The Cunninghame Graham Collection Series
Series Editors: Alan Macgillivray and John C. Mcintyre Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham first came to public attention as a Radical Liberal
Member of Parliament in the 1880s, when he was in his thirties.
The apparent contradiction between his Scottish aristocratic family
background and his vigorous attachment to the causes of Socialism, the
Labour movement, anti-Imperialism and Scottish Home Rule ensured that
he remained a controversial figure for many years right up to his death
in the 1930s. Through his father’s family of Cunninghame
Graham, descended from King Robert II of Scotland and the Earls of
Menteith, he had a strong territorial connection with the West of
Scotland. On his mother’s side, he had significant Hispanic
ties through his Spanish grandmother and a naval grandfather who took
part in the South American Wars of Liberation. His own world-wide
travels, particularly in the Americas, Spain and North Africa, and his
amazingly wide circle of friends and acquaintances in many countries
and different walks of life gave him a cosmopolitan breadth of
experience and a depth of insight into human nature and behaviour that
would be the envy of any writer.
And it is as a writer that we now have primarily to remember
Graham. His lasting political monuments are the Labour Party and
the Scottish National Party, both of which he was deeply involved in
founding. Yet he has to share that credit with others. His
literary works are his alone. He wrote books of history, travel
and biography which were extensively researched but very personal in
tone, so that, although highly readable, they might not easily
withstand the objective scrutiny of modern scholarship. Rather it
is in his favoured literary forms of the short story, sketch and
meditative essay, forms often tending to merge into one another, that
Graham excels. Over forty years, between 1896 and 1936, he
published fourteen collections of such short pieces, ranging over many
subjects and lands. With such a wealth of life experience behind
him, Graham did not have to dig deep for inspiration. Probably no
other Scottish writer of any age brings such a knowledge and awareness
of life’s diversity to the endeavour of literary creation.
However, the quality of his achievement has not as yet been fully
assessed. One reason is not hard to find. There has never
yet been a proper bringing together of Graham’s separate
collections into a manageable edition to provide the essential tools
for critical study. Consequently literary attention has never
been really focused on him, something for which the climate of
twentieth-century Scottish, and British, critical fashion is partly
responsible. Neither the Modernist movement nor the Scottish
Renaissance seems to be an appropriate pigeonhole for Graham to
inhabit. He has instead had to suffer the consequences of being
too readily stereotyped. Perhaps entranced by the glamour of his
apparent flamboyant persona of ‘Don Roberto’, the Spanish
hidalgo, the Argentine gaucho, the Scottish laird, the horseman -
adventurer, a succession of editors have republished incomplete
collections of stories and sketches selected more to reinforce an image
of Graham as larger-than-life legend rather than as the serious
literary man he worked hard to be.
The purpose
of this series is to make Graham’s literary corpus
available in a convenient format to modern readers as he originally
intended it. Each collection of stories is kept intact, and they
appear in chronological order with Graham’s own footnotes, and
retaining his personal idiosyncrasies and eccentricities of language
and style. It is not the intention of the editors to make
magisterial judgements of quality or to present a fully annotated
critical edition of the stories. These purposes would go far
beyond the bounds of this series in space and time, and must remain as
tasks for future scholars. We merely hope that a new generation
of general readers will discover Graham’s short stories and
sketches to be interesting and stimulating for their own sake and in
their own right, diverse and revealing of a strong and generally
sympathetic personality, a richly-stocked original mind and an ironic,
realistic yet sensitive observer of the amazing variety of life in a
very wide world.
The Cunninghame Grahame Society
Please click on the title for further information.
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