“The Force of Ridicule”: The Ironies of Blackwood’s Magazine and Walter Scott’s The Fortunes of Nigel

ABSTRACT

This article develops the current scholarly understanding of Walter Scott’s attitude toward irony by analyzing The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) in relation to controversies surrounding Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Co-edited by Scott’s son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, Blackwood’s drew criticism for its ironic tone and satirical treatment of public figures. Scott privately warned Lockhart about being involved in such an irreverent journal—and he repeated those warnings more forcefully after a rival magazine editor was killed in a duel. The Blackwood’s controversy provided Scott with a theme for The Fortunes of Nigel. Throughout the novel, irony confuses and misleads audiences; it is a form of rhetorical tyranny that allows its practitioners to insult, deceive, and manipulate. Yet there is a doubleness to this critique of irony: the novel includes elements characteristic of Scott’s other works, including a heavily veiled prologue and other meta-fictional material, which raises the question of how these aesthetic techniques differ from the harsh personal irony depicted in the novel. Ultimately, Scott associates certain types of ironic detachment with broader personal and social shortcomings and warns that excessive irony threatens the national unity central to his novelistic project.

Notes

1. Yoon Sun Lee also considers forms of communication in the novel, specifically the role of financial debt, which she argues “can create a non-fetishized social connection; debt can create durable sentimental pathways in a manner similar to the functioning of a gift economy” (“Time, Money” 234). Significantly, this effective form of communication relies on the absence of money. John J. Burke’s treatment of King James’s homosexuality also relies on necessary gaps in communication.

2. Although my argument focuses on the irony of Blackwood’s, it is important to recognize that the magazine contributed more to periodical culture than just controversial humor. Phillip Flynn has shown that Blackwood’s sought to establish a Scottish cultural identity based on “Christian classicism and piety and Scottish patriotism” to challenge “the secular rationalism, smug modernism, and disdain for Scotland’s past” conveyed by the Edinburgh Review (“Early Blackwood’s” 52). Similarly, William Christie emphasizes that “Patriotism and Religion were … the two, broad issues that Blackwood’s had with the Edinburgh” (99). And Robert Morrison has drawn attention to the role Blackwood’s played in “shift[ing] the Gothic tradition away from the protracted unease and suspense cultivated by Ann Radcliffe … and toward the concise and explicit terrors dramatized by Edgar Allen Poe” (par. 11).

3. Flynn provides a helpful catalogue of the basic contents of early Blackwood’s: “(1) Chatty, often cryptic notices ‘To Contributors’ on the status of their submissions to the magazine … ; (2) serious essays on scientific, political, economic, legal, ecclesiastical, and antiquarian subjects … ; (3) original, translated, or reprinted poetry and prose fiction; (4) ferocious, personal, controversial criticisms of contemporary writers and other public figures; (5) assorted whimsies, hoaxes, intertextual or pseudonymic [hoaxes]” (“Beginning Blackwood’s” 144).

4. According to Tom Mole, Blackwood’s responds to the charges of ad hominem attacks by dismissing the distinction between private and public lives because immoral ideas expressed in literature could corrupt personal behavior. Nonetheless, as Mole points out, Blackwood’s revised some of their more aggressive critiques to be less personal.

5. In this article, I treat irony, sarcasm, and satire as a group of closely-related terms. The intimate relationship between sarcasm and irony is clear from the OED’s first definition of irony: “The expression of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect (cf. sarcasm).” As for satire, Wayne Booth observed that “irony is used in some satire, not in all; some irony is satiric, much is not. And the same distinction holds for sarcasm” (30). To develop Booth’s formula briefly, what irony and sarcasm always share to some degree, and what irony and satire occasionally share, is detachment between what is expressed and what is meant, between what the words literally signify and what they rhetorically convey.

6. For a fuller discussion of Macvey Napier’s and John Scott’s critiques of Blackwood’s and the magazine’s self-defenses (including Middlestitch’s contributions), see my “Transcendental Buffoonery.”

7. My reading of Scott’s skeptical attitude toward duels in The Fortunes of Nigel challenges Cronin’s claim that Scott’s novels tend to glorify such confrontations and “offer refuge in a masculine past to all those male readers of his who felt themselves at times rather uncomfortably trapped in feminine modernity” (204). Mark Schoenfield also offers valuable insights into the topic of dueling and Blackwood’s in “Taste for Violence.” Finally, Ian Duncan notes that “in the years from the so-called ‘Radical war’ of 1819 to George IV’s visit, … literary feuding boiled over into verbal and physical violence, much of it inflamed by Blackwood’s and the irregulars of the Tory press” (27).

8. Scott would again have the unfortunate occasion to comment upon a real-life duel involving his own friends and associates. In 1822, Alexander Boswell was killed in yet another duel involving rival magazines. As Lockhart noted in his biography of Scott, “several circumstances of [Boswell’s] death are exactly reproduced in the duel scene of St. Ronan’s Well” (477). Cronin considers this correspondence in Paper Pellets (149–52).

9. Scott saw James I himself as an emblem of irony, declaring it “a pity that rare mixture of sense and nonsense pedantry and childishness wit and folly should remain uncelebrated” (Letters 7: 16). Tara Ghoshal Wallace interprets the king as an ironic figure based on the gap between his attempts to project power and the very limited power he actually wields. She explains that for Scott, James is “the perfect vehicle to explore the unstable hybridity of the King’s two bodies, and the consequences when the King fails to perform the integrated self required by ideology. The reader’s very first glimpse of James makes explicit the duality which undermines the King’s authority” (111).