ABSTRACT
This assault on familial relationships can be found in an obscure and ostensibly anonymous work, Home: A Novel, published in York and London late in 1802 in five duodecimo volumes, and sold at a cost of £1. The writer was identified by the Monthly Review as ‘Miss Cullen, a native of the northern part of our island’, and was Margaret Cullen, the daughter of William Cullen, Professor of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh from 1755 to 1789, and his wife Anna Johnston.3 Home was widely reviewed; there were two further editions by 1804 and the novel was also published in Philadelphia in 1813.4 Yet it has not previously been viewed as a Scottish novel. Perhaps it was the triteness of the title, suggesting a conventionally sentimental tale, that brought it obscurity in later generations. Pam Perkins has also noted that Scottish women’s fiction at the end of the eighteenth century remains less visible than that written by English women.5 Yet Home should be recognized as a distinctively Scottish intervention in a British debate. The Cullen family was at the heart of the Enlightenment in Scotland, though it was deeply divided both
personally and politically from the early 1790s. Margaret Cullen’s onslaught on the present state of the family as ‘a Prison in which the Virtuous are condemned to associate with the Vicious’ draws upon her own familial experiences. At the same time, in her hopes for a different future in which the family home might become ‘the most delightful Asylum of Man’, she shares the reforming spirit of the many women writers who contributed to the ‘war of ideas’ of the 1790s and early 1800s, to use the phrase which Marilyn Butler employed in 1975 for the literary exchanges between radicals and conservatives in the aftermath of the French Revolution.6 Cullen also uses the language of the Scottish Enlightenment, united with a republican politics that reflected the Foxite Whiggism of most of her family. And, alone among the contributors to the debate of the 1790s, she used her knowledge of the distinctiveness of Scottish family law – and in particular, the availability of divorce, for women as well as men – to indicate one possible direction for the reform of the family.7
