Sowing the Seeds
Six Months Before Kailyard
In April 1895, J.H. Millar coined the term “Kailyard” in the New Review, grouping Crockett, Barrie, and Ian Maclaren under a single dismissive heading. The label stuck. It shaped how Scottish fiction of the 1880s and 1890s was discussed for generations — and in many quarters still does.
What this exhibition has shown is that the instruments of that dismissal were fully operational six months earlier. Consider the double standard applied to folk sources. The amplification of an unverified accusation across connected periodical networks. The deployment of Stevenson as a yardstick Crockett could never quite reach. The implication — never stated directly — that a working-class Free Kirk minister from Galloway was more likely an imitator than an originator. None of this was Millar’s invention. He inherited it.
Crockett won the argument of November 1894. He won it in print, with evidence, with openness about his sources, and with a piece of literary-critical reasoning — the Scott parallel — that any professional reviewer might have been proud to produce. His accusers retreated, disavowed responsibility, or hid behind initials.
Crockett went on to have incredible success. Those opposed to him would not let things lie. The seeds for Kailyard were sown in 1894.
‘Digging up the Kailyard’ suggests that by seeing Kailyard as a critical construct, a label which served cultural purposes, fed by personal and professional rivalry (and perhaps jealousies) we are in a better position to reappraise Crockett's considerable contribution to Scottish literature and cultural history. When the critical apparatus built against him is examined on its own terms, his crop looks entirely different.
All six items in the Academy sequence — Wallace’s review, Crockett’s response, Wallace’s reply, Crockett's further response, Lang’s interventions, and Nicoll’s corroboration — are available in full in the museum.
Dig deeper by visiting The Reading Room series.
The research continues.