Scottish Enlightenment & the lack of it: A note on Elizabeth David & Christian Isobel Johnstone

Scottish Enlightenment and the lack of it: A note on Elizabeth David and Christian Isobel Johnstone

Elizabeth David reveled in her reputation as a scholar but did not always put in the time. Neither close reader nor deep thinker, David mars much of her work with inaccuracies and omissions. At times, as critiques of her British bestselling Book of Mediterranean Food have noted, she indulges in outright fabrication. Revered for a stern authenticity, David does not much care about rigorous research.

Consider David’s 1951 treatment of Isobel Christian Johnstone and her 1829 masterpiece, The Cook and Housewife’s Manual. It is ostensibly the work of Meg Dods, a cantankerous character from St Ronan’s Well, a novel written by Sir Walter Scott. In the introduction Mrs Johnstone parodies his style so well that readers believed (some including Clarissa Dickson Wright still believed until her death in 2014) he wrote its ‘introduction,’ in fact an extended satire on British mores. (Perkins 21-28)

David surmises that Mrs Johnstone “appears to have been an amiable and accomplished woman” and mentions a pair of joint publishing positions she briefly held with her husband. (David 153,152)

That is something like calling Disraeli a flash dresser or Lincoln a Midwestern rustic, fair enough statements in themselves but by themselves misleading. In common with the profiles of Norman Douglas, David’s depiction of Mrs Johnstone is incomplete, in her case out of negligence instead of the artifice she applied to her descriptions of Douglas, whose pedophilia she elided.

Mrs Johnstone was one of the more distinguished Scots of a distinguished Scottish generation. She wrote works of history, children’s literature and novels; published compilations of stories by herself and others; and edited Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, rival to the legendary Blackwood’s. That in itself is remarkable, for her politics were Radical and she was the only woman to edit a major British periodical before the 1860s. (White 168)

Her journey to literary success had been hard. Mrs Johnstone must have held considerable reserves of fortitude, not to say courage; she had divorced an earlier husband, no easy task in otherwise Enlightened Edinburgh, remarried and remained childless. These were triplicate transgressions to the arbiters of a stern presbyterian society during her lifetime. To his immense credit, Scott had no use for any such reflexive opprobrium: The Johnstones not only published his work but also counted him among their friends. Scott valued Mrs Johnstone for her work and “ready wit” along with her “sense of humour and power of delineating character.” (McNeill 15n)

As for the Manual itself, “[i]t is especially in the preparation of the wonderful natural foods in which Scotland abounds” where, David claims, “‘Meg Dods’ stands supreme.” (David 153)

The Manual, however, represents a lot more than that. Two centuries on it remains the best chronicle of the Scots culinary canon, not only of its indigenous ingredients, an observation that already amounted to cliché by 1951, but also for its detailed description of technique. In addition, as Peter Brears observes, The Manual “is as much nationalist journalism as recipe book,” (Brears xxii) a component of the cultural project undertaken by Scott and his circle at the outset of the nineteenth century. The project created or promoted the cults of the kilt and the haggis, innumerable new tartan patterns, English literature written in Scots dialect, an idealized conception of the Highlands and other manifestations of Scottish sentiment, including the celebration and to some extent invention of Scottish foodways.

No Outlander without Scott and his circle.

The Manual is one of the more astonishing artifacts of culinary literature from any country, at once

fantastical, funny and utilitarian, a rollicking satire that targets the artifice of national identity and emergent cult of politeness along with self-interested hypocrisy, not least as practiced by moralizing reformers and representatives of organized religion, all too often members of the same crowd.

David mentions none of that, forgivable enough some of the time in a glossy magazine but not for anyone considered a scholar. Nor is getting the name of her subject wrong. ‘Meg Dods’ is not ‘Christian Jane Johnstone.’ (Brears xxii)

Notes:

For more on the Manual, see the most comprehensive discussion of Johnstone to date, see Perkins, “Johnstone” 16-41

For a sprightly essay on the earlier invention of a Highland tradition and its trappings, see Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland” in Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition. The essay concerns dress; Trevor-Roper traces the invention of the kilt, by an English Quaker, only as far back as circa 1730 although he does note that during the nineteenth century a pair of common brothers masquerading as Stuarts, “two of the most elusive and seductive characters who have ever ridden the Celtic hobby-horse or aerial broomstick… sought to revive not merely the Highland costume but a whole imaginary Highland Civilization.” (Hobsbawm 37, 31)

The promotion of a nonexistent Scottish past was so successful that after Waterloo “the Waverly Novels [sic] combined with the Highland regiments to spread the fashion for kilts and tartans throughout Europe.” For the visit of George IV to Edinburgh during 1822, so many clans clamored to buy their ‘lost’ tartans that an enterprising London textile firm falsely claimed to have found ‘ancient’ records of them. The firm profited for years from its hoax. Scott’s son-in-law and sympathetic biographer considered the 1822 spectacle a collective hallucination and in Trevor-Roper’s words “the farce of 1822 had given new momentum to the tartan industry, and inspired a new fantasy to serve that industry.” (Hobsbawm 28, 29-31)

As he notes more generally “history is not rational, or at least it is rational only in parts,” an observation applicable to the invention and celebration of David herself. What a stylist Trevor-Roper was.

Sources:

Peter Brears, “Introduction” to Elizabeth Cleland, A New and Easy Method of Cookery (Totnes, Devon 2005)

Elizabeth David, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (London 1984)

Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 1993)

F. Marion McNeill, The Scots Kitchen: Its Lore and Recipes (Frogmore, St. Albans 1976)

Blake Perkins, “Christian Isobel Johnstone and The Cook and Housewife’s Manual by Meg Dods,” Petits Propos Culinaires 105 (April 2016) 16-41

Florence White, A Fire in the Kitchen (London, 1938)