Furth of the Solway

This chapter turns to the fertile library culture in southwest Scotland 1770–1830, and to the transformative popularity of Walter Scott. It does so in order to reframe and extend the preceding analysis of the book, by considering an alternative view of regional Romanticism in which it is constituted primarily by readers, libraries and audiences instead of texts. The chapter features a study of manuscript library borrowing records from the Dumfries Presbytery Library (est. c.1706) and Wigtown Subscription Library (est. 1795) to address how the growth of literary regionalism in southwest Scotland was experienced, and manifested, by historical readers. The book finishes by returning to Scott’s hugely impactful Guy Mannering (1815) to develop concluding remarks on the importance of regions and regionalism to anglophone literary culture 1770–1830, and on the transformation of southwest Scotland during that interval.