Making British Culture English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740–1830

Making British Culture explores an under-appreciated factor in the emergence of a recognisably British culture. Specifically, it examines the experiences of English readers between around 1707 and 1830 as they grappled, in a variety of circumstances, with the great effusion of Scottish authorship – including the hard-edged intellectual achievements of David Hume, Adam Smith and William Robertson as well as the more accessible contributions of poets like Robert Burns and Walter Scott – that distinguished the age of the Enlightenment.

Abbreviations Acknowledgments PART I: PROBLEMS Chapter 1: A Question of Perspective: Scotland and England in the British Enlightenment PART II: CONTEXTS Chapter 2: "The Self-Impannelled Jury of the English Court of Criticism": Taste and the Making of the Canon Chapter 3: "For Learning and For Arms Renown’d": Scotland in the Public Mind Chapter 4: "An Ample Fund of Amusement and Improvement": Institutional Frameworks for Reading and Reception Chapter 5: Readers and Their Books: Why, Where and How Did Reading Happen? PART III: CONTINGENCIES Chapter 6: "One Longs to Say Something": English Readers, Scottish Authors and the Contested Text Chapter 7: "Many Sketches & Scraps of Sentiments": Commonplacing and the Art of Reading Chapter 8: Copying and Co-opting: Owning the Text PART IV: CONSTRUCTIONS Chapter 9: Reading and Meaning: History, Travel and Political Economy Chapter 10: Mis-reading and Misunderstanding: Encountering Natural Religion and Hume PART V: CONSEQUENCES Chapter 11: The Making of British Culture: Reading Identities in the Social History of Ideas Notes Bibliography Index

David Allan is Reader in History at the University of St Andrews. His other books include Virtue, Learning and the Scottish Enlightenment: Ideas of Scholarship in Early Modern History (1993), Philosophy and Politics in Later Stuart Scotland: Neo-Stoicism, Culture and Ideology in an Age of Crisis, 1540-1690 (2000), Scotland in the Eighteenth Century: Union and Enlightenment (2002), Adam Ferguson (2006) and A Nation of Readers: The Lending Library in Georgian England (2008).