Ballantyne, Hermione

By Catherine Jones

Critical Essay

Late in 1843, Chambers's Edinburgh Journal published two articles under the heading ‘Rambling Reminiscences of Sir Walter Scott and Some of His Friends’, which were attributed in an introductory note to ‘Mrs John Ballantyne’. In choosing to be known as the author of the memoirs by this designation, Hermione Ballantyne (or her editor) sought to emphasise her privileged knowledge of Scott's character and certain of his friends on account of her first marriage. John Ballantyne had played, with his brother James, a central role in the career of the ‘Wizard of the North’. The friendship of both brothers with Scott dated back to schooldays in Kelso. James Ballantyne was Scott's printer from 1799, and it was at Scott's suggestion that he had given up his newspaper business in Kelso and moved his printing operation to Edinburgh in 1803. Scott was made a partner of the firm in 1805, though this was not publicly known (Millgate, p.28). John Ballantyne became a clerk in his brother's printing house in 1806, and until his death in 1821, he collaborated with Scott and James Ballantyne in different aspects of commercial publishing. In her memoirs, Hermione Ballantyne describes the ‘solemn’ and ‘inquisitorial’ meetings which took place between the three men in Trinity Grove, a villa belonging to her husband on the outskirts of Edinburgh: ‘mirth was excluded to make way for care, and ledgers, and account-books, and long bills, and longer faces’. On one occasion, she recalls unexpectedly encountering Scott in the garden of her home:

He was steering along on his magic staff with rapid strides, his eyes fixed on the ground, and muttering some incantation which I could not hear. Fearing to annoy him, I was on the point of making my escape by another walk, when we met vis-à vis; and extending his kind generous hand to me, he shook mine cordially, asked me how I did, and if John were at home? Being aware how matters stood, and that he was so completely in a reverie as scarcely to know where he was, or who he was, I made some hasty evasive answer, and escaped into the house. I told my husband of this curious rencontre: he laughed heartily at the idea of Scott asking me if he were ‘at home,’ having left him but a few moments previously. He dismissed me hastily, as we heard the point of the ‘Wizard's’ wand as it struck the ground. ‘Poor Watty,’ said my husband, ‘has got the bill-fever; run away or you will catch it.’

(Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 613, Saturday October 28, 1843, p.324, p.325)

Reverie, with its Romantic associations of creativity, is re-described in this anecdote as a state of illness occasioned by paper money and speculation. ‘Bill-fever’ would reach its apogee for Scott in late 1825, during the severe financial crisis that led to the bankruptcy of some banks and countless businesses and individuals. In a chain reaction of bankruptcies among publishers, Scott became liable for the debts of James Ballantyne's printing and publishing business and for discounted bills, which he had endorsed, of Archibald Constable and Company and Hurst Robinson and Company. John Ballantyne had died in 1821, and did not witness Scott's ruin and the downfall of his brother's printing house. Yet his prediction concerning the contagious nature of bill-fever would prove all too accurate.

Scott responded to the financial crisis by setting himself the task of writing to pay off a debt which has been calculated at over £126,000: ‘My own right hand shall do it’ (Journal, p.65). Although Scott's biographer and son-in-law J.G. Lockhart would represent his subject in his 1837 Life as the victim of ‘blind over-confidence in the management of the two Ballantynes’ (Lockhart, p.4), Scott himself took the financial disaster on his own shoulders . He remained loyal to James Ballantyne, insisting in a letter to the publisher Robert Cadell that the printer should not be abandoned in any future projects. ‘I need not remind you’, he writes on 3 January 1838, ‘that we three are like the shipwrecked crew of a vessell cast upon a desolate island and fitting up out of the remains of a gallant vessell such a cock-boat as will transport us to some more hospitable shore. Therefore we are bound by the strong tie of common misfortune to help each other in so far as the claim of self preservation will permit & I am happy to think the plank is large enough to float us all’ (Letters, 10: 354). John Ballantyne would have been of Scott's shipwrecked crew had he survived. That friendship and the ‘strong tie of common misfortune’ would lead Hermione Ballantyne to approach Scott for assistance in 1830 through one of the trustees of her husband's estate, Duncan Cowan. Writing to Cowan on 3 October 1830, Hermione Ballantyne describes herself as being in ‘actual want’, having received no money from the estate for three years. Although remarried, her second husband John Glover had become insolvent, and she had to support him entirely out of an income of £44 per annum:

Can nothing be remitted to me from the Estate? God knows I am almost heart-broken. When my husband died, Sir Walter Scott sent me a message by Mr. James Ballantyne, desiring me - if ever I wanted his assistance, to apply to him - alas! that time is come. I know Sir Walter's kind heart, and I think that if it be in his power to do so, he will suggest some plan or other to assist me. I therefore particularly request that you will immediately state the case to him, and let me know the result with all other matters concerning my affairs.

(NLS MS 3914, f.101)

Scott secured financial aid for Ballantyne, and it is also likely that he encouraged her to turn her facility in poetic composition to profit. In her memoirs for Chamber's Edinburgh Journal, Ballantyne recalls Scott's ‘applause’ of an epigram she composed at Trinity Grove (‘Epigraph on a Dyer's Wife’). On receiving financial assistance from Scott, she wrote a verse epistle of thanks in which she asks in a tone of mock seriousness his opinion of her poetic skill. Her ‘Muse’ presents its ‘suit’:

‘And now - great Bard, thy thoughts I'd sift -
‘With thee - hold close confab ----
‘Dost think that I have any "gift,"
‘Save merely - "of the Gab?"
‘To Common Sense, when I appeal'd,
‘She struck me off at once,
‘With the whole weight of Wisdom's shield,
‘As a decided dunce!!
‘But Vanity each line approves
‘Unqualified her praise -
‘She every obstacle removes,
‘And crowns me with the bays! [...]

‘I humbly beg thee, to decide
‘This point, without delay!
‘Shoulds't thou condemn - my task is o'er! -
‘The bare idea's shocking!
‘For never rhyme will I make more,
‘But ... darn my old blue stocking!

(NLS MS 922, f20)

Scott's reply does not survive, but 1832 saw the appearance of Ballantyne's first publication, The Kelso Souvenir: or, Selections from Her Scrap-Book. (Entirely Original.) By A Lady. The title-page epigraph from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet hints at the straightened financial circumstances of the poet: ‘My poverty, but not my will, consents.’ In the light of the Ballantyne-Scott correspondence, it is likely that The Kelso Souvenir was conceived as a money-making venture.

The title of the collection shows a shrewd awareness of literary fashion. In 1825 Alaric Watts had begun an annual, The Literary Souvenir, or Cabinet of Poetry and Romance, which created a gathering of verse, prose, and engraved plates that had been popular since Rudolph Ackermann had introduced the Forget Me Not, a Christmas and New Year's Present for 1823. The Literary Souvenir, which earned Watts the title of Father of the Annuals, sold 6,000 copies in two weeks on its appearance in 1825: the following year's edition reached 10,000, and at its peak, the Literary Souvenir attained a circulation of 15,000 copies. Notwithstanding the language of gift that surrounded the annuals, they were, as Peter J. Manning argues, ‘commercial projects [...] which [...] were widely publicized to create the very need they claimed to answer’ (Manning, p.45). Writing as Christopher North in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in January 1825, John Wilson advocated the purchase of The Literary Souvenir:

Do you wish to give a small earnest graceful gift to some dearly-beloved one, then thank us for the happy hint, and with a kiss, or if that be not permissible, at least with a smile of severest suavity [...] lay the Literary Souvenir upon her tender lap, with a few words, which it would be impertinent is us to particularize; only be sure, ‘you breathe them not far from her delicate auricle;’ and with a low, a deep, and a pleading tone, like the Knight who won the bright and beauteous Genevieve. It is a hundred to one that you are a married man in six weeks or two months; nay, if it be a ‘large paper copy,’ one flesh will ye be before the new moon.

( Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1829, 17 (1825), 94)

Ballantyne suggests through the allusive title of her collection that The Kelso Souvenir will share the ‘earnest’ and ‘graceful’ characteristics of The Literary Souvenir, if not its eroticism: The Kelso Souvenir is, after all, ‘By A Lady’.

Situated at a confluence of the Tweed and Teviot rivers, the town of Kelso has a famously romantic aspect. As John Sutherland describes in his biography of Scott, ‘The town is dominated by the picturesquely ruined abbey. The ruin of Roxburgh Castle is distinctly visible’ (Sutherland, p.24). Like her first husband, Hermione Ballantyne came from Kelso, and the title of her collection suggests that its miscellaneous verses will form a token of remembrance or ‘keepsake’ of the place. However, there are no topographical poems in the collection that recall the distinctive Kelso landscape or its picturesque ruins, and only one in which the town is named (‘The Dandy in Kelso’). Instead, it is York Minster, the ruins of Peel Castle in the Isle of Man, and the ruins of St Andrews that prompt Ballantyne's sentimental effusions. Yet just as the word ‘souvenir’ could be exploited for its association with the popular annual, Kelso had potentially valuable associations in mercantile terms with Scott's literary production. An early translation of Scott's from the German of J.W. von Goethe, ‘The Earl King’, had first appeared in 1798 in the Kelso Mail, which was printed and edited by James Ballantyne. The following year, Scott had printed at the Kelso Mail Office An Apology for Tales of Terror, a slim volume which contained poems by Scott destined for a long-delayed project of Matthew Lewis. And, most significantly, 1802-3 saw the appearance of Scott's three-volume collection, the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, published in London by Cadell and Davies, in Edinburgh by Constable, but printed by Ballantyne in Kelso. ‘When the book came out’, Scott recalled in 1830, ‘the imprint, Kelso, was read with wonders by amateurs of typography, who had never heard of such a place, and were astonished at the example of handsome printing which so obscure a town produced’ (Poetical Works, 1: 77). If Scott and James Ballantyne had established Kelso on the literary map, Hermione Ballantyne sought to exploit the town's rise from obscurity for the marketing of her collection.

The Kelso Souvenir alludes to early works of the Kelso press. The speaker in ‘The Robin’ is soothed in ‘melancholy hours’ by the bird's ‘Border Minstrelsy’, which is italicised to draw attention to its inversion of a literary title, the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The dandy of ‘The Exquisite of 1824’ is described in language drawn from An Apology for Tales of Terror, which had introduced its reader to mischievous spirits of German superstition. In a prefatory note to ‘The Erl King’, reprinted from the Kelso Mail for the collection, Scott describes how these spirits were supposed to preside over the different elements, and amused themselves with inflicting calamities on human beings. ‘One of these’, he writes, ‘is termed the WATER-KING, another the FIRE-KING, and a third the CLOUD-KING. The Hero of the present piece is the ERL or OAK-KING — a Fiend who is supposed to dwell in the recesses of the forest, and thence to issue forth upon the benighted traveller to lure him to his destruction’ (An Apology for Tales of Terror, p.1). Ballantyne recalls this note in ‘The Exquisite of 1824’, invoking the spirit of the fire-king for satiric purpose, to ridicule the ‘modern beau’:

He's like a spout - a furnace - any thing -
A sort of water kelpy or fire-king,
Reeking and puffing both in front and rear,
Half smother'd in his own dense atmosphere.

(Kelso Souvenir, p.82)

Ballantyne's alignment of the dandy with the spirits of German superstition may be interpreted as a repudiation of Scott's interest in the gothic and his use of gothic conventions in his metrical romances and novels. Yet other poems in The Kelso Souvenir are deliberate imitations of the gothic ballad, notably the four ‘Tales’ of the collection: ‘The Gibbet’, ‘The Old Oak Chest’, ‘Guy Geoffrey’, and ‘The Spectre Knight’. The last of these, ‘The Spectre Knight’, is a late re-writing of the popular supernatural ballad ‘Lenore’ by Gottfried Bürger, which was translated by Scott, amongst others, in the 1790s. ‘Said To Have Been Found On The Field Of Waterloo’, Ballantyne's poem also invokes Scott's visit to the field of Waterloo in 1815 and his acquisition of a manuscript collection of French songs, which had been picked up from the battlefield. (Scott incorporated translations from the collection into his 1816 travel narrative, Paul's Letters to His Kinsfolk.)

While it is possible to group individual poems in Ballantyne's collection under thematic or generic headings, such as gothic imitation, The Kelso Souvenir is fragmentary in its conception. Ballantyne deliberately separates works that are thematically or generically linked to create a desultory impression, one summed up in the subtitle, ‘scrap-book’. The cultivated desultoriness of the enterprise might form one explanation for Ballantyne's fall from view as a poet in the Victorian era: her poetry was not included in any of the major anthologies of the nineteenth century. Neither was the collection reviewed in the years immediately following its appearance. This might be due to the death of Scott in 1833, which deprived Ballantyne of a patron who could promote her work through the influential periodicals of the day. But Ballantyne could also be accused of failing to establish anything resembling an ‘original’ aesthetic; instead, she tries on voices and poses as others try on clothes. ‘My Dream’, for example, which is oddly subtitled ‘A Literal Fact’, reads less as a narrative of authentic experience than as an echo of earlier Romantic dream poetry, such as S.T. Coleridge's, or Thomas De Quincey's autobiographical prose-poetry, with its characteristic hyperaesthetic and hypnagogic dream vistas. The group of poems entitled ‘Fables’ reinvigorate a distinctively Scottish tradition that goes back to Robert Henryson, but the humour is strained and the satire less than sharp.

Perhaps the most powerful of her poems are those which connect with directness and immediacy to the historical or social circumstance of her time. ‘Napoleon's Grave’, for example, avoids sentimentality in its evocation of the ‘lone desert Isle’ that is the ‘funeral pile’ of the great conqueror. The short satiric poem ‘Impromptu, On Being Told That Human Bones Were Used In Making Bread’, is disturbing in its consideration of the age's ‘march of mind’ against the activities of William Burke, who, with his accomplice William Hare, murdered vagrants and strangers to supply anatomists in Edinburgh with subjects at £7 to £10 a time:

The present age is so refin'd
That what may be the ‘march of mind’
Can with no certainty be said.
Our nearest neighbours now we kill,
Subjects for anatomic skill,
And grind their bones to make our bread!
We're coming on, no doubt, apace -
And haply the succeeding race,
Though food for worms, may cheat 'em;
All of the Gothic we retain,
Is, that till more of ‘March' we gain,
We KILL our friends before we eat 'em.
Who knows when at the very summit we arrive,
Of this said ‘March,’ but we may EAT OUR FRIENDS ALIVE!

(Kelso Souvenir, p.71)

Such poems show Ballantyne responding to specific events (in this case the Burke and Hare scandal) and the more general cultural milieu of post-Enlightenment Scotland in a voice that is free from impersonation or imitation. The Kelso Souvenir is, at its best, a remembrance of its writer's fragmentary perceptions of the complexities and strangeness of the spirit of the age.

Works Cited

Manuscripts

Ballantyne, Hermione, letter to Duncan Cowan, 3 October 1830, National Library of Scotland MS 3914 f.101
--- verse epistle to Walter Scott, signed Hermione July 1831, National Library of Scotland MS 922 f.20

Published Works

The Kelso Souvenir: or, Selections from Her Scrap-Book. (Entirely Original.) By A Lady. (Kelso and Edinburgh, 1832)
--- ‘Rambling Reminiscences of Sir Walter Scott and Some of His Friends’, Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 613,
Saturday October 28, 1843, pp.324-25 and No. 614, Saturday November 4, 1843, pp.332-333 Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Edinburgh, 1817-)
Lockhart, J.G., The Ballantyne-Humbug Handled, In a Letter to Sir Adam Ferguson. By the Author of the Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1839)
Manning, Peter J., ‘Wordsworth in the Keepsake, 1829’, in Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. by John O. Jordan and Robert L. Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp.44-73
Millgate, Jane, Scott's Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1987)
Scott, Walter, ed., An Apology for Tales of Terror (Kelso, 1799)
Scott, Walter, The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 12 vols (Edinburgh, 1833-34)
--- The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., ed. by H.J.C. Grierson and others, 12 vols (London, 1932-37)
--- The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. by W.E.K. Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972)
Sutherland, John, The Life of Walter Scott (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995)

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