Subversive Antiquarianism

This chapter provides the first extended study of John Mactaggart’s Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia (1824), a controversial example of regional antiquarianism that occupies the most experimental end of 1820s place writing. Literally an encyclopaedia of Galloway, Mactaggart’s book employs the new principles of ethnographic fieldwork to capture the miscellaneous eccentricities of this part of Scotland. However, such is the author’s freewheeling sense of humour and emphasis on poetry that his version of regional culture intermittently becomes an avant-garde artwork. The chapter discusses class tensions in the angry initial reception of Mactaggart’s book, a reminder that the acts of representation involved in the emergent field of cultural regionalism were always contested and partial. It provides context for the Encyclopedia in the fields of popular antiquarianism and (post-)Enlightenment encyclopedism, as well as Mactaggart’s other published and unpublished writings, and finishes by turning to textual and paratextual reworkings of this distinctive vision of Galloway.