The Blame Game
The Blame Game
Highland history has run a strange course. Even before the Victorian era, an ‘invented tradition’ transmogrified the Highlander from an object of distrust and antipathy into a romantic figure. For this Dr Johnson and Sir Walter Scott take most responsibility. The Highlander became fully assimilated into the Scottish national identity, a tartanised image towards which most Lowlanders and ÈmigrÈs happily cleaved. Highland chiefs in 1746 had been regarded as ‘the brutal oppressors of a slavish people’, but were soon metamorphosed into the ‘paternal protectors of a grateful peasantry’ Subsequently their clearing successors were excoriated and denounced throughout the nineteenth century: the verdict on the Highland landowners became enshrined in official opinion. The controversy continues into the present day.
Keywords: Blame, Responsibility, Intervention
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