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A look at Sir Walter Scott and work of the 18th century
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From the course by University of Virginia
Plagues, Witches, and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction
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From the lesson
What is Historical Fiction?
In this module Professor Holsinger details the history of the historical fiction novel through the 18th and 19th centuries.
Meet the Instructors
Bruce HolsingerProfessor
English
The events of Scottish history and the flourishing of
history writing in the 18th century were also what
led Sir Walter Scott to write Waverley, an enormously
influential historical novel from the early decades of the genre.
If you read any scholarly account of the history of historical fiction,
you'll see that Waverley has a special place in its origins and development.
For a long time the book was considered the first historical novel, in fact.
And while most literary historians today would now quibble
with that designation, Waverley has to have a
central role in any serious treatment of historical fiction.
Indeed, Scott was well aware that the novel would form a
kind of literary experiment and he initially chose to remain anonymous.
As he would put it later, once his identity
was known, my original motive for publishing the work
anonymously was the consciousness that it was an experiment
on the public taste which might very probably fail.
And therefore there was no occassion to take on my
self the personal risk of discomfurture.
Waverley, published in 1814, is a story of war, family and rebellion.
The novel takes as its protagonist a man named Edward Waverley,
a romantic and idealistic young soldier serving in the English army.
The story is set around the year 1745, during the great Jacobite Uprising.
This was a conflict sparked by competing claims
to the British monarchy between different aristocratic factions and
divided loyalties between Whigs and Tories that
also reached down to divide families from within.
The Jacobites are led by Charles Edward Stuart,
or the Young Pretender, who was the grandson
of King James the second seeking to regain
the throne with the help of the Scottish Highlanders.
Edward Waverley is the son of a Whig who works in the
Hanoverian bureaucracy, but he's also the nephew of a Tory with Jacobite sympathies.
The novel follows Waverley as he journey from the south
of England to the Scottish Highlands, eventually taking
part in the rebellion for the Jacobite cause.
Given its setting in a climate of war and rebellion, it's no
surprise that Waverley contains many scenes
of high stakes and dramatic tension.
It was Scott's attempt to recreate in an authentic way the circumstances of the
Jacobite uprising that lent the novel a lot of its adventurous appeal to readers.
Here, for example, is a scene from the beginning of chapter 31 when Edward
is being interrogated by a certain major
Melville about his involvement with the highlanders.
I am not your judge Mr. Waverley, your examination will be transmitted elsewhere.
And now to proceed, do you know a person that
passes by the name of Wily Will or Will Ruthven?
I never heard of such a name til this moment, he responds.
Did you never through such a person, or any other person, communicate
with Sergeant Humphry Houghton, instigating him to desert, with as many of
his comrades as he could seduce to join him, and unite with the
Highlanders and other rebels now in arms under the command of the Young Pretender?
I assure you I am not only entirely guiltless of the plot
you have laid to my charge, but I detest it from the
very bottom of my soul, nor would I be guilty of such
treachery to gain a throne, either for myself or any other man alive.
Yet, when I consider this envelope in the handwriting of one
of those misguided gentlemen who are now in arms against their
country, and the verses which it enclosed I
cannot, but find some analogy between the enterprise
I have mentioned ad the exploit of Vogon,
which the writer seems to expect,you should imitate.
Waverley was struck with the coincidence, but denied that the wishes or expectations
of the letter writer, were to be regarded as proofs of a charge, otherwise
[UNKNOWN].
So here we have an intense scene
of interrogation, and the stakes couldn't be higher.
Our protagonist is caught with a seized
envelope bearing the handwriting of a known traitor,
accused of conspiring with the Highlanders against the
king of England, and imprisoned for his treachery.
When you read these kinds of scenes in Waverley,
you can't help but be struck by their immediacy.
And while Scott's language and sense of humor can feel a
bit antiquated, even for fans of 19th century fiction, there's a still
palpable sense of authenticity that pervades the novel and lends it a
historical weight that was hard to find in other novels of Scott's time.
Sir Walter Scott was very well aware of the idiom of authenticity
he was inventing for Waverly and what it demanded from the author.
Here I want to bring out the novel's subtitle, shown in this slide
on the title page from the first edition, Waverley or Tis Sixty Years Since.
That period of 60 years is a very important
one, for Scott is not writing about ancient history or about a history 3 or 4
centuries past as Sophia Lee was, but about
a relatively recent period in the British past.
Scott frames this decision to go back just 60 years and
write his particular version of historical fiction as a deliberate literary choice.
By fixing, then, the date of my story 60 years
before the present 1st November 1805, I would have my readers
understand, that they will meet in the following pages neither
a romance of chivalry, nor a tale of modern manners.
That my hero will neither have iron on his shoulders as of yore, nor on
the heels of his boots, as is the present fashion of Bond Street; and that my
damsels will neither be clothed in purple and in pall, like the Lady Alice of
an old ballad, nor reduced to the primitive
nakedness of a modern fashionable at a rout.
From this, my choice of an era the understanding critic may farther presage,
that the object of my tale is more a description of men than manners.
A tale of manners, to be interesting, must either refer
to antiquity so great as to have become venerable, or it
must bear a vivid reflection of those scenes which are
passing daily before our eyes, and are interesting from their novelty.
Scott, in other words, was writing neither
a medieval chivalric romance nor a modern
novel of manners, think Jane Austen, his contemporary.
Nor is he writing an ancient epic, Scott's intent, that
is, is to write about history, but not ancient history.
The setting is old enough to establish real distance from the characters at
play, but recent enough that we can
recognize them as very much like ourselves.
60 years then implies a kind of historical distancing that allows
the past to be the past, without becoming a foreign
country utterly remote from the presence of Scott's contemporary readership.
Yet Scott could get quite defensive about his choice of historical setting.
Waverley has been criticized many times for
its tedium, particularly in the first few chapters.
If you've read these chapters already, you'll know why.
It can feel as if the novel has a
hard time getting started and Scott is constantly pausing
to defend his choice of theme and subject.
Here's an example from chapter five as the author compares the meandering course
of his narrative to the rough course of a vehicle on a road.
I beg pardon, once and for all, of
those readers who take up novels merely for amusement,
for plaguing them so long with old fashioned
politics, and Whig and Tory, and Hanoverians and Jacobites.
The truth is, I cannot promise them that this story shall
be intelligible, not to say probable, without it.
My plan requires that I should explain the motives on which its action proceeded;
and these motives necessarily arose from the
feelings, prejudices, and parties of the times.
I do not invite my fair readers into a
flying chariot drawn by hippogriffs or moved by enchantment.
Mine is a humble English post-chaise, drawn
upon four wheels, and keeping his Majesty's highway.
Those who are contented to remain with me will be occasionally exposed to
the dullness inseparable from heavy roads,
steep hills, sloughs, and other terrestrial retardations.
But with tolerable horses and a civil driver, as the
advertisements have it, I engage to get as soon as possible
into a more picturesque and romantic country, if my passengers
incline to have some patience with me during my first stages.
The narrative
of the historical novel then, can be imagined as a ride in a post-chaise.
Not a magical flight on a chariot drawn
through the sky through by legendary or mythical
creatures, but a rough somewhat uncomfortable journey on
a wheeled vehicle along the roads of Britain.
These roads are bumpy, the ride can be dull, and all this can take some
getting used to at first, but the rewards
of beautiful and romantic vista on the past.
And part of what makes this vista so compelling
I think, and this is an element of all great historical fiction,
is the wealth of authentic detail that readers found in the novel.
In Waverley this comes apart in little flourishes,
like this one at the end of chapter
five, when Edward Waverley is leaving his ancestral
home and his aunt Rachel gives him a ring.
She concluded her farewell with a kind and moving benediction, and gave the young
officer, as a pledge of her regard, a valuable diamond ring, often worn by
the male sex at that time, and a purse of broad gold pieces,
which were more common 60 years since than they have been of late.
You'll see this kind of language all over the novel, which is sprinkled
with historical details about dress, custom, daily
life in the household and so on.
As with any author of historical fiction though, Scott got got into some trouble
with his readers for getting some details wrong, and I'll show you just one example.
It comes during the banquet scene in Chapter 11 when one of the
characters the Laird of Killancureit is
speaking about animal husbandry and land use.
As Scott writes, Killancureit talked, in a steady
unalterable dull key, of top-dressing and bottom-dressing, and year-olds,
and gimmers, and dimmonts, and stots, and runts,
and kyloes, and a proposed turnpike-act and so on.
Scott is filling Killancureit's
talk with all kinds of Highland's jargon here.
A gimmer is a yearling female sheep, a dimmont, a young castrated ram, and so on.
Notice that asterisk just after the
phrase top-dressing and bottom-dressing, which refer
to specific farming techniques having to do with the placement of fertilizer.
In later editions of the novel, Scott dropped a footnote at this point
that reads this has been censured as an anachronism, and it must be
confessed that agriculture of this kind was unknown to the Scotch 60 years since.
A trivial detail maybe, but if you're one of those readers
who cringes whenever you find this kind of error in a
historical novel, you'll recognize the gesture and I hope sympathize with
it, because it's been part of historical fiction from the very beginning.
It's no surprise that Scott became greatly admired for the rigor of
his research and the wealth of historical sources he used to construct
the world he recreated in the pages of Waverely.
In fact, if you read through the novel's original notes, you'll
be really dazzled by the wealth of historical sources that he sites.
Inscriptions on swords and other old metal works, personal memoirs
in both print and manuscript, and the list goes on.
And the early editions of Waverley come complete with the glossary of
old Scott's terms the author uses to lend authenticity to this account,
from aits for oats, to yate for gate.
In its immediate success on the literary marketplace, Waverley became a remarkable
testament to the power of historical fiction in shaping the public imagination.
One of the results of the novel's triumph was that Sir Walter Scott became a
Scottish national hero, who's still remembered today as
an unparalleled advocate for Scottish history and culture.
This is a shot of the Walter Scott memorial
in Edinburgh, Scotland, a neo-gothic spire 200 feet
high that towers over this part of the city.
It is embellished with stone likenesses of some of Scott's
most beloved characters from Waverley and other of his works.
But not everyone was so agilatory of Scott.
Jane Austen was a reluctant, grudging admirer, including this tongue
in cheek assessment in a letter to one of her sisters.
Walter Scott
has no business to write novels, especially good ones.
It is not fair.
He has fame and profit enough as a poet and
should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths.
I do not like him, and do not mean to
like Waverley if I can help it, but fear I must.
Mark Twain, on the other hand, saw Scott's version of romantic historicism
as a curse responsible for promoting
a bastardised version of chivalry throughout the
American South, and leading to an idiom of Southern
gentility tinged with class privilege, unearned aristocracy, and racism.
You can find links to these more skeptical
appraisals of Scott's influence under the Readings tab.
So to summarize, the historical novel has multiple points of origin.
In the English Literary tradition, two of these can be
found in Sophia Lees, The Recess and Sir Walter Scott's, Waverley.
Very different examples of historical fiction
that speak to distinctive aspects of a genres
that emerges in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Do take a look at my conversation
with Michael McKean for a more in-depth consideration
of the governing notions of history, realism,
and so on that play in this period.
In the next lecture I'll talk about historical fiction as a global genre.
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