"Fools of Prejudice": Sympathy and National Identity in the Scottish Enlightenment and Humphry Clinker

“Fools of Prejudice”:Sympathy and National Identity in the Scottish Enlightenment and Humphry Clinker Evan Gottlieb (bio) During the middle decades of the eighteenth century, London became an increasingly attractive destination for Scottish-born Britons looking to make their fortunes south of the Tweed. As Scotland continued to lag behind England's more sophisticated economy, the exodus of educated Scots grew apace.1 Their greater presence in the southern metropolis, however, did not necessarily mean that the post-Union ideal of a united British citizenry had been achieved. As late as 1770, Samuel Johnson could announce that "he considered the Scotch, nationally, as a crafty, designing people, eagerly attentive to their own interest, and too apt to overlook the claims and pretensions of other people." Describing the Scots as "confin[ing] their benevolence, in a manner, exclusively to those of their own country," Johnson's remarks demonstrate the persistence of the xenophobic idea that the Scots were a separate people from the English, possessing distinct (and distinctly suspect) national characteristics and loyalties.2 [End Page 81] Supporters of the Union, especially Scots, had long struggled with the problem of how to convince people on both sides of the Tweed to think of themselves as British together. Centuries of feuding and ill will had given way to the incorporative Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, but neither government policy nor the threat of a common enemy could force the English and the Scottish to resolve their differences and learn to think of themselves as a single nation.3 According to conventional Whig narratives of "English" history, the tensions and animosities between these two former states dissipated naturally as the superior economic, political, and military might of England simply overwhelmed its northern partner; more recently, advocates of the "internal colonialism" model of post-Union Anglo-Scottish relations advanced a counter-narrative in which England's aggressive absorption of the so-called "Celtic fringe" foreshadowed its later imperial expansion.4 In the past few years, however, eighteenth-century scholars—influenced in part by new postcolonial theories that contest the assumptions of the old centre-periphery model of national relations—have discovered a renewed interest in how the Scots, far from being merely passive victims of Anglicization, in reality played a formative role in shaping the cultural contours of the new British nation.5 Building on such revisionist work, in this article I will suggest that David Hume's and Adam Smith's influential formulations of sympathy had significant implications for fostering a sense of shared national identity between the English and the Scots. Appreciating the political ramifications of Enlightened sympathy, in turn, helps shed new light on the nation-building work of the most famous novel of another eighteenth-century Scot, Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771). Smollett's final novel can be seen as a virtual experiment, in which the sympathetic theories of Hume and Smith are summoned, staged, and tested to determine the most effective way [End Page 82] to promulgate more harmonious relations between the citizens of the two former states. Yet even as Humphry Clinker settles on Smithian sympathy as its favoured mode of intra-national relations, Smollett's fiction reveals the difficulties and dangers inherent in the attempt to bring the people of Britain together in feeling as well as in name. Humean Sympathy and the Dangers of Emotional "Communication" Sympathy has recently received increased attention from eighteenth-century scholars, but such criticism, with a few notable exceptions, has generally focused on sympathy's role in the sentimental novelistic tradition.6 Sentimentalism, however, is only one product of the philosophical discourse of sympathy as theorized by the Scottish Enlightenment. Since the Scottish Enlighteners were "traditional intellectuals" in the Gramscian sense of being employed by the hegemonic institutions (church, law, and university) left to Scotland after the Union, their position was both exhilarating and disorienting.7 Generally supportive of Scottish initiatives at English-style "improvement," but wary of achieving progress at the cost of eradicating the Scottish culture that supported their intellectual endeavours, the Enlightenment literati had personal as well as political motivations to seek ways to heal the fractures still splintering the British state. While their...

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