Sir Walter Scott
The Quarterly Review, founded by Scott, greeted the anonymous Waverley (1814) as
‘a Scotch Castle Rackrent’ but ‘in a much higher strain’.Waverley; Or, ’Tis Sixty Years
Since deals with a larger subject more directly, the Jacobite Rising of 1745, in which
Bonnie Prince Charlie, backed by Highland clans loyal to the deposed House of
Stuart, advanced as far as Derby before retreat and defeat. (The Rising was sixty-nine
years since, but Scott had begun and abandoned Wav e r l e yin 1805.)
Scott’s initial approach is oblique, establishing Edward Waverley as a decent young
English gentleman who has spent his youth, like Cervantes’s Don Quixote, reading
romances of chivalry. He is an impressionable blank page. Finding himself in
Scotland with his detachment of Dragoons, he is charmed by Scottish hospitality and
manners, and by Rose Bradwardine. He is then captivated by Highland life, and smit-
ten with Flora MacIvor, whom he sees in the glen in a scene of ‘romantic wildness’:
Here, like one of those lovely forms which decorate the landscapes of Poussin, Waverley
found Flora gazing at the waterfall. Two paces further back stood Cathleen, holding a
small Scottish harp, the use of which had been taught to Flora by Rory Dall, one of the
last harpers in the Western Highlands. The sun now stooping in the west, gave a rich and
varied tinge ....Eventually he joins Flora’s bold brother Fergus in the Prince’s army. He orders a pair
of tartan trews (a compromise between English trousers and Highland kilt), and sees
bloody action. He gradually sees that he is being used by Fergus. Captured, Fergus
and his clansmen face death bravely. Flora becomes a Benedictine nun in Paris.
Waverley marries Rose Bradwardine: a happy Union! But the orotund prose is not
naïvel y Romantic: the too-picturesque vision by the waterfall is presented with some
irony. Like Don Quixote and Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Waverley falls for images
from books.The making of the trews by James of the Needle is a parody of the
arming of an epic hero. The tragic Highland romance is set inside a political British
novel about a young Englishman who wisely marries a Lowland Scot.
Scott’s success was immediate, immense, international.Waverley was followed by
twenty-five Scottish historical novels, notably The Antiquary (1816),Old Mortality
(1816),The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and Redgauntlet (1824), and English
medieval romances, beginning with Ivanhoe (1819); also numbers of plays, biogra-
phies, essays, and editions. Thanks to Scott, Edinburgh saw the Prince Regent in a
kilt (and pink tights) taking a dram of whisky: a swallow which made the summer
of Scottish tourism. Scott, the first Briton to be made a baronet for writing books,
may be the most influential of all British novelists. Among his firmest British admir-
ers were Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Stevenson and Hardy. Abroad he was
imitated by Fenimore Cooper, Dumas, Tolstoy, Manzoni and by a host of play-
wrights and composers of opera. His historical novels use a new social history to re-
create the past through characters imaginary and real. He combined wide reading in
18th-century antiquarians with fluent composition and narrative. Leisurely and
detailed in exposition, he sets up several centres of interest; the action then develops
energy and drama. He made the past imaginable, with a sympathetic grasp of the
motives and influences shaping the actions of groups and individuals. His character-
ization is benign, detached, shrewd, humorous, owing much to 18th-century theatri-
cal traditions of external representation, but very wide in its social scope, with
pungent low-life characters. His reconstruction of how things happen in history is
broad, penetrating and subtle, and his plots are expertly managed. In his Scottish
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