‘All that is curious on continent and isle’: Time, place and modernity in Scott’s ‘Vacation 1814’ and The Pirate

This article considers the interrelations of temporality and spatiality in the early nineteenth century. Comparing Scott's journal of his tour of the lighthouses of Great Britain and his fictional revisiting of the islands of Orkney and Shetland in The Pirate, I look at two different historical contexts: the (supposed) post-war summer of 1814 and the imperial expansion of the 1820s. I explore the ways Scott uses the rarely visited Northern Islands to think about other spaces: war-torn Europe and the archipelagic empire. Setting the diary form against the novel, I then think about the form of the novel as genre in literary history, the progress of the national tale, and finally the uses of georgic as metonymic of literature as a whole.