Kailyard - A 'New' Assessment by Ian Campbell

The Ramsay Head Press, Edinburgh

1981

I suppose Ian Campbell's Assessment can hardly be called 'new' in 2020 - his book was published in 1981, some 40 years ago. It is still a powerful, forensic critique of what is seen as the Kailyard phenomenon; and it is not just of the usual three - MacLaren, Crockett and Barrie - but a scholarly appraisal of what (and who) went before and after the 'high noon' of the last years of 19th century Scottish literature. Campbell, Professor Emeritus of Scottish and Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh, as he was by then, came to a John Buchan Society Seminar held in Durham in 2013 to give a talk on 'Buchan and Scott'. We were all privileged to be at his talk - packed with insights, erudite yet very understandable, he was 'drookit' in his subject matter.

His Chapter I 'Introduction to the Kailyard' is one of the best 'starters' for an exploration of the Kailyard phenomenon that I know of. After pitching George Douglas Brown's The House of the Green Shutters in at the onset - seemingly a virulent fly in the Kailyard ointment, Campbell argues that the kailyard will be seen in terms of a set of attitudes in theory and practice evolving from certain features in Scottish fiction a hundred years older than...George Douglas. He then gives six headings as guideposts:
1. Primarily we are talking of a rural form, a literature which prefers the small town or farming countryside to the burgeoning cities which were increasingly the everyday reality of Scotland in the later nineteenth century...
2. Transport is a prominent feature in our kailyard - prominent, that is, by its absence...the kailyard village lies at the end of a branch line...
3. Class distinctions are an important, if tacit, feature of kailyard...the laird is respected, the minister more so; the dominie selflessly works for the good of the local boys, and is honoured for it in the same way as is the village doctor...there is a curious and obviously satisfying air of stasis to the kailyard.
4. The kailyard, within certain rules, tolerates some change...education and self-help [could lead]  to a University chair, a pulpit...a business responsibility...to women of ability, the kailyard offered less.
5. Christian values: Churchgoing, decent rational practical Christianity, are the staples of kailyard society... the decline in churchgoing in the cities is seen in terms of contrast to the abiding certainties of the village...
6. The kailyard is in part the skill of realistic short-story telling...to reject the kailyard is to reject much that is central to any attempt to define "Scottishness".

I cannot argue with the soundness (and helpfulness) of each one of the above six guidelines.

Chapters 2 and 3 took me into an area I knew little about and skilfully explained to me the importance of such writers as Henry Mackenzie (The Man of Feeling, 1771); John Wilson, or "Christopher North" (Lights and Shadows of a Scottish Life, 1822; Trials of Margaret Lindsay, 1823); and (in Chapter 3) John Galt (The Ayrshire Legatees, 1821; Annals of the Parish, 1821; The Provost,1822; The Gathering of the West, 1823); and Elizabeth Hamilton (The Cottagers of Glenburnie, 1808). Ian Campbell also put into more understandable context, two authors I know more about - Sir Walter Scott and Susan Ferrier. Two paragraphs comparing Galt and Scott were particularly helpful to this ingenu.

Chapter 4 concentrates on George MacDonald's work, identifying the position of Dr. Anderson (in his Robert Falconer, 1868) as an example of the dichotomy within the man of parts, educated for medicine (or the Ministry) and his peasant background - this is a recurrent theme in the kailyard. Campbell argues that MacDonald - as well as Neil Gunn and Lewis Grassic Gibbon - shows greater insight into this crisis of identity. I regret I have never read any of these authors' works.

Then, in Chapter 5, we are on to The Kailyards - reinforcing the points established in Chapter I, that the location of kailyard is in general rural; that it usually belongs to the past and stops within living memory; that its moral values ensure good endings to those who deserve them; and that these values are essentially conservationist with a narrow social scale. Patriarchal figures hold sway. The House with the Green Shutters, however, takes change from the background to the foreground, whilst the ideal of education for the pulpit is scorned. Campbell states that both Brown and Gibbon do not turn their backs on the kailyard, but use it as part of a strategy of involving their audience. With Neil Gunn and others, these authors create a more flexible view of the Scottish countryside than the limited kailyard can achieve. Campbell has some penetrating and shrewd comments on both Crockett and Barrie:  Margaret Ogilvy (1896) - that deplorable lapse of taste which allowed Barrie to make an enormous commercial success of his mother's last months of life. As an aside, it is interesting that it was the 7th best-selling book in the USA in 1897! The chapter concludes with a brief appraisal of Scottish verse of the period, which displays a similar narrowness and repetitiveness of theme.

Campbell's final Chapter summarises the position reached in his previous arguments: the greater Scottish writers ensured that their audience were involved in a total response, rather than a passive acceptance of preconceived roles. However, as the 19th century wore on, the contrast between some Scottish fiction and some English became more obvious: Scotland lacks the subtle exploration of local life in Silas Marner, Adam Bede, above all in Middlemarch; Scotland has no Wuthering Heights; the Scottish cities do not find an author of the stature of Dickens...Lockhart and Hogg, Galt and Carlyle spend much time in England...The future lies in London. The kailyard produced a literature which packaged environment...Its literature, in brief, is passive instead of active.

Campbell does strike a more positive note - it appears to be that the kailyard was capable of retaining small parts of Scotland's heritage, and giving pleasure in the telling of them, in competent hands.

You can tell it's a compelling book when you decide to purchase others as a result. I have my accumulative eye on Hamilton's The Cottagers of Glenburnie, Galt's Annals of the Parish and Gibbon's Sunset Song. At present, the finger still hovers over their Internet purchase.