![\"A](\"http:\/\/scottishlit.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/A-hen-in-a-vegetable-garden.jpg\")
<\/a>A hen in a kailyard<\/p><\/div>\n
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that as the 19th\u00a0century progressed, \u2018Scottish\u2019 literature became more narrowly associated with the heirs of the realist mode of fiction, set in identifiably Scottish communities that were populated by characters, many of whom spoke a recognisable variety of Scots. These \u2018kailyard\u2019 or \u2018cabbage-patch\u2019 novels were, effectively, the heirs of the regional novel, and they generally offered sentimental and comforting stories of rural life for the entertainment of their readers. And they were extraordinarily popular, both within Scotland and beyond its borders.<\/p>\n
As these novels were being written and voraciously consumed, however, the discipline of \u2018English Literature\u2019 was gradually forming in British universities, led, as Robert Crawford has argued, by academic developments in Scotland. Ironically, perhaps, as the discipline of \u2018Eng Lit\u2019 grew, in its earlier years, it was influenced by cultural commentators such as Matthew Arnold, whose book Culture and Anarchy <\/i>(1869) argued that the literature worth studying needed to be of timeless, universal value. In a famous formulation of \u2018high culture\u2019, he proclaimed:<\/p>\n Matthew Arnold<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n Culture […] is a study of perfection [\u2026 It] seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light […]”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n One of the results of the dissemination of setting this normative value was to marginalise those genres of fiction, poetry and drama that were distinctively regional, rather than universal. As Robin Gilmour (p. 57) puts it:<\/p>\n Arnold\u2019s formulation of Culture as a transcendent value is a crucial development, because it drove a wedge between regionalism and culture, stigmatising the one as enfeebled provincialism, and raising the other above the claims of time and place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Regional novels, moreover, might easily be accused of a lack of ambition, and an easy reliance on familiar formulae. This was recognised as early as 1889 by Margaret Oliphant, in a review in Blackwood\u2019s Magazine <\/i>(pp 265-6):<\/p>\n The books called \u201cCarlowrie\u201d, \u201cAldersyde\u201d, \u201cBlinkbonny,\u201d \u201cGlenairlie\u201d &c are cheap books, perfectly well adapted, with their mild love stories and abundant marriages, for the simpler classes, especially of women whose visions are bounded by the parish, who know nothing higher in society than the minister and his wife, and believe that all the world lieth in wickedness except Scotland. [\u2026] It is sad to be told that these productions are regarded as representatives of a national school and attain their popularity by dint of their dialect and by the very narrowness of their aim.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Bits from Blinkbonny by John Strathesk<\/p><\/div>\n The kailyard novelists best remembered now include Ian Maclaren (e.g. Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush)<\/i>, S.R. Crocket (e.g The Stickit Minister<\/i>), and J. M. Barrie (e.g Auld Licht Idylls, A Window in Thrums). <\/i>Their novels tend to be episodic, humorous descriptions of rural Scottish life, with, as Oliphant says, \u2018mild love stories and abundant marriages.\u2019 They were comforting reads, on the whole, celebrating the nostalgic values of a simple, rural existence: humility, modesty, decency, community, piety, poverty, and the kind of uneducated native ingenuity that the Scots call \u2018canniness\u2019. Familiar characters populate the pages: as well as the amusing peasantry, there are a set of professionals who function as mediators between the reader and the characters in the stories. Like the reader, these professionals \u2013 often a doctor, a minister, a lawyer or a \u2018dominie\u2019 (a teacher) \u2013 use standard English, and their narrative frames the dialogue of the Scots-speaking characters.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most interesting author of the kailyard school is J.M. Barrie. He was born in the north-east of Scotland, in the small town of Kirriemuir in Angus, in 1860, ten years after the birth of Stevenson. He developed an interest in storytelling in a childhood that was marred, when he was six years of age, by the death of his brother, David. When he grew up, Barrie attended Edinburgh University, and started working for an Edinburgh newspaper as a drama critic. His transition into novel-writing came through journalism, and \u00a0his first novels, Auld Licht Idylls<\/i> (1888), A Window in Thrums<\/i> (1890), and The Little Minister<\/i> (1891) are in the kailyard style, and are based on his youthful memories of Kirriemuir (which becomes the fictional setting of \u2018Thrums\u2019). The novels were an international success and Barrie moved to London, where he began to work on drama; his stage play Peter Pan <\/i>was produced in 1904, and his lasting fame was assured.<\/p>\n Andrew Nash, who is one of several scholars who have recently reappraised the kailyard school of writing, draws attention to the deepening maturity of Barrie\u2019s style, as he moves from kailyard novelist to acclaimed dramatist (Nash, p.71):<\/p>\n At this stage of his career [ie when writing A Window in Thrums<\/i>], he uses the narrator to try and convince the reader of the realism and veracity of the story, and of Jess and her family and the emotions involved in it. As his fictional career progressed, however, he became more interested in the role of the narrator and in the act of creating illusions of reality. His later novels are characterised by an intense interest in the creative mind; with storytelling and illusory realities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Kirriemuir, or ‘Thrums’, around 1900<\/p><\/div>\n The status and uses of literature, indeed, are among the topics gently addressed in Chapter X of A Window in Thrums, <\/i>in which the narrator touches on the reading habits and tastes of the small-town inhabitants:<\/p>\n Two Bibles, a volume of sermons by the learned Dr. Isaac Barrow, a few numbers of the Cheap Magazine, that had strayed from Dunfermline, and a “Pilgrim’s Progress,” were the works that lay conspicuous ben in the room. Hendry had also a copy of Burns, whom he always quoted in the complete poem, and a collection of legends in song and prose, that Leeby kept out of sight in a drawer.<\/p>\n The weight of my box of books was a subject Hendry was very willing to shake his head over, but he never showed any desire to take off the lid. Jess, however, was more curious; indeed, she would have been an omnivorous devourer of books had it not been for her conviction that reading was idling. Until I found her out she never allowed to me that Leeby brought her my books one at a time. Some of them were novels, and Jess took about ten minutes to each. She confessed that what she read was only the last chapter, owing to a consuming curiosity to know whether “she got him.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>