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John Muir. Frederick Turner
Читать онлайн.Название John Muir
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782114314
Автор произведения Frederick Turner
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Agriculture, once the basic mode of life, was becoming increasingly consolidated and at the same time was becoming distinctly subordinate to the cities with their factories, ports, commerce. Even in the years when harvests were good, agriculturalists suffered because of lowered selling prices. And when crops were poor—as they often were in what were known in Scotland as the “Hungry Forties”—there was hunger and indeed famine, and not just in the newly spawned cities. Such had been the case in 1845, so it was again in Ireland in 1847 and 1848, and in the latter year the condition spread from Ireland to infect much of the Old World and to leave a scar on the European consciousness: such sights, such scenes of unparalleled, irremediable suffering could not easily be forgotten or understood as the bottom curve of some huge cycle. They must instead portend the end of something.
The year 1848 confirmed the general fear of crisis, for not only was there the agricultural failure and famine; there was also the attendant economic crisis. Eighteen forty-five and 1846 had seen wild speculation in wheat and railroads; then the huge wheat purchases had been followed by a bad harvest. In England business houses failed in droves, thirty-three of them in London alone in 1848.
Above all this hovered the specter of revolution on the Continent. In Paris the king had been forced to abdicate, leaving the Tuileries to the vengeance of a mob. There had been upheavals in the German and Italian states and in Hungary. In Vienna, even the grand political puppeteer Metternich had been forced to flee to England before the threat of mob violence.
Assessing the situation, the Edinburgh Review in its July-October 1848 number took a very Burkean view, admitting the real possibility of political collapse everywhere, a contagion emanating from France’s “huge chronic ulcer,” the “foul and purulent” contents of which were now disgorged upon all nations. Plainly, in order to deal with the mobs of unemployed and dispossessed, extraordinary remedies might be temporarily required, “among the rest, greater facilities to Emigration—a subject which has lately, and justly, claimed so large a share of public attention.”
With the exception of the Irish, the Scots were perhaps the most susceptible to encouragements to emigration, and a man like Daniel Muir, Johnnie’s father, had grown up hearing talk of American opportunities while all about him he was discovering evidence of his homeland’s historic poverty and overpopulation. Daniel Muir was born in 1804, precisely the period in which a more general recognition had come to the Scots people of just how far their country lagged behind the community of modernizing nations and of how far it was likely to stay behind. Scotland’s problems, exaggerated by the convulsions of the Industrial Revolution, were in fact endemic.
As early as the eighteenth century the Scots financial adventurer John Law (he of the Mississippi Company Bubble) succinctly identified the country’s major problem: numbers of people, he observed, “the greatest riches of other nations, are a burden to us.” The country was simply too poor to support a large population. Law’s personal solution was to try his fortunes abroad as did ever-increasing numbers of his countrymen as the century wore on and conditions darkened. The years 1763–75 saw almost 25,000 Scots leave for Nova Scotia, Canada, and America, a figure that would later look paltry but in that time was of sufficient magnitude to become a major public issue.
From the Highlands, where barren gray rocks dropped precipitously into the waters of lochs and range behind range of mountains and hills bore only the tough furze and heather, the people came down to try their luck in the Lowlands, and then, finding the prospects there equally grim, went to America, about which the news was so unfailingly good. There were stories of the American soil’s great, almost magical fecundity, of the inexhaustible resources, of space for a free life. And those who had seen the Glasgow tobacco dealers grow fabulously wealthy on a product of the American earth, sporting their scarlet cloaks and gold-knobbed canes, could not doubt the factual basis of these rumors. Journals like the Scots Magazine, which featured a special section on “British North America,” and the Chambers’s Information for the People and Edinburgh Journal catered to the rising interest in emigration to America. Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer enjoyed a sustained popularity after its first publication in 1782. In it Crèvecoeur had written extensively of the Scots immigrants descending from the “high, sterile, bleak lands of Scotland, where everything is barren and cold,” lands that “appear to be calculated only for great sheep pastures.” He retailed the representative history of one Andrew, an honest Hebridean, who arrived in America pale, emaciated, and virtually without resources yet who in the course of four years became “independent and easy.”
They were still coming down from the high country and out from the Lowlands forty years after Crèvecoeur wrote, for the conditions that sent the emigrants to the New World were only intensifying. The Highland clearances that had begun in the 1780s had by the 1820s increased in scope and ruthlessness as thousands of Highlanders were thrown off the land to make room for sheep. So too with the agriculturalists of the Lowlands, where consolidation and modernization were squeezing out the small farmer. Even the once-prosperous weavers of Glasgow, Paisley, Renfrew, and Lanarkshire now felt the pinch as thousands willing to work for almost any wage crowded into the industry. After 1815 the weavers became the most prominent occupational group in the emigration movement, and in Lanarkshire alone they had organized thirty-two emigration societies.
Growing up in that Lanarkshire district, Daniel Muir would surely have noticed all this, would have heard the talk of the New World and of the plans of the emigration societies. Daniel Muir’s flight from the backcountry to Glasgow around 1825 was part of the larger pattern and was the first step in his own eventual emigration.
Muir had been born in Manchester, England, where his soldier father was then stationed in the British army. Shortly after birth Daniel had been orphaned by the deaths of both parents, and the baby with his eleven-year-old sister Mary was taken back to the father’s home region of Lanarkshire and raised there by relatives.
In nearby Glasgow, despite some feeble child-labor statutes, small children regularly worked thirteen-hour days, and in the cotton mills of Lanarkshire similar brutalizing routines were in force. So it is not difficult to imagine that life for the orphan Muir children on the farm near Crawfordjohn was anything but idyllic. There on the high moors, surrounded by steep mountains that suffered but a few bleak villages and some lead mines, Daniel Muir “lived the life of a farm servant,” as his son John was later to write in an obituary notice. He continued in this when he moved to the neighboring sheep farm of Hamilton Blakley after his sister Mary had become Blakley’s wife.
Given the numbing routine of such a life and the absence of parental affection, it is a little surprising that Daniel Muir should ever have displayed much joy in life or any interest in its non-utilitarian dimensions. Yet at some point in his calcified maturity he confessed to his son John that on the Crawfordjohn sheep farm he had taken pleasure in carving little images out of whatever materials were at hand. He had also made himself a fiddle and had learned to scrape across its catgut strings the tunes of hymns and ballads. The native Lowlander is said to be an outwardly dour type who conceals the warm romanticism that bubbled out in Burns and Sir Walter Scott, and if circumstances deny him any effective outlet for the romanticism and demonstrativeness within, the result can be a grim, crabbed character. So it proved with Daniel Muir, and whatever his talents for life, for art and music, they were crushed out of him in the monotonous grind of agricultural servitude. He gave up the carving, though the fiddling and singing lingered on for a few years as a pathetic, vestigial remnant of the suppressed side to his character.
The most significant event in Daniel Muir’s Lanarkshire apprenticeship to life was his conversion to a brand of evangelical Presbyterianism. Indeed, this was to prove