South Britons’ Reception of North Britons, 1707–1820

Type:

Book Chapter

Author:

Paul Langford

Published:

2005

Publisher:

British Academy

This chapter explores the dark reception that the Scots received in eighteenth-century England. Scots obtained no new rights of residence by the Act of Union in 1707. Sauny the Scot was the eponymous hero of a doctored version of <italic>The Taming of the Shrew</italic> that placed Shakespeare's comedy in polite London society. Sauny's function was to protect the gentility and refinement of his master Petruchio. <italic>The Man of the World</italic> is ultimately a more serious story of a vicious and unprincipled Scotsman on the make. Anglo-Scottish personal unions multiplied after the parliamentary union. Language was perhaps increasingly the prime criterion of full acceptability. Growing awareness of Scotland as a country and a culture did not necessarily decrease prejudice. There is evidence of a marked increase in the flow of Scots into England in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth, as the pace of economic growth south of the border intensified and its extent broadened.

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