"to Be at Once Another and the Same": Walter Scott and the End(S) of Sympathetic Britishness (Critical Essay‪)‬

ON A MISERABLE DECEMBER DAY IN 1825, WALTER SCOTT RECORDED HIS resolve to fight his latest bout of depression "by letting both mind and body know that supposing one the House of Commons and the other the House of Peers, my will is sovereign over both." Three weeks later, only days before the collapse of the printing and publishing businesses on which he had staked his fortune, Scott mused in his journal on the significance of the new year: Ruminating on the concurrent deterioration and renewal that paradoxically characterizes the body, Scott ponders the prospect, both eerie and exhilarating, that an individual might be "another and the same" simultaneously. His interest in the duality of bodies, moreover, seems intimately linked to his life-long investment in the fate of Britain, a compound state created by the 1707 Act of Union joining England and Scotland. Given Scott's evident familiarity with metaphors of the body politic, and bearing in mind his public role as the leading literary representative of Scotland to the world, we can fruitfully read the above passage as reflecting national as well as personal concerns. Do nations, like bodies, change so gradually that it is impossible to demarcate precisely when the transformation has created a new entity? If it seems paradoxical, even uncanny, "to be at once another and the same," what do Scott's writings reveal about the possibilities and pitfalls of attempting to retain one's original national identity while simultaneously learning to accept a new one?