Book contents
- Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland
- Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Of Documents and Declarations
- Chapter 2 Remembering to Forget
- Chapter 3 National Correspondences
- Chapter 4 Writing the 1715 Jacobite Rising
- Chapter 5 Reading the 1745 Jacobite Rising
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 3 - National Correspondences
Print, Letters and the Company of Scotland’s Darien Expedition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2022
- Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland
- Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and Ireland
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Of Documents and Declarations
- Chapter 2 Remembering to Forget
- Chapter 3 National Correspondences
- Chapter 4 Writing the 1715 Jacobite Rising
- Chapter 5 Reading the 1745 Jacobite Rising
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chapter 3 analyzes how, within a newly expanded marketplace for print, a combination of manuscript and printed letters helped shape the ways in which the Company of Scotland’s Darien venture (1695–1700) and its subsequent failure came to be understood in cultural memory. Letters in both manuscript and printed form helped establish the company. Letters also served to connect the company directors with the colonists in Darien, and, when published in pamphlet form, they provided information and propaganda about the new colony to the nation back home. After the collapse of the Darien settlement, letters also became the evidence used to shape the cultural memory of the disaster. The chapter traces how, over the course of the eighteenth century, the cultural memory of Darien was erased by the bigger controversies surrounding the implications of the Acts of Union (1707) for the Scottish nation. Lastly, it considers how the rediscovery and publication of the Darien papers by John Hill Burton in 1849 brought them back into focus as a site of cultural memory.
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- Mediating Cultural Memory in Britain and IrelandFrom the 1688 Revolution to the 1745 Jacobite Rising, pp. 108 - 156Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022