Other Works by R. R McIan

Samuel Carter Hall’s Book of British Ballads (1842)
 
Robert McIan’s first major commission as an illustrator was to illustrate part of a volume of poetry and song compiled by his friend, the luminary and editor Samuel Carter Hall. Here, McIan was one of a team of illustrations which included his wife, Fanny McIan. The poem which he illustrated, Lord Soulis, concerned a legendary medieval landowner who was said to have employed witchcraft in order to plot against King Robert I. Two of the illustrations which accompanied this ballad were reproduced by Belinda Morse in her biography of Robert and Fanny and give a flavour of McIan’s early work. The first depicts Soulis as a sinister, conspiratorial figure in the manner of nineteenth century melodrama, advised by his scheming jester, Redcap. The final image in the series depicts the ghastly results of Soulis’s hubris. Having been boiled alive in a huge cauldron on the orders of the King, his remains are a feast for birds of prey.
 
Elizabeth Ogilvy’s Highland Minstrelsy (1846)
 
Not strictly speaking a work by McIan, this was in fact a compilation of sentimental poetry on Highland and Jacobite themes by an obscure author, Elizabeth Ann Harris Ogilvy. Like Carter Hall’s ballads, this was aimed at a popular audience and catered to the apparently insatiable demand of the mid-nineteenth century reading public for Highlandism and tartanry, with one contemporary reviewer praising the book as providing an ‘inexhaustible fund of romance’. Details of Ogilvy’s life are scarce, and as Belinda Morse pointed out in 2001, her name does not appear in dictionaries of Scottish literature. McIan’s often emotionally laden illustrations comprise a series of vignettes which accompany key scenes in Ogilvy’s poetry. For example, ‘The Haunted Tarn on the Moor’ depicts the reaction of a woman to seeing the ghastly spectre of a victim of inter-clan warfare, at a remote and picturesque location. McIan also contributed an elaborate frontispiece which depicted a late medieval Highland warrior in repose with a clàrsach (Celtic harp) surrounded by a border of oak leaves and thistles.
 
McIan’s Highlanders at Home (1848)
 
McIan’s final major literary project was a further collaboration with James Logan. This was intended to build upon the previous success of Clans of the Scottish Highlands, but was aimed at a more popular, although still affluent readership. A folio, it was a significantly smaller book and did not stretch to multiple volumes. It consists of a substantial text by Logan upon the subject of traditional lifestyles and customs to be found in the Scottish Highlands, which the author correctly asserted were being eroded by contact with cultural and technological change in the wider British world.

McIan’s twenty-two illustrations showed groups of Highlanders taking part in past-times which a wider audience would have found ‘picturesque’ such as spearing salmon, fording rivers, carding wool and butchering the carcass of a stag. Rather than depictions of actual scenes drawn from life, they are in fact cultural productions with a very specific ideological intent. They were intended to show a vision of Highlanders as a people, who through their enforced remoteness were able to symbolise ideas about more authentic modes of existence. For example, drawing upon the thought of Maureen Martin, we might interpret McIan’s depictions of young men engaged in physical past-times such as ‘throwing the stone’ and ‘robbing an eagle’s nest’ as embodying a raw, primal masculinity. Similarly, McIan’s depictions of women are invariably demure (and sport immaculate mid-Victorian hairstyles) and are engaged in crafts and past-times associated with femininity and domestic life such as spinning wool. McIan’s illustrations for Highlanders at Home therefore assert to their viewers that Gaelic society was a place of arcadian rural harmony, idealised gender roles and hearty outdoor pursuits.  

However, according to Belinda Morse, ‘Highlanders’ was less well-received than ‘Clans’ in terms of sales and impact, for it was published at a time of severe social upheaval in the British Isles and abroad. She further asserted that some Scots took exception to the old-fashioned way of life it depicted. Given its high production values it is possible that the book simply cost too much for its intended readership. However, our own copy preserves a clue as to the way the book was understood and used in the nineteenth century: a note on the inside cover states that it was awarded to a Scottish primary school pupil, one John McGillivray, as the prize for a successful essay. It was therefore regarded as a minor prestige object suitable for children, perhaps because of its colourful illustrations and projection of a certain version of Scottish identity.