The Displaced Naturalist: W. F. Campbell’s Life of Exile in Normandy
This article examines the dynamics of rootedness and displacement; bourgeois authority and peasant ways of life; signified and signifier, that are at work in Walter Frederick Campbell’s Life in Normandy (1863).Walter Frederick Campbell (1798–1855) spent the last years of his life in Avranches, Norma...
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| Wydane w: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises, |
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| 1. autor: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Język: | Anglais |
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Études écossaises
2011
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| Dostęp online: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Streszczenie: | This article examines the dynamics of rootedness and displacement; bourgeois authority and peasant ways of life; signified and signifier, that are at work in Walter Frederick Campbell’s Life in Normandy (1863).Walter Frederick Campbell (1798–1855) spent the last years of his life in Avranches, Normandy as an economic refugee. He had been Laird of Islay for thirty-two years and his financial ruin was in large part due to the agricultural and economic reforms he had implemented on the island. He was in many ways a benevolent proprietor and was described as “a man of kind heart and generous nature”. The reforms he introduced were farsighted, visible in the landscape still today, while he resisted the temptation to clear the overpopulated island.Life in Normandy is a fictionalized account of Campbell’s experience in and around Avranches. His son, John Francis Campbell edited the two volumes and declared them to be primarily a philanthropic effort to teach Scottish peasants how to improve their practices: “It was suggested that a good cheap dinner would tempt a poor man from bad dear drink abroad, and that a poor Scotchman’s wife might be taught to do that which poor wives do elsewhere” (p. v). Hope and Cross, the protagonists of the narrative are clearly Campbell’s alter egos and are both passionately interested in nature, fishing and shooting. The action in Normandy takes place against the background of rumblings from the 1848 Revolution in Paris.The account can be read as a long reflection on the dislocation of identity and the precarious meaning of home for the economic exile as well as for the Scottish and French peasant. |
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