Lachlan Munro and W. R. B. Cunningham Graham
(eds), *The Complete Scottish Sketches of
R. B. Cunningham Graham: “A Careless Enchantment”*

Edinburgh University Press, 2024, 352 p.

Lesley Graham

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**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/etudeseccossaises/5112

DOI: 10.4000/13lkx

ISSN: 1969-6337

**Publisher**

UGA Éditions/Université Grenoble Alpes

**Printed version**

ISBN: 978-2-37747-539-1

ISSN: 1240-1439

**Electronic reference**

Lesley Graham, "Lachlan Munro and W. R. B. Cunningham Graham (eds), *The Complete Scottish Sketches of R. B. Cunningham Graham: "A Careless Enchantment"*, Études écossaises [Online], 24 | 2025, Online since 31 March 2025, connection on 12 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/etudeseccossaises/5112; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/13lkx

This text was automatically generated on April 12, 2025.

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Lachlan Munro and W. R. B.
Cunninghame Graham (eds),
*The Complete Scottish Sketches of
R. B. Cunningham Graham: “A Careless
Enchantment”*

Edinburgh University Press, 2024, 352 p.

Lesley Graham

REFERENCES

Lachlan Munro and W. R. B. Cunningham Graham (eds), *The Complete Scottish Sketches of R. B. Cunningham Graham: “A Careless Enchantment”*, Edinburgh University Press, 2024, 352 p.

1 This volume brings together, for the first time, all of Robert Bontine Cunningham Graham's writings about Scotland and Scots, including pieces first published in periodicals, book reviews, introductions, and other occasional works. The selected texts are presented in chronological order, thus allowing the linear reader to appreciate the evolution of both Graham's writing style and his centres of interest while also noticing the themes to which he returned repeatedly over a period of several decades.

2 Many of the pieces in this volume were first published in *The Saturday Review*, a prestigious, right-leaning paper for which Graham wrote over a span of thirty-six years. His association with the publication began after the unexpected success of his guidebook, *Notes on the District of Menteith* (1895). Graham's own political views were markedly different from those of *The Saturday Review* and writing for its conservative readership pushed him to moderate his more overtly polemical tendencies.
3 One of the first questions that arises is how best to classify Graham's writing. The editors, Lachlan Munro and W. R. B. Cunningham Graham, settle on the term "sketches", as these pieces are often plotless but have a strong narrative drive based on lightly fictionalised autobiographical detail. At times, they take the form of extended tirades, particularly on themes such as so-called progress, the decline of Scottish life and culture, and the Kailyard School of literature. In reaction to the latter, Graham appears to make a deliberate effort to deconstruct and banalise ordinary Scottish rural life rather than offer an idealised vision of the bucolic lifestyle celebrated by J. M. Barrie, Ian Maclaren et al. Alongside the reflections on Scottish identity, the volume also includes travel pieces, and writing about Scots abroad as well as several of Graham's prefaces, a genre in which he excelled. His talent in this area was widely recognised, notably by Joseph Conrad and by G. K. Chesterton who reportedly called him the "Prince of Preface Writers".

4 Each sketch is accompanied by a short headnote and extensive footnotes, the majority of which provide definitions of Scots words and phrases. The explanatory notes are generally well-pitched although one might occasionally question why certain words are selected for elucidation while others are not. For example, why in the same sentence, is "chasuble" defined but not "crosier" (p. 13)? The familiar inconvenience associated with the use of the "passim" device in such a long text is evident when, for example, a footnote to the word "thrawn" on page 254 indicates "passim" obliging the reader to thumb their way back unaided to page 81 to find the definition.

5 The editors have chosen to use the transcribed original periodical versions of the texts as copy texts, a decision that occasionally reveals substantial variations from later anthologised editions. As the editors observe, bringing all of the Scottish sketches together also brings to light the recurrent use of some favoured expressions—such as "flauchtered", "linn", and also "Scotissimus Scotorum" as well as some overused tropes such as the "mists" which appear in almost every sketch. As pointed out, however, the work was written over a very long period and the repetitions would not have been noticeable to readers at the time.

6 Pertinent contextual information is supplied in the introductory material at key turning points in Graham's life and career, helping to situate his work within its broader historical and literary framework. The volume also includes a useful biographical section that offers a comprehensive understanding of Graham's remarkably full life, allowing the unversed reader to appreciate why he was such a respected and influential figure both within and outwith Scotland during his lifetime. Born in London in 1852 to parents from Scotland's landowning class, Graham was a quarter Spanish. Educated at Harrow School and in Brussels, he left for Argentina at the age of seventeen in an attempt to restore the declining fortunes of the family through cattle ranching. Immersing himself in the life of the *gauchos*, he developed extraordinary horsemanship skills in the midst of a revolution. Back in Europe, he married "Gabrielle Marie de la Balmondière", a French-Chilean poetess (who it turned out was in reality from Yorkshire) and they set off for the United States with the intention of establishing a mule-breeding operation. He was also drawn to Morocco, and in 1897, he embarked on a perilous reconnaissance mission to the forbidden city of Taroudant. Captured and imprisoned, he later recounted the expedition in *Mogreb-El-Acksa* (1898), widely regarded as his most celebrated book and described by Hugh MacDiarmid as "one of the best travel books ever written".
7 This adventurous life alone would have been enough to secure Graham's fame, but his later career in politics further elevated his profile. He began as a Liberal Member of Parliament for the mining constituency of North-West Lanarkshire and quickly gained a reputation as a forthright opponent of inequality and injustice and a proponent of progressive causes such as universal suffrage and Irish and Scottish home rule. Graham's political trajectory shifted after he was converted to socialism by William Morris, leading him to engage with radical circles in London. In 1888, alongside Keir Hardie, he co-founded the Scottish Parliamentary Labour Party, the first party of its sort in Britain. Although he was unsuccessful in his bid for re-election as a proto-Labour candidate in 1892, his political activism did not wane. As the editors of this volume observe, "he would re-emerge as an even more radical political activist, an outspoken supporter of women's rights, and an anti-imperialist" (p. 331).

8 In 1906, Graham's wife died from dysentery in Hendaye. When the First World War broke out, despite being in his sixties, he volunteered for military service and was dispatched to Montevideo where he spent eleven months purchasing horses for the war effort, riding with *gauchos* as he had done in his youth. On the return voyage to British shores his ship was torpedoed by a U-boat in the English Channel. Undeterred, he promptly agreed to go back to South America to report on beef cattle stocks in Colombia. Graham died in Buenos Aires in 1936 at the age of eighty-three. His body lay in state at the Casa del Teatro, where thousands of mourners, including the Argentinian president, gathered to pay their respects.

9 Given this wide-ranging and romantic life story full of so many contrasts, it has become something of a cliché to describe Graham as a difficult-to-categorise enigma. Cultural commentators have at times regarded his literary output as secondary to his biography and even today his place in the Scottish cultural canon remains somewhat unstable. Munro and Graham partly account for his contradictory reputation in the following terms: "despite his undoubted eloquence, Graham wrote self-indulgently, for his own nostalgic satisfaction, ignoring the editorial conventions and disciplines of the professional writer, and peppering his already heavily nuanced works with obscure local and foreign details, that he alone cared about, some of which not one in a hundred of his readers would have understood" (p. 324). He was, nevertheless, greatly admired by many including writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Compton Mackenzie, and John Galsworthy, as well as public figures like President Theodore Roosevelt and T. E. Lawrence.

10 Perhaps the most striking characteristic of these Scottish sketches is a pervasive sense of loss and decay caused by what Graham considered "the great drabness of prosperity which overspreads the world" (p. 200). He mourns the loss of "that older Scotland that was poor and furnished soldiers and adventurers to all the rest of Europe; that Scotland which vanished after Culloden, and has been replaced by factories and mines, progress and money, and an air of commonplace, exceeding all the world" (p. 14), repeatedly harking back to "pre-Knoxian and pre-bawbee days" and the "pre-Culloden type". In parallel with this nostalgia for a vanished world, the reader also notes a growing interest in the mystical, fairies, and the supernatural being expressed in these pieces.

11 Another recurring theme is the distinction between Scots and their southern neighbours: "Why is it that the races English and Scotch have never really amalgamated? So close, so like, both wizened by the same east wind, tormented more or less by the same Sunday, and yet unlike" (p. 15). It is no surprise that one of
Graham’s best-known and most anthologised sketches, “Beattock for Moffat”, stands out as one of the best in this volume. Beneath this compassionate character study lies an evocation of national and cultural differences—specifically between “the hard, unyielding, yet humorous and sentimental Lowland Scot” and “the weedy, shallow breed” produced in London (pp. 76–7). This sharp contrast reinforces one of Graham’s recurring themes: the resilience and character of the Scottish people in the face of modernity and cultural homogenisation.

12 Here, as in many of the sketches, he demonstrates an uncommon ability to capture Scots dialogue and an understanding of its etymology. Despite not being a speaker of Scots, Graham had been exposed to the language from an early age and possessed a keen ear for its nuances so that his use of Scots in all of his writing sounds authentic. In “A Survival” he argues that being a Scotsman in contemporary society was a challenge, as the public expectation was that Scottish writers, regardless of their background or education, were obliged to write in a manner “as unintelligible as possible to the average Englishman” (p. 20) and this as a result of the sentimentalized Scots found in Kailyard novels, which he dismissed as a synthetic language spoken by nobody.

13 The sketches all demonstrate a very strong sense of place. Being neither entirely Highland nor Lowland but reflecting characteristics of both regions, Gartmore, Graham’s home turf was the perfect stage for many of his observations. The marshy moor known as Flanders Moss is a “brooding presence” that appears recurrently in these pieces, like the haunting mist in which it is so very often swathed. There is a clear belief in a spiritual connection to the landscape and tradition in the early pieces but after the Cunningham Graham family were forced to sell Gartmore House and the estate, Graham’s sense of guilt and loss emerge more distinctly and he seems to be less invested in that spiritual connection. His distance from Scotland, which he was visiting less frequently, and from the people he wrote about, both geographically and socially, is increasingly evident.

14 The sketches of Scotland often lack the joyfulness of his portrayals of South America; they exhibit more than anything a strong nostalgia for bygone characters and a cultural heritage that he fears is in danger of slipping into oblivion. Stephen Graham’s perceptive observation of the opposition of Scotland and the Hispanic world in Graham’s writing throws light on his dichotomous mental representation of the contrasting cultures. For him, “reality is Scotland; romance is South America. He is a bitter, sarcastic, even cynical, intellectual Scot, tearing and rending his own country when he thinks of it—but suddenly melted and sentimentalised by Spain. He writes of a decidedly real Scotland, but of an unreal, unearthly, romanticised, golden Spain” (p. 42).

15 Graham had a vast repertoire of Scottish types, notably his eccentric family members and their servants, often lost types stranded between the past and contemporary Scotland, all of them depicted with affectionate amusement, and it is those characters that make many of these sketches memorable. This expertly edited volume provides a fresh opportunity for readers to appreciate the development of this profoundly influential author’s skill in expressing his insight into the particularities of the people and places of a Scotland that has, just as Graham feared, largely disappeared.
## AUTHORS

### LESLEY GRAHAM

Université de Bordeaux

lesley.graham@u-bordeaux.fr

Lesley Graham est maître de conférences HDR à l'Université de Bordeaux où elle enseigne dans le Département des langues et des cultures. Ses recherches portent sur la littérature écossaise du xIXe siècle et en particulier sur les récits de voyage et autres genres non fictionnels. Elle a publié de nombreux articles sur Robert Louis Stevenson. Elle est l'éditrice de la *New Edinburgh Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Uncollected Essays 1880-94* (EUP).

Lesley Graham is senior lecturer at the University of Bordeaux where she teaches in the Department of Languages and Cultures. Her research interests centre on nineteenth-century Scottish literature and in particular on travel writing and other non-fiction genres. She has published widely on Robert Louis Stevenson, his entourage, and his afterlives. She is the editor of the *New Edinburgh Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Uncollected Essays 1880-94* (EUP).