in other parts of the United Kingdom grappling with those dilemmas, the most useful resource is the BMA’s Ethics Toolkit which has specific sections for each of the nations.

The study of dialects in Britain and Ireland yields insight into the manner in which social forces affect the development of language. The history of English, outside of the trajectory which led to Southern Standard British English, shows a rich and varied tapestry of features, processes and interactions, which make this subject particularly rewarding in the context of an inclusive view of the language’s history. The identity function of local norms is apparent in all the studies of dialects in individual locations and ultimately accounts for the survival of local varieties despite the increasing pressure from supraregional forms of English represented in the educational system and very widely across the media landscape of modern Britain and Ireland. Looking beyond Britain and Ireland, factors that have influenced the English spoken in four small but significant locations in Europe (the Channel Islands, Malta, Cyprus and Gibraltar) are examined, revealing a rich interaction of colonial legacy, contact and national identity.