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Abstract:Our essay studies three early-nineteenth century autobiographical texts written by young Scottish Gaels who narrate their sense of dislocation in the 'Gaelic' Atlantic. Dugald MacNicol's journal (1809–1813), written entirely in Gaelic, describes leaving Argyll for Barbados as a young army officer. Memoirs of Charles Campbell (1828) was written in a Glasgow prison, after Campbell had murdered his wife in a fit of insanity, following his service on a Jamaican slave plantation. William MacGillivray's English-language Hebridean journal (1817–1818), describes the author's sojourn, while a student, on the island of Harris. We examine these journals in the context of Romantic-era travel literature and conclude with thoughts on the relationship between an increasingly stressed Gaelic culture at home and the emergence of a 'Gaelic' Atlantic within the British imperial world.

Abstract:A response to the other essays in "An Inventive Age," developing their ecocritical revision of the antagonism between an "organic" Romanticism and industrialism. Framing its argument around the failure of the Scottish Highlands to industrialize like other regions of Britain, the essay explores some different inflections to key contemporary terms like "industry," "invention," and "improvement" in Thomas Garnett's 1800 Tour of the Highlands. Notwithstanding Garnett's cameralist hopes for a mixed ecology of growth in the region, his Tour disguises the structural dependence of the Highland economy on West Indian wealth, with implications for the other essays in the special issue.

This essay discusses the disputed authorship of the short poem ‘Delia'; locates for the first time the correct London newspaper in which the poem was first printed, as written by Burns, before its appearance in Belfast; confirms earlier research and speculation by Lucyle Werkmeister and further elucidates the relationship of Burns with the editor Peter Stuart, and with Stuart's ‘spurious' Starnewspaper; identifies, also for the first time, a previous publication of the poem with music in The Feast of Apollo(London, ?1787); and concludes that ‘Delia' (and the letter that accompanied it in newspaper publication) is very unlikely to be by Burns.