of a royal pardon for her sister who is imprisoned in the Tolbooth of .... Crusades, Scott's story portrays the clash of Western medieval values and ...... 1839 a large banquet was held in Irvine to congratulate Lord Eglinton on his momentous.
GREAT SCOTT! PICTURING THE PAST THROUGH THE WAVERLEY NOVELS By Lillian M. Elliott
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2016
ABSTRACT With over two hundred years between the Waverley Novels and us, it is difficult to understand just what Walter Scott – Wizard of the North, Laird of Abbotsford, the Enchanter, the Great Unknown, and, of course, the beloved Author of Waverley – meant to the nineteenth century. Critical discussions about Scott and the literary and social contexts in which he lived abound. However, these extant studies ignore the numerous modes of visual reproduction that were influenced by or sought to replicate the Waverley Novels throughout the progression of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, what these creative endeavors have had to say about Scott as an author has, for the better part of a century, gone unnoticed – until now. This thesis seeks to legitimize Scott’s role as an active force within the purview of popular nineteenth century visual culture. It is through this lens that the present study breaks new ground. I focus on the aesthetic principles that guided much of Scott’s literary output and explore the subsequent morphing of his texts into a number of different visual media. Each of these derivative forms, I argue, has played an integral part in the collective understanding of Scott’s works and can be useful in fleshing out the multiplicity of meanings that were once, or still are, attached to his fictional oeuvre. The three chapters that constitute the body of this thesis have been organized in such a way as to offer a profound sense of the different visual platforms that drive his legacy. Biography Lillian M. Elliott is an undergraduate instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Liberal Arts. Before attaining her M.A., Elliott received a B.A. in Art History and European Studies from DePauw University in Greencastle IN. In 2013, Elliott was awarded the SAIC Writing Across the Curriculum Fellowship, a position that assists SAIC instructors in the teaching of written argumentation and analysis. In addition to her time spent with the school, Elliott has also enjoyed providing research assistance for the Prints and Drawings Department at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Howard County Historical Society in her hometown, Kokomo IN. Thesis Committee Advisor: Margaret MacNamidhe, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism (2012) Second Reader: Bess Williamson, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism (2012) Third Reader: Timothy Wittman, Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism; Historic Preservation (1994)
TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures……………………………………………………..…..i A Timeline of the Waverley Novels………………………………….iii Introduction…………………………………………………………....1 Chapter One: A Uniquely Portable Magic………………………….....6 Chapter Two: The Waverley Novels and the Antiquarian Romance..............................................................................................39 Chapter Three: Envisioning Scott-Land…………………….……….75 Bibliography………………………………………………………..104
LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. The Scott Centenary: A Dream of the Waverley Novels, A. Hunt, 1871, The Illustrated London News
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Figure 2. Playbill from Edinburgh’s Theatre Royal, 1820, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland.
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Figure 3. For the Play of the Heart of Midlothian: Six Scenes, Alexander Nasmyth, 1820, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland.
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Figure 4. “Aristocratic Sense; Or the Eglinton Tomfooleryment,” Cleave’s Penny Gazette, 14 September 1839, The British Library, London.
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Figure 5. “The Eglinton Tournament: A Mock Heroic Ballad,” Alfred Crowquill, February 1840, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and American Monthly Review.
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Figure 6. An illustration from Richard Doyle’s The Tournament, Or, the Days of Chivalry Revived, 1840, The British Museum, London.
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Figure 7. Illustrated Title Page for Waverley; Or, Tis’ Sixty Years Since, W. Harvey, 1842, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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Figure 8. Ivanhoe, Charles Hunt, 1871, New York, Forbes Magazine Collection.
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Figure 9. Details of St. Peter’s Church in Oxon, Engraving for Archaeologia, 1779, vol. 1, page 151.
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Figure 10. A Curious Botanical Table, Engraving for Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1766, page 113.
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Figure 11. Detail of a massive footnote used by William Tytler in his “Dissertation on the Scottish Music,” Archaeologia Scotia or Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, vol. 1, 1792, page 477.
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Figure 12. Page taken from the “Appendix to the General Preface” of Waverley; Or Tis’ Sixty Years Since (Abbotsford Edition, 1842). Figure 13. Footnote taken from Ivanhoe (Abbotsford Edition, 1842) containing epistolary fragments from the “annuls of Queen Mary.”
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Figure 14. Officer of the Black Watch, J.S. Stuart, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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Figure 15. Highland Lady, J.S. Stuart, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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Figure 16. Swords From Battle Field of Culloden, Dickes, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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Figure 17. Highland Brogues (Shoes), McIan, 1842, from Rob Roy, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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Figure 18. Black Watch Pistols, Dickes, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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Figure 19. Gold Broad Pieces, Fairholt, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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Figure 20. Bonnet worn by the Prince at the Ball at Holyrood, 1745, J.S. Stuart, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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Figure 21. Signet Ring of the Prince, Dickes, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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Figure 22. The Prince’s Sporran; The Belt of the Time of the Knight’s Templars, Dickes, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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Figure 23. Rob Roy’s Gun, Dickes, 1842, from Rob Roy, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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Figure 24. Rob Roy’s Sporran or Purse, Dickes, 1842, from Rob Roy, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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A TIMELINE OF THE WAVERLEY NOVELS 1814
Scott anonymously publishes his first novel, Waverley; or Tis’ Sixty Years Since. Waverley is a coming of age story about a young Englishman, Edward Waverley, who ventures into the Scottish Highlands during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Taken by the nobility and fervor of the clansmen he encounters there, Waverley decides to abandon his post as an officer in the British army and join the Stuart cause. Flouted by the Scottish defeat at Culloden, however, Waverley returns home a more practically minded man.
1815
Publishes Guy Mannering; or the Astrologer under the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley.” Set in late eighteenth century Galloway, Scotland, Guy Mannering recounts the life story of one Harry Bertram, a young Scotsman who is kidnapped at the age of five by smugglers after witnessing the murder of an English customs officer. The story follows the fortunes and misadventures of Harry and his family across the span of seventeen years.
1816
Publishes The Antiquary under the pseudonym “The Author of "Waverley and Guy Mannering." Scott sets this tale in Scotland during the wars with revolutionary France. A mysterious man named “Lovel” begins an idle journey toward the seaside town of Fairport, Scotland. En route, he encounters an antiquary named Jonathan Oldbuck. Oldbuck befriends Lovel and thus sets out on an adventure to uncover the truth of his friend’s identity.
1816
Publishes The Black Dwarf. Having completed his “Scottish” trilogy consisting of Waverley, Guy Mannering, and The Antiquary, Scott tries another experiment on the reading public by adopting a fresh nom de plume, Jedediah Cleishbotham. Under this guise he begins a new subset of the Waverley series entitled the Tales of My Landlord. Set just after the Union of Scotland and England (1707), The Black Dwarf recounts the tale of Sir Edward Mauley, a social recluse feared by the locals of Liddesdale Hills in the remote Borders of Scotland.
1816
Publishes The Tale of Old Mortality as the second volume in the Tales of My Landlord series. This novel was originally conceived to accompany the Black Dwarf as a two-book set, but Scott’s manuscript grew to such length that it eventually became a separate publication. Set in 1679, Old Mortality presents a narrative account of the violent events surrounding
the military campaign of John Graham of Claverhouse against the Covenanting army. Scott was widely praised for this delineation of opposing forces. His narrative seeks to uncover the bigotry inherent in both Royalist and Covenanting personalities. 1817
Publishes Rob Roy under the reassumed pseudonym “The Author of Waverley.” Inspired by legends of the early eighteenth-century cateran, Rob Roy, this lively story is narrated by the character Frank Osbaldistone, the son of an English merchant who travels deep into the Scottish Highlands in search of his family’s stolen fortune. One of Scott’s highest grossing novels, Rob Roy was acclaimed for its honest portrayal of vernacular characters as well as the brutal social conditions of Highland life succeeding the union of 1707.
1818
Publishes The Heart of Midlothian as the “second series” in the Tales of My Landlord, a mere seven months after Rob Roy. Now considered to be one of Scott’s finest works, The Heart of Midlothian recounts the tale of Jeanie Deans, a humble dairymaid who travels to London on foot in search of a royal pardon for her sister who is imprisoned in the Tolbooth of Edinburgh. Set in 1736, Scott’s narrative highlights the socio-political turbulence of the years leading up to the Jacobite Rebellion.
1819
Publishes the Bride of Lammermoor as the “third series” installation in the Tales of My Landlord. Based on a local Scotch legend Scott had heard as a child, this novel takes place in the Lammermuir Hills of South-East Scotland in the late seventeenth century. Scott relates the tragic love affair between one Lucy Ashton and her family's sworn enemy, Sir Edgar Ravenswood. A hit among female readers in early the nineteenth century, The Bride of Lammermoor was a rumored favorite of the young Queen Victoria.
1819
Publishes A Legend of Montrose as the accompanying book in the “third series” installation of Tales of My Landlord. Set in 1644 in Perthshire and Argyll, the central plot is loosely based on the murder of Lord Kilmont by James Stewart of Ardvoirlich after the battle of Tippermuir. Much of the story infiltrates the Earl of Montrose’s 1644-5 Highland campaign, while Scott also relays the story of a love triangle, which has unfolded between the fictional characters Allan M'Aulay, his friend the Earl of Menteith, and Annot Lyle. Overshadowed by the success of Bride of Lammermoor, the novel received a markedly cool reception.
1819
Publishes Ivanhoe; A Romance under the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley.” Ivanhoe was the first historical novel in which Scott adopted a purely English subject, portraying the brutal conflict between Saxons and Normans during the reign of Richard I (1189-99). It is a tale of knighthood, chivalry, and romance. Of Scott’s twenty-seven historical novels, Ivanhoe was, without question, the one that gained greatest currency in the popular nineteenth century imagination. Translated into numerous languages, paintings, plays, and historical re-enactments, it marked the peak of Scott's international celebrity.
1820
Publishes The Monastery; A Romance under the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley.” This story revolves around the abbey of Kennaquhair in the years preceding the Reformation in Scotland and in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Pinkie (1547), a catastrophic defeat for the Scots at the hands of Henry VIII's English army. Much of the plot deals with the religious divisions occurring in Scotland at the time: between Catholicism, which favored the 'auld alliance' with France and the Protestantism, which desired closer links to England. Mary Queen of Scotts figures as a principal character in the tale.
1820
Publishes The Abbot under the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley.” Presented as a sequel to The Monastery, the novel takes place between July 1567 and May 1568, spanning the imprisonment of Mary Queen of Scots at Lochleven, her enforced abdication, her escape from the Castle, defeat at Langside, and subsequent flight to England.
1821
Publishes Kenilworth; A Romance under the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley.” Centered on the tragic events surrounding the secret marriage of Robert Dudley, First Earl of Leicester and Amy Rosbart, daughter of Sir Hugh Robsart, this novel takes place roughly around the year 1575 in the Elizabethan courts of England. Queen Elizabeth I figures as a principal character.
1822
Publishes The Pirate under the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley, Kenilworth, & c.” Scott’s tale is loosely based on the real-life events of John Gow, a notorious eighteenth century pirate. Set in a remote area of Shetland (which Scott had recently visited at the time), it recounts the romantic lives of two men, Mourdant Mertoun and Clement Cleveland and two sisters, Minna and Brenda Troil.
1822
Publishes The Fortunes of Nigel under the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley, Kenilworth, & c.” The plot of this novel concerns the efforts of Nigel Olifaunt, Lord Glenvarloch, to prevent the sale of his ancestral castle and estates. In order to do so, he travels to London to reclaim a large sum of money that was lent to King James I and VI by his late father.
1823
Publishes Perevil of the Peak under the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley, Kenilworth, & c.” The background to this novel is the socalled Popish Plot of 1678, when Jesuits were alleged to be planning the assassination of King Charles II in order to bring his Roman Catholic brother, the Duke of York (later King James II) to the throne. Scott’s story focuses on two Derbyshire landowners, Sir Geoffrey Peveril, an old Cavalier, and, Major Ralph Bridgenorth, a Puritan. Despite their opposing political and religious opinions, they are brought together through certain events dealing with the Civil War.
1823
Publishes Quentin Durward under the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley, Perevil of the Peak, & c.” Set in fifteenth-century France, it was Scott's first fictional venture onto the continent of Europe. The narrative relays the events surrounding the power-struggle between the Duchy of Burgundy and the Holy Roman Empire for possession of the thriving merchant city of Liège in modern-day Belgium. Louis XI of France and Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy figure as principal characters in the tale.
1824
Publishes Saint Ronan’s Well under the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley, Quentin Durward, & c.” The only one of Scott's novels set in the nineteenth-century, it portrays the fashionable society of the fictional spa-town of Saint Ronan's. The plot revolves around the enmity of two half-brothers, Valentine Bulmer and Francis Tyrrel.
1824
Publishes Redgauntlet; A Tale of the Eighteenth Century under the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley.” The last of Scott’s “Scottish” novels, Redgauntlet centers around a third, completely fictitious, Jacobite rebellion set in the summer of 1765. The novel's hero, young Darsie Latimer, is kidnapped by Edward Hugh Redgauntlet, a fanatical supporter of the Stuart cause, and finds himself caught up in the plot to install the exiled Bonnie Prince Charlie on the British throne.
1825
Publishes The Betrothed as part of a new Waverley series called Tales of the Crusaders. Continues to use the now famous pseudonym “The Author of Waverley.” Scott’s tale takes place in the Welsh marshes during the latter part of the reign of Henry II. Through a sequence of events Eveline, the 16-year-old daughter of Sir Raymond Berenger, is rescued from a Welsh siege by the forces of Damian Lacy. As payment for this kindness, however, she is unhappily betrothed to Lacy’s elderly uncle Sir Hugo, a crusader. Scott’s narrative deals with the events surrounding this union.
1825
Publishes The Talisman as the second book installation in the Tales of the Crusaders. Continues to use the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley.” Here Scott focuses on the Third Crusade, which had been triggered by the conquest in 1187 of almost the whole of Palestine, including Jerusalem, by Salah-ed-Din Yusef ibn Ayub or Saladin. The plot revolves around the Crusaders' camp in the Holy Land, which has recently been torn apart by dissension within the ranks, rival leaders, and the worsening illness of Richard the Lionheart. Amidst the chaos, one Scottish crusader Sir Kenneth, or the Knight of the Leopard forms an unlikely friendship with a Saracen emir.
1826
Publishes Woodstock; or The Cavalier, A Tale of the Year Sixteen Hundred and Fifty-one. Continues to use the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley.” Scott’s narrative was inspired by the well-known legend of the Good Devil of Woodstock, a supernatural being who in 1649 supposedly tormented parliamentary commissioners in possession of the royal residence at Woodstock, Oxfordshire. With a fictional romance interwoven into the story, it predominately deals with the escape of Charles II during the Commonwealth, and his final triumphant entry into London on 29 May 1660.
1827
Publishes Chronicles of the Canongate. This was the first work of fiction to which Scott put his own name. Although the title page credits the Chronicles to the “Author of Waverley,” an autobiographical introduction is signed “Walter Scott.” (The incident in which Scott finally revealed his authorship at a public dinner is carefully recorded in J.G. Lockhart’s The Life of Sir Walter Scott.) Comprised of two short stories, “The Highland Widow” and “The Two Drovers,” and a novella, “The Surgeon’s Daughter,” the Chronicles were Scott's only collection of short stories. Each tale is set in the second half of the eighteenth century and deals with the migration of Scots from post-Union, post-Culloden homelands.
1828
Publishes St. Valentine’s Day; or, The Fair Maid of Perth as the second book installation in the Chronicles of the Canongate. The novel is set in the late fourteenth century during the reign of Robert III of Scotland. Scott’s narrative begins when Catharine Glover, the daughter of a glove maker in Perth, decides to kiss a local armorer named Henry Gow. Little does Catherine know, she has caught the eye of the Duke of Rothsay. When Gow interrupts the attempted abduction of Catherine, he is unwittingly drawn into royal intrigue and highland feud.
1829
Publishes Anne of Geierstein; or The Maiden of the Mist. Picking up around the same time and place where Quentin Durward left off, Scott recounts the tale of two exiled Lancastrians who are on a secret mission to the court Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgandy, hoping to gain his help in regaining the English crown from the Yorkist Edward IV. When the two Englishmen get into trouble in the Swiss mountains, the Countess Anne Geierstein and her family, who are involved in the politics of the newly independent Swiss Confederation, rescue them. Scott’s story deals with the events that transpire when these two groups decide to travel together.
1831
Publishes Count Robert of Paris as the “fourth series” installation in the Tales of My Landlord. Set in Constantinople at the time of the First Crusades, Scott’s story portrays the clash of Western medieval values and the attitudes of the society of the Byzantine Empire. The two main characters are Count Robert, a Frankish knight, and Hereward, an AngloSaxon refugee from the Norman conquest of England. Scott based the character of Count Robert on a minor historical figure who at the end of the eleventh century, disrupted negotiations between European leaders and the Emperor Alexius Comnenus by occupying the latter's throne when it was temporarily vacated.
1832
Publishes Castle Dangerous as the final book installation in the “fourth series” of Tales of My Landlord. Scott sets this story in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire in the year 1306, shortly after the death of William Wallace. The leading character, Lady Augusta, has promised to marry Sir John de Walton, provided that he can maintain possession of Castle Dangerous for one year and a day. Regretting this promise, however, Lady Augusta resolves to travel in disguise to the castle to find some method of subversion.
INTRODUCTION Thanks! and much gratitude to him we owe, The Bard of Yarrow! From his living song How do our pulses beat, our bosoms glow, Forming acquaintance with the dazzling throng Of warriors, dames, and elves, that dance along, As in a gay procession, subtly wrought, The web of his romantic tales, among; The sense aches with o'er-stimulated thought, As through its gorgeous crowd of images 'tis brought. – Charles Lloyd, 1821 Looking at it the engraved sketch A Dream of the Waverley Novels (1871), the expression “Great Scott!” is aptly brought to mind (See Fig. 1). The impression this image imparts is one of unbridled potential, a fantasy world unleashed. Disparate characters, period clothing, and landscape – each taken from a unique episode in the Waverley oeuvre – coalesce in the space of a single page. As the title to this engraving suggests, the pantheon of literary characters amassed here operates somewhere outside the scope of reality. Within the context of whim and reverie the meaning of the composition is made curiously clear: The extent of Scott’s world is somehow beyond reckoning, and only through of the use of the imagination can we begin to comprehend the variety of detail that impregnates the Waverley canon. With over two hundred years between the Waverley Novels and us, it is difficult to understand just what Walter Scott – “Wizard of the North,” “Laird of Abbotsford,” “the Enchanter,” “the Great Unknown,” and, of course, the beloved “Author of Waverley” – meant to the nineteenth century. The aforesaid print, composed in a manner akin to what I can only describe as a mine of enchanting moments, offers us a remarkable glimpse into that world. Significantly, A Dream of the Waverley Novels pays tribute to
Scott’s stature through the amalgamative use of images. The engraving was produced for the 100th anniversary of Sir Walter Scott’s birthday and appeared in a poster-sized segment of The Illustrated London News. What I find intriguing about this, aside from the overwhelming display it presents, is the lack of proper figural identification or textual reference in the newspaper article that accompanies it. It is assumed that having read Scott’s twenty-some fictional stories the viewer “will have no difficulty in identifying all the characters or figures represented.”1 The memorability of the Waverley Novels, it thus seems to be implied, arises from their ability to operate aesthetically. It is surprising in view of Scott’s popularity in the nineteenth century to find how little scholarly attention has been paid to the analysis of this aspect of his writing. Critical discussions about Scott and the literary and social contexts in which he lived abound. However, these studies ignore the numerous modes of visual reproduction that were influenced by or sought to replicate the Waverley Novels throughout the progression of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, what these creative endeavors have had to say about Scott as an author has, for the better part of a century, gone unnoticed – until now. Anne Rigney’s The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (2012) and Richard J. Hill’s Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels (2010) are two landmark publications that have done much in recent years to broaden our understanding of what shaped Scott’s cultural canonicity. Crucially, these authors have contributed breakthrough research on the appropriation of Scott into material culture and other forms of public expression. Against the tradition of literary criticism, their analyses seek to
1 “The Scott Centenary Festival,” The Illustrated London News, August 5, 1871, 134.
show the adaptability of the Waverley Novels across a range of socio-cultural practices. The study I offer here contributes to this new area of research. Above all, this thesis seeks to reexamine Scott’s role as an active force within the purview of popular visual culture. It is through this lens that the present study breaks new ground. I focus on the aesthetic principles that guided much of Scott’s literary output and explore the subsequent morphing of his texts into a number of different visual media. Each of these derivative forms, I argue, has played an integral part in the collective understanding of Scott’s works and can be useful in fleshing out the multiplicity of meanings that were once, or still are, attached to his fictional oeuvre. The three chapters that constitute the body of this thesis have been organized in such a way as to offer a profound sense of the different visual platforms that drive his legacy. Chapter 1 of this study concentrates on two cases of artistic reiteration – staging and reenactment – in order to reflect the Waverley Novel’s ability to move across different ideological spheres. My main concern here is with explaining some of the graphic qualities that initially made Scott’s writing such a pleasurable, all-pervasive point of reference in Britain. Chapter 2 then discusses the representation of Scott’s novelist decline. I use this study to segue into a larger conversation regarding Scott’s role as visual historiographer. As I show, Scott’s propensity for verbal illustration was a practice deeply indebted to the developments made by late eighteenth century historians and antiquarians. And lastly, Chapter 3 considers the long-term ramifications of Scott’s Scottish prose. Focusing on posthumous illustrations of the Waverley Novels, I comment on discourses of transience and progress. I claim that these legacies continue to be felt almost two hundred years after the publication of Waverley (1814), particularly in
contemporary representations of Scotland. In the end, I reflect, it is precisely the staying power of Scott’s progressive rhetoric that has lent to his own oblivion. Of course, it goes without saying that the literary status of the Waverley oeuvre has now slipped beyond the horizon. (I recently discovered at my local library a copy of Rob Roy that hadn’t left the shelf since the late 1980s.) However, the inheritance of its creative project is a topic of ongoing relevance, especially for art historians. It confirms that the convergence of visual media around a common platform occurred well before the arrival of the Information Age. More specifically, because the Waverley phenomenon was disseminated through instances of visual repetition, transformation, and appropriation, we will see, it gives credence to a number of contemporary issues like artistic remediation, hybridity, fragmentation, and change. It is my hope that as a more nuanced appreciation of this critical heritage emerges, so too will the retrospective understanding of nineteenth century cultural dynamics. The Scott experience as summed up in A Dream of the Waverley Novels – brilliant, borderless, and great – may finally be brought to light.
Figure 1. The Scott Centenary: A Dream of the Waverley Novels, A. Hunt, 1871, The Illustrated London News.
CHAPTER 1: A UNIQULEY PORTABLE MAGIC How many pencils have already been employed and how many will in future times be employed, in embodying the conceptions of that great writer! Literary Gazette, 1831 As one critic put it: “To have been alive and literate in the nineteenth century was to have been affected in some way by the Waverley Novels.” 2 Upon initial release in Edinburgh in 1814, nearly one thousand copies of the anonymously written Waverly were sold in two days, swelling to a staggering twenty-two thousand copies and twelve new editions by the year 1829. By the year 1832, Scott had already appeared in French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish translations. 3 And that was just Waverley. Compared to Charles Dickens who wrote sixteen novels in thirty-four years, and George Eliot who wrote seven in seventeen, Scott managed to produce a staggering total of twenty-seventy historical novels in the course of eighteen years, each a commercial success. This unprecedented triumph, unrivaled in British publishing history, quickly established Scott’s reputation as the foremost literary figure of his day and, importantly, one of the most widely read authors in the world. What is more, many individuals were exposed to the Waverley Novels without actually reading them. The generative capacity of Scott’s writing, by which I mean its ability to convert into a variety of different media – each with differing values – was part and parcel of the Waverley legacy. By showing
2 John Henry Raleigh, “What Scott Meant to the Victorians,” in Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels, ed. Harry E. Shaw (London: Prentice Hall International, 1996), 49. 3 For a timeline of the European reception of Sir Walter Scott and its many translations see Murray Pittock, The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (London: Continuum, 2006) xxiv - lxxiv.
the extent to which some of Scott’s novels were remediated and incorporated into popular visual culture, this chapter offers proof of his vitality beyond the medium of writing.4 *
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In February 1820, the Theater Royal in Edinburgh put on a “new” theatrical production called The Heart of Midlothian. This would become just one of the 4,566 plays, dramatic interludes, and operatic productions of Scott’s work to grace the British theaters from the year 1814 onward. It was not the first time the novel had been adapted for the stage, nor would it prove to be the most financially successful. However, the manner in which this particular production garnered critical recognition stands out as a compelling example of the Waverley Novel’s rich aesthetic afterlife. In appropriating The Hearth of Midlothian (1818) for theatergoers, producers at the Theater Royal ingeniously drew from an aspect of Scott’s fiction overlooked by previous dramatists: topographical realism. Channeled into a series of sweeping Scottish backdrops, this feature clinched the success of the play and helped earn it the highly regarded subtitle “National Drama.” Examining how the theatrical translation of Heart of Midlothian (hereafter referred to as HM) tied into this sense of Scottishness, I uncover here one of the crucial ways in which Scott was reinstated into the cultural fabric of his day, with his work taking on a new and significant layer of meaning in the process. Two factors played a hand in the dramatization of HM. On the one hand, the play was a shrewd, commercially driven response to the popularity of Scott’s novel. For many 4 Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 204.
nineteenth-century audiences, a stage version of this text would have been the closest possible encounter with it. At a time when books were still relatively expensive in Britain and urban literacy rates remained low, theater played a pivotal role in disseminating popular works among groups who, because of limitations in income or education, had little access to them.5 On the other hand, the play was conceived as a perfect response to the growing public demand for forms of spectacular entertainment. Scott’s graphic descriptions of Scotland (the origins of which will be discussed later in this thesis) had already won him numerous accolades in Britain. In the year 1820, when the pictorial realization of such evocations had only just begun to emerge, the potential market for a theatrical production of this kind would have been too good to resist. Keenly aware of this, producers at the Theatre Royal speedily concocted an edited version of the dense HM text that would ride on the crest of one of the novel’s chief appeals: scenery. According to Scott’s biographer, John Gibson Lockhart, “From choice of localities, the reception of [HM] was a scene of all-engrossing enthusiasm, such as I never witnessed.” 6 What was it about this feature that captivated the reading public so? To answer this, one must briefly consider what HM is about: Scott’s novel opens against the backdrop of Old Town Edinburgh and the socio-political upheaval surrounding the events of the 1736 Porteous Riots. Inside the city’s forbidding Tolbooth prison – at the time known by all as the Heart of Midlothian – a frightened young girl, Effie Deans, is 5 A recent study conducted by Dr. Ruth M. McAdams tracks the different prices of the Waverley Novels throughout the progression of the nineteenth century. See “The Posthumous British Editions of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly Novels, 1832-1871 And the Evolution of his Literary Legacy,” (MPhil diss., University of Edinburgh, 2008). 6 John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1871), 409.
held on suspicion of infanticide.7 When Effie is tried and condemned to death according to old Scots law, her sister Jeanie decides to travel to London on foot in search of a royal pardon. The journey of Jeanie Deans, from out-law infested Lowlands to the chintz parlors of England, constitutes the bulk of this tale where, paying special attention to local landmarks, street routes, architecture, and regional geography, Scott expertly brings the physical realms of early eighteenth century Scotland into view. For Scott’s Scottish readers, this topographical realism had a nostalgic resonance. The industrial expansion and radical urbanization of Britain toward the end of the eighteenth century had brought about major changes in the Scottish landscape. The redevelopment of Edinburgh, in particular, had been drastic. To combat the effects of increased overcrowding, poverty, poor sanitation, and crime, Scotland’s capital city had undergone a series of proto-Haussmannian face-lifts so profound one visiting scholar, a young Friedrich Engels to be exact, referred to it as the “modern Athens of Europe.”8 In 1818, the year of HM’s publication, the city center of Edinburgh would have appeared sharply divided by these ongoing renovations: on the one side, the vertiginous, antique wilderness of the medieval Old Town, and on the other, the strikingly open, ordered, neoclassical New Town. Received with mixed emotions, this latter precinct was looked on by Edinburgh residents as a space where modern progress was set in stone. The elegant granite houses, white columns, statues, sidewalks, and large city squares that 7 Midlothian or Midlodwen (as it appears in Scots) is the county in which the city of Edinburgh is located. 8 In The Conditions of the Working Class in England (1844) Engels writes: “Edinburgh, whose superb situation, which has won it the title of the Modern Athens, and whose brilliant aristocratic quarter in the New Town contrasts strongly with the foul wretchedness of the poor in the Old Town . . . the prevailing construction of Edinburgh favours these atrocious conditions as far as possible.” Friedrich Engels quoted in Stuart Kelly, Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2010), 19.
made up the new metropolitan center then, while lovely, symbolically threatened to efface the collective memories associated with the picturesque streets and timber “wynds” of Old Town. Putting the memory of these places to pen, Scott went street by street in HM capturing the vistas, prospects, and panoramas of historic Edinburgh as it had originally stood. In this way, he created a lasting monument to what was seen by many as a rapidly passing way of life in Scotland. The year in which the play HM was produced was especially affected by Edinburgh’s changing landscape. The old “Nor Loch,” an extensive body of water, which formerly ran along the east-west axis of the city, was finally drained and filled. Because this area had once formed a natural barrier between Old Town Edinburgh and the burgeoning New, the convergence of these distinct psychological spaces must have been keenly felt by city dwellers, perhaps more than ever before. Eager to cash in on Scott’s ready-made nostalgia, the Theatre Royal put HM’s verbal descriptions to good use. As indicated in the playbill for the opening performance of HM, the selling point for the play is indeed its scenery (See Fig. 2). Situated directly beneath the bill’s heading the following lines are emblazoned in all caps: “The VIEWS of EDINBURGH and its VICINITY painted by Mr. NASMYTH.” 9 It bears mentioning that while the placement of this announcement was a significant promotion in and of itself, for even the lowliest nineteenth century playgoer the name Nasmyth would not have gone unrecognized either.10 In recruiting a capable set designer, chief producer Daniel Terry had found his 9 This playbill, including 8 other theatrical versions of HM can be seen online at http://digital.nls.uk/playbills/playbill.cfm?id=23431. 10 Richard J. Hill, Picturing Scotland through the Waverly Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010) 148-156.
man. Scottish portraitist, landscape painter, city engineer, architect, illustrator, and highly celebrated set designer, Alexander Nasmyth was an artistic mastermind whose expertise spanned a significant number of different areas. As a figure of great reputation in the Edinburgh community and a close friend of Scott’s, his involvement with the pictorial treatment of HM drew considerable interest.11 As we see listed in the playbill, Nasmyth’s stage set is in close keeping with Scott’s roving narrative. A jaw-dropping total of twenty-one backdrops are used in the course of five acts – half of which, it is specified, picture “Edinburgh as it appeared in the Days of Porteous.” Scenes such as “The HALL in the TOLBOOTH of EDINBURGH,” “The PARLIAMENT CLOSE,” and “The GRASSMARKET, EDINBURGH” would have especially caught viewers’ attention as they pictured parts of the old city recently transformed or destroyed altogether.12 Though today all that remains of these theatrical backdrops are six obscure preparatory sketches, we know from existent reviews of HM that they were tremendously well received (See Fig. 3).13 A report published the week of the play’s opening exclaims: We need not say that the scenery was splendid, and that as a mere exhibition it was worth all the money paid for the admission to the Theater. It possessed merit of the highest order . . . The Views of, and in Edinburgh are truly Scottish in 11 Ibid. 12 The destruction of the Edinburgh Tolbooth or “county gaol” was an event witnessed by both Nasmyth and Scott in September of 1817. Scott was so affected by its destruction that he purchased many architectural features from the building, which he then had integrated into his home at Abbotsford. 13 These sketches are kept in the National Gallery of Scotland (ref. D3727/C). The caption above the sketches reads “For the Play of the Heart of Midlothian”; and beneath reads, “Six Scenes 24-feet by 16-6 inches begun 29 Decem.r 1819 and finished Feb’y. 8th 1820. —, —, by A N. — for the Theatre Edinburgh — .”
manner, as well as in subject; and we were especially pleased with the Sunrise View of Edinburgh, and the Deans cottage and byre in Act 1, Craigmillar Castle and Edinburgh, in the distance, Act III; distant view of Carlisle and Grassmarket in Act V; Laird of Dumbiedyke’s mansions, and romantic wood in Act IV; the moonlight view of Edinburgh and more especially the ruins of St. Anthony’s chapel in Act II; And – but we can go no further in this . . . 14 As a mere exhibition, then, it is declared HM is worth one’s while: what is believed to be the import of the play is clearly articulated here. Where Scott’s novel had originally implanted the memorialized views of old Edinburgh in the minds of his readers, the theatrical version of HM successfully put them before the eyes. Yet the question remains: how did HM get caught in the mechanism of such strong national sentiment? If one consults H. Philip Bolton’s anthology of Scott dramatizations, it is clear following the Theater Royal’s adaptation of HM that the term “national” is applied with much greater frequency to the play’s handbills. Subsequent theatrical productions of the novel feature subtitles like “National Drama,” “National play,” “National Melodrama,” and “Scotch Drama.”15 Of note, Nasmyth’s scenery is described above as being “truly Scottish in manner.” Correspondingly, in one report made by the Caledonian Mercury, it is avowed HM will become the next national favorite in Scotland. Without further explanation, the piece then delves into a detailed discussion of “the most splendid and natural scenery.” 16 To be sure, we get the sense here that Scottishness was identifiable with the play’s scenery. But what explains the 14 Scotsman, 26 February, 1820. 15 Bolton, Philip, H. Scott Dramatized (London: Mansell Publishing Limited, 1992), 259296. 16 The Caledonian Mercury, 24, Februrary, 1820.
identificatory warmth with which HM’s audience greeted the depiction of HM’s landscape? To answer that question, I selectively tap the wide and somber seam of late twentieth-century reflection on what I call the dynamics of memorialization and place. Two names are salient here. In his posthumous study on public remembrance in contemporary culture, La Mémoire Collective (1950), Maurice Halbwachs maintains that the practice of memory-making functions principally in the service of the present. It is the unprecedented force with which Halbwachs argues for the powerful affective charge of physical locations that makes his work so indispensable to recognizing the intensity of topographical theater in Edinburgh of the 1820s. Whether paced over, slowly walked around, or painted evocatively across a large theatrical backdrop, physical locations, Halbwachs tells us, entail an embodied encounter with the past akin to no other. Such encounters, according to Halbwachs, do nothing less than symbolize the most authentic experience because they offer the most affecting pitch of memorial sensation. But the ease with which Nasmyth’s skillful conjuring put Scott’s old Edinburgh right before the eyes of a delighted audience in 1819 is explained even more effectively by Pierre Nora’s theory concerning lieux de mémoire or “sites of memory.” Nora’s allegiance to the celebrated longue durée formulated by Ferdinand Braudel has to be seen as tempered by belatedness. Nora is a third-generation member of the Annales group, whose commitment to themes of sustaining structures and tides in history was eroded by
Michel Foucault’s 1973 critique.17 For my purposes then, Nora provides a contemporaneous revisionism, while refusing to abandon Braudel’s argument that history has been a matter of enduring place as much as singular, over-estimated events. It is against this formidably evolved backdrop of historigraphy’s development in France, that we can see the value of Nora’s argument that the construction of memorial experience arises out of a need for defining group identity.18 This means that in the face of perceived trauma – whether political, physical, or social – people adhere to points of collective reference in the attempt to stabilize or preserve the community’s sense of self. Staying connected to the past in this way offers the illusion of communal affiliation and permanence despite a rapidly changing present.19 In the wake of unprecedented urban expansion and modern change, one might see how Edinburgh around the turn of the nineteenth century bore out Nora’s theory. As longtime cultural center of Scotland, one of the most valuable heritages of the city had been its “unity of social feeling” – a condition that perceptibly altered, according to historian A. J. Youngson, after the emergence of New Town.20 Compounded by the homogenizing British patriotism of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and the succession of another Hanoverian king (George IV) in 1820, concern at this time regarding 17 In the first chapter of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault formulates a critique against Braudel and the Annales methodology based long-term social history and history from the point of view of mentalities, otherwise referred to as mentalités. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology Knowledge (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), Introduction. 18 Pierre Nora, “Entre mémoire et histoire: la problématique des lieux,” in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire, 3 vol (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), I: xvii-xlii. 19 According to Marice Halbwachs, physical locations offer the greatest memorial sensation. Because they entail an embodied encounter with the past they symbolize the most ‘authentic’ experience. See Marice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997 [1950]), 235-236. 20 A. J. Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh, 1750-1840 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 256.
Scotland’s self-image intensified.21 Then came HM. In staging the well-worn tracks and topographies distinct to the country’s capital city, the play supplied a potent framework from which sentiments like national-historic recognition, pride, and belonging could be construed. Fused with the “perpetually actual phenomenon” of live performance these scenes succeeded in creating a unified vision of Scotland’s past and present.22 From what little we see in Nasmyth’s six preparatory sketches, his indebtedness to the picturesque certainly enhanced these effects. Working on a grand scale and adding more than a touch of atmospheric charm to Edinburgh’s ancient stomping grounds, he offered a vivid memoryscape, which occluded the dirty, unsanitary, and often-violent reality it actually presented. Moved by the shared experience of seeing these familiar places anew, Scottish audiences extolled the play’s scenery as a platform of national solidarity. It is tempting to consider what would have happened to Scott’s novel had it not been appropriated by the Theatre Royal. HM was certainly a success before it entered the arena of popular visual culture in Britain, yet the extent to which it became distinctly “Scottish,” was, I think, greatly assisted by this particular instance of theatrical realization. The fact that Nasmyth’s six preliminary drawings were used to front the cover of the 1994 Penguin Classics edition of HM leaves little room for doubt on that front. Designed to attract the curiosity of theatergoers nostalgic for the sights and scenes of historical Edinburgh, the point of these backdrops had been romantic reconnection. Displayed as part of a public forum, they then generated a unique atmosphere of 21 Ina Ferris, “Pedantry and the question of Enlightenment History: the figure of the Antiquary in Scott,” European Review 13 (2002): 274. 22 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations no. 26 (1989): 8.
collective remembrance and national feeling that enriched the original understanding of Scott’s text. Such was their effect that nearly two hundred years later (as we can see from such examples as the Penguin Classics’ use of Nasmyth’s drawings), it appears that people are still drawn to the excitement that these images could potentially elicit. *
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The case of HM proves significant because it invites us to analyze remembrance as a mode of national awareness. Here we have seen how Scott’s text was molded to meet the needs of a particular constituency, thus recalling Halbwachs claim that memorialization strives to do something in the present as much as it recalls things from the past. At times, the density of memorial sensation can be such that social frameworks already in place are weighed down by the past. When this happens, memorialization isn’t simply absorbed by the community at large. It is broken down, re-mediated, and given new life; new forms of contemporary discourse inevitably arise.23 Anne Rigney, who has specialized in the societal effects that Scott’s work generated, has aptly referred to this phenomenon as “nostalgically flagging a collective affiliation to an imagined history.”24 Scott’s topographical realism in HM was so affecting to the audiences of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh that it created a blueprint for imagining a national relationship to the past. Converted to popular theater, the book then offered a solid point of reference to which people living amidst a backdrop of disruption and change could collectively rally. Yet the theatrical realization of HM is merely one example of the 23 See Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994 [1925]). 24 Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1.
myriad of ways in which Scott’s texts touched the lives of his readers. We might consider then how the display of collective appreciation for the Waverley Novels in Edinburgh differed from communities located elsewhere. In the county of Ayrshire, for instance, about twenty miles southwest of Glasgow, fervor for Scott would manifest itself in the form of medieval reenactment. Such enthusiasm wasn’t confined to Ayrshire, of course. It occurred across Scotland, and extended south of the border too, where a fervor for Scott would be recalibrated according to differing sets of local experiences, expectations, and values. Here, however, Scott became a cultural outlet for Britain’s well-to-do. In recent years British historians have demonstrated the profound influence of public ritual on the expression of group identities during the early Victorian era.25 Following Alex Tyrell’s argument that performance provides “an ideal vehicle for conveying messages that concern authority, legitimacy and power,” this section of Chapter 1 traces how the Waverley Novel Ivanhoe (1820) was appropriated to reinforce political developments occurring in Scotland and England during the late 1830s and early
25 Albert D. Poinke, “A Ritual Failure: The Eglinton Tournament, the Medieval Revival, and the Victorian Ritual Culture,” Studies in Medievalism XVI (2008); Alex Tyrrell, “Paternalism, Public Memory and National Identity in Early Victorian Scotland: The Robert Burns Festival at Ayr in 1844,” History: A Quarterly Magazine and Review for the Teacher, Student and the Expert (2005), 90; Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Debra N. Mancoff, The Return of King Arthur: The Legend Through Victorian Eyes (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1995); James A. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), Chapter 5; James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 107-116; Kara G Marler-Kennedy, “Social Memory and Nineteenth-Century British Historical Fiction” (PhD diss. Rice University, 2010); Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), Chapter 6-8.
1840s.26 Enshrining the novel within the romantic cult of chivalry, wealthy British conservatives attempted to use Scott’s writing as a script for envisioning what they perceived to be the ideal world order. This pie-in-the-sky state of affairs, as we’ll see, was nothing short of aristocratic paternalism. In what follows, I argue that the embodied role-playing that took place at the famed Eglinton Tournament in Ayrshire represented yet another way in which the imaginative experience of Scott’s texts helped shape people’s actions amidst the crises and complexities of the nineteenth century. On the morning of 14 September 1839 Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement issued its response to what had promised to be Britain’s social event of the season: the grand orchestration of a medieval tournament by Archibald William Montgomerie, thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, first Earl of Winton. For weeks, the press had been buzzing over the promotion of this much-anticipated event as advertisements, invitations, and cards circulated widely among the general public. Admission to the tournament, it had been publicized, was free on the condition that prospective guests submit an application, and as befited a truly noble host of yore, it was announced that the honorable Lord Eglinton expected no fewer than 1,500 visitors – the size of a crowd attending a horse race – to attend his gathering. No small expense had been spared in the attempt to make this a most festive and historical occasion. Elaborate dress rehearsals were held; massive quantities of food, decoration, and equipment were ordered. In careful preparation for the event’s proceedings, a veritable army of costumers, seamstresses, weapon masters, antiquarian dealers, landscape engineers, and architects 26 Tyrrell assumes this argument in “Paternalism, Public Memory and National Identity in Early Victorian Scotland: The Robert Burns Festival at Ayr in 1844,” though the quote is taken from Avner Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics and Memory and Modern France, 17961996 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 262.
had been hired. In Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine it was even reported that the land surrounding Lord Eglinton’s estates had been remodeled in order to accommodate the crush of anticipated visitors, while Eglinton Castle, a former eighteenth century Georgian mansion, had been enlarged, aged, and bedecked with Gothic battlements, turrets, crenellations, and spires.27 The tournament, it was related by some, would last upwards of a week, with over one hundred and fifty of the country’s finest cavaliers arranged to tilt on the first day.28 Costumed knights and horses, glittering ladies, pages, mummers, musicians, monks, friars, halberdiers and standard-bearers would all be in attendance, and as guests were recommended to gather on the front of Eglinton lawn, a procession of these persons was planned to lead them to the lists. With all the pomp and circumstance worthy of princes, this grand display was guaranteed to be a most brilliant exposition. Once at the lists, men and women would be invited to take their seats inside a magnificent, fifteenth-centuryinspired grandstand. A formal ritual honoring the tournament’s Queen of Beauty would follow, along with an official reading of the rules, jousting, a mêlée, and afterwards, an awards ceremony. To cap it all, Lord Eglinton planned to host a tremendous ball that evening, consisting of feasting, dancing, and merriment at Eglinton castle – a revel so lavish as to put the legendary entertainments of good King Harry to shame! Or so it was promised. What actually transpired at the Eglinton Tournament was not without its fair share of complications.
27 “The Eglinton Tournament,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, November 1839. 28 “The Tournament at Eglinton Castle,” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, March 17, 1839.
Cleave’s article, entitled “Aristocratic Sense, Or the Eglinton Tomfooleryment,” was one of many satirical responses that appeared in the British press following the Eglinton Tournament (See 4). The trouble began when, on the morning of the tournament’s grand opening, a steady drizzle of rain turned into a torrential Highland gale. What had promised to be a glittering scene of sartorial splendor, quickly turned to muck as Eglinton’s guests were pitted against the elements. As if that weren’t enough, with an unprecedented swell of nearly 100,000 spectators converged on the castle grounds, there proved to be little relief by way of shelter. Makeshift tents and pavilions sagged beneath the weight of accumulating water and threatened to give way as the thunderstorm intensified. Hoping that the rainfall would eventually cease, Lord Eglinton and a select number of invited guests waited tentatively inside. Nearly three hours would pass before it was decided to proceed with the day’s activities, by which time many of the spectators who had been forced to wait outside had stormily trodden to the adjacent towns of Irvine and Kilwinning. As Eglinton’s medieval procession finally got underway, it was remarked by more than one observer that much of the “gilt and gayness” that had pervaded the early morning hours had worn conspicuously thin.29 At the head of the mighty cavalcade, Eglinton’s associate Lord Londonderry dejectedly squelched through mud toting a green umbrella, while the tournament’s Queen of Beauty and her retinue ingloriously rode to the tilting grounds in nineteenth century closed carriages. Down at the lists, the multi-colored assembly of knights and their retainers had transformed into what one bystander compared to an “enormous field of mushrooms,” 29 Henry Cockburn, Journal of Henry Cockburn quoted in Sarah Abigail Swiney, “The Knights of the Quill: The Arts of the Eglinton Tournament” (PhD diss., Baylor University, 2009), 11.
another to the “backsides of elephants” as all who had them had taken out their umbrellas and galoshes.30 The umbrella; a pair of galoshes: few objects seem more emblematic of the utilitarian Victorian than these shields against the British weather. Though neither was invented in nineteenth-century Britain, it was surely here that they first became indispensable. By the same token, it is safe to say that during the nineteenth century there was no extant visual or literary evidence of umbrellas or galoshes used in a medieval tournament. During the thirteenth Earl of Eglinton’s orchestration of the same, the sudden appearance of these mass-produced objects provided fodder for satirical reporters and cartoonists in attendance at Eglinton. The image accompanying the Cleave’s article, in addition to numerous others circulating around the same time pokes fun at the Eglinton spectacle by overemphasizing knight-participants’ use of umbrellas (See Fig. 5-6). Yet there is another, more nuanced message being transmitted here as well. The riders in “Aristocratic Sense, Or the Eglinton Tomfooleryment” sit astride hobbyhorses, objects that are proper to the realm of juvenilia, not chivalric life. In Cleave’s article these childish accouterments are unabashedly referred to as “rocking-asses,” a jibe that is clearly directed at the aristocratic attendees of Eglinton who demonstrated sufficient reserves of idiocy play dress up in public.31 Anyone silly enough to do that, it is implied here, deserves to be the butt of a joke or two – tomfooleryment indeed! This response necessitates our further examination as it suggests to the viewer how a certain audience in 30 Anon., “A Full Report of the Grand Tournament at Eglinton Castle” (newspaper broadsheet, printed Belfast and Edinburgh) quoted in Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 101. 31 “Aristocratic Sense; Or, The Eglinton Tomfooleryment,” Cleave’s Penny Gazette, September 14, 1839.
Britain perceived Eglinton’s project. Tellingly, Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement was a weekly newsprint closely associated with the working class movement in London. Its publisher, John Cleave (1795-1850), was eminently known for his Radical sympathies having refused to pay stamp duties on his newspapers throughout the earlyto-mid 1830s. Cleave also played an active public role in the London Working Men’s Association as well as the National Charter Association. His affiliation with both these reformist groups speaks volumes about the political climate in which the backlash against the Eglinton Tournament occured. Cleave’s Gazette catered to a largely urban, bluecollar readership. The ostentation, flummery, and overblown escapism associated with the Eglinton Tournament thus posed an insult to that class of men and women in industrialized Britain scraping to make ends meet. In the Morning Chronicle, Scottish Liberal Charles Mackay (1812-1889) seized on the “frivolous and scarcely picturesque unrealities” that were staged at Ayrshire, calling them a nuisance, while one writer for the Freeman’s Journal went so far as to call it “a sham, humbug, and a degradation.”32 In Whig-run newspapers such as The Examiner and the Glasgow Argus, the event was collectively referred to as a piece of sheer “aristocratic folly.”33
32 Charles Mackay quoted in Sarah Abigail Sweeney, “Knights of the Quill: The Arts of Eglinton Tournament” (PhD diss. Baylor University, 2009), 19; Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advisor, September 25, 1858 quoted in Sarah Abigail Sweeney, “Knights of the Quill: The Arts of Eglinton Tournament” (PhD diss. Baylor University, 2009), 26. 33 John Killham, Tennyson and the Princess: Reflections of an Age (London: Athlane, 1958), 273, quoted in Albert D. Poinke, “A Ritual Failure: The Eglinton Tournament, the Medieval Revival, and the Victorian Ritual Culture,” Studies in Medievalism XVI (2008), 32.
There was, of course, a notable difference of opinion in Tory circles. Grantley Berkeley, son of Frederick, Fifth Earl of Berkeley described his experience at the Eglinton Tournament as one of the most memorable occasions of his life: I know of nothing that sized on the minds of the young men of fashion with such force as it did, or held out apparently so many romantic attractions. I can safely say that, as far as I was concerned, I was seized with an extraordinary desire to be one of those who [entered] the lists . . . All that I thought of for the moment was [the] Queen of Beauty, brave deeds, splendid arms, and magnificent horses.34 Similarly, Louisa Stuart, daughter of Lord Stuart de Rothesay, wrote in a series of letters “the procession into the Lists, tilting, [and] the mêlée, were such beautiful sights as one can never expect to see again.”35 Despite the initial setbacks caused by the weather, it was agreed upon by the majority of Eglinton’s social elite that the affair had turned out to be a most “magnificent illustration . . . a living picture, on a grand and commensurate scale.”36 No fewer than eight illustrated books were commissioned to commemorate the memory of this “gorgeous spectacle,” each highlighting the “valor and dignity” of Eglinton’s aristocratic attendees.37 Souvenirs and mementoes were also mass distributed, including music-sheets, perfume bottles, plate-ware, and jigsaw puzzles. In one particularly creative response to the tournament, author Peter Buchan defended its chivalric spirit via the ghostly voices of King James V of Scotland (1512-1542) and Sir
34 Grantley F. Berkley, My Life and Recollections vol. II (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1865), 126-27. 35 Louisa Stuart quoted in Girouard, 102. 36 John Richardson, The Eglinton Tournament (London: Colnaghi and Puckle, 1843), Introduction. 37 Ibid.
David Lyndsay (c. 1490 -1555).38 And more praise would follow: On 29 September 1839 a large banquet was held in Irvine to congratulate Lord Eglinton on his momentous dramaturgical achievements. Presented with a silver trophy rising some eight feet high and costing over £1775, the earl was touted by his peers as the modern-day “heir of Ivanhoe.”39 In linking Eglinton so readily to a novel published nineteen years earlier, the Irvine banquet shows how deeply Scott’s creative legacy had permeated Britain’s social fiber by mid-century. It is to Ivanhoe, then, that we next turn. Walter Scott took a leap of faith when he published Ivanhoe in 1820. Since the publication of Waverley in 1814, his works had been concerned primarily with detailing recent Scottish history. Novels like Guy Mannering (1815), Rob Roy (1817), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818), illuminated Highland life, manners, and customs in a pleasingly fictitious, but nonetheless historical way. Perhaps because they were some of the first written accounts in Britain to respond creatively to this subject matter, they ignited the reading public’s imagination and achieved astronomical sales figures. By 1819, however (Scott published his ninth novel, A Legend of Montrose, in the summer of that year) Scott was weary of the Scotch milieu and ready to move on, into newer fictional territory. Abandoning Highland and Lowland life altogether, he opted for an English Romance set in the Middle Ages. This was a successful departure. Ivanhoe would in many ways prove to be Scott’s magnum opus, selling out within less than two weeks of publication and being translated into more than nine European languages by the year 1830 alone. By 1829 Ivanhoe was already in its seventh edition in Britain. The 38 Peter Buchan, The Eglinton Tournament and Gentlemen Unmasked (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1840). 39 Chris Brooks, The Gothic Revival (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1999), 152.
book was a sensation, and unlike most of the other Waverley Novels, it maintained its vogue well into the twentieth century. How do we account for this extraordinary appeal? It was the voices of Thomas Macaulay and John Henry Newman that perhaps summarized it best: Scott was the first author to “[turn] men’s minds in the direction of the Middle Ages,” wrote the university reformer and theologian Newman.40 And unlike those authors who came before him, explained the imperialist historian Macaulay, Scott had the incredible knack of imbuing that era with all the vitality and color that characterized the most “beautiful painted window.”41 What a marvel that was! Not only was Ivanhoe the first historical novel to be set in the chivalric past, it was also the first to convincingly bring it to life.42 In characteristic fashion, Scott’s writing helped conjure all material aspects of a bygone era, focusing especially on descriptions of place, costume, and historical furnishings. Though these features had already been made manifest in Scott’s former novels, they were all the more remarkable in the case of Ivanhoe. The novel brought forth an “imaginative space” that was heretofore unexplored in popular nineteenth century visual culture.43 Within the text, “images perceived today as medieval archetypes – such as the great hall with roaring fire, passage at arms, chivalric code, and merry woodland encampment – took shape for 40 John Henry Newman quoted in Alice Chandler, “Sir Walter Scott and the Medieval Revival,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 19.4 (1965), 315. 41 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Critical Historical and Miscellaneous Essays, 3 vols (New York: A. L. Burt, n.d.), I: 307-8. 42 As a qualification to this statement it needs mentioning that some literary critics technically consider Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to be the first historical novel set in the Middle Ages. While this is partially accurate – Castle of Otranto does take place in Middle Ages – Walpole’s literary aims are less concerned about illustrating medieval life and customs as they are about relaying a Gothic tale of fantasy and horror. For this reason, Ivanhoe is typically accredited as being the first true historical novel set in the Middle Ages. 43 Brooks, 131.
the first time. Before Scott gave us Ivanhoe, the twelfth century was effectively a remote period in history to which no living memory could attest. Yet this does not provide us with an adequate understanding as to how the novel affected Lord Eglinton. It would be remiss to assume his project was one of numerous others in the Victorian era (like the production of Heart of Midlothian, for example) that sought to merely restage the fanciful world that Scott had so carefully crafted. In part this was true. However Eglinton’s orchestration of a medieval reenactment had less to do with creating a spectacle of whimsy and romance than it did with perpetuating the political power of his status. Importantly, Ivanhoe set the stage for a kind of chivalric idealism that neatly fit the conservative tastes of Britain’s landed gentry. We might observe, throughout the entirety of his novel, Scott chooses to portray a society that rests comfortably on the cornerstone of feudal order. Though Ivanhoe is set during the dark, tumultuous years succeeding the Norman Conquest in England – 1194 to be exact – Scott takes pains to describe this era as a kind of pre-industrial golden age.44 The monarchy, the aristocracy, and their loyal retainers make up an organic community in Ivanhoe that wants for very little and is content with the institution of hierarchical powers. Here the nobility reigns supreme. While social tensions between Saxons and Normans, Christians and Jews, even men versus women flare within the book’s narrative matrix, Scott’s system of happy feudal dependence remains curiously unchallenged. Moreover, through his careful delineation of the character Wilfred of Ivanhoe, Scott elevates the system to a level of idealization that proved irresistibly catchy to early nineteenth-century British
44 Tyrell, 50.
audiences who, in 1820, still held recent memories of near-conquest by France during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15). Ivanhoe largely centers on the fortunes and misadventures of the heroic Saxon knight Wilfred of Ivanhoe. Handsome, youthful, and strong, Scott’s protagonist represents the epitome of knightly virtue. Not only is Ivanhoe a stalwart warrior, he is also a defender of liberty and justice, a righteous nobleman, gallant, and man true to his oath of honor. Motivated by a commitment to high ideals, his character exudes the kind of shining selflessness, constancy, and nobility of spirit that later Victorian artists like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson would cast in their image of ideal manhood, the legendary King Arthur.45 Above all, Ivanhoe symbolizes the ancient program of aristocratic benevolence known as noblesse oblige.46 Providing protection and civil service to the lower castes of society, he demonstrates the responsibility of the ruling class to act with generosity and decency toward those less privileged. This compassionate system of social obligation, his character reveals, is quite necessary for the safety and preservation of the realm. When executed properly, sentiments of amity, fidelity, and deference between the peasant and ruling classes arise. In this way, Ivanhoe creates a quixotic justification for socioeconomic dependency between rich and poor: under the precepts of aristocratic paternalism, the weak shall want for nothing because the strong will always provide. A nobleman’s right to rule is thus ensured through acts of public munificence, poise, and chivalric conduct. This idealized vision of feudal life, we can see, would have been compelling to a man of Eglinton’s circumstances. Highborn and of inordinate fortune, he belonged to 45 Mancoff, 101-128. 46 The literal translation for this term is “nobility obligates.”
that branch of old-world Toryism that, according to the scholar Alex Tyrell, found itself increasingly under threat during the late 1830s and early 1840s due to the mounting influence of reformist activities nationwide like Utilitarianism, Whiggism, Chartism, and the Anti-Corn Law League.47 For a conservative landowner like Eglinton, these radical political movements were the outward signs of a changing world order that cared little for the retention of Britain’s sacred institutions. For him, economic liberalism signaled the death of chivalry: with it, the ancient rights and custodial duties of the nobility threatened to disappear altogether, or worse still, be callously repossessed by figures such as the mill tyrant, factory owner, foreign importer, slumlord, and human trafficker. Would these unsavory characters see to the welfare of the lower classes? Surely not! “An increasingly cash-based economy founded on competitive commercialism and urbanization,” argues historian Albert D. Poinke, would have deeply dismayed the British peerage at this time as it demonstrated to them the diminished state of their cultural authority. In the long run, these developments could only mean one thing: a reality fraught with tension, unchecked poverty, and social divisiveness. Fostering a sense of belligerent nostalgia for that era in human history, the Middle Ages, in which all the various ranks of society had seemed to know their place and respect each other’s roles, the landed gentry would have looked to Scott’s celebratory vision of medieval life for comfort and reassurance.48 For Lord Eglinton, this romantic world of fealty, paternalism, and honor offered what he perceived to be the most effective solution against the march of the modern mind. If he could express, as Scott had successfully done, the goodwill of
47 Tyrell, 50. 48 Poinke, 28.
the British aristocracy, then perhaps the possibility of redeeming its status was not lost, after all. The Eglinton Tournament was devised as an elite public ritual, which riding on the coattails of Ivanhoe, would promote in the eyes of the general public a revival of aristocratic paternalism as well as the values of traditionalist society. Replete with ceremonial procedure, authentic costume, and display, it afforded Lord Eglinton the perfect opportunity to dust off his lordly mantle while engaging in acts of chivalric conduct. The point of implementing such lofty role-play before a mass audience, explains Rigney, was to publicly stabilize the Earl’s “contested self image.”49 By recreating an “intelligible exposition” of the aristocratic modes and manners described in Ivanhoe, he hoped to rekindle a relationship to the feudal past based on the continuity of repetition.50 51 According to the theorization of Nora, this performative turn in memorial dynamics poses a radical departure from the concept of mere lieux de mémoire, which seek to reexamine the past using a nostalgic or historicizing gaze. Rather than present the Middle Ages in this manner – as foreign and discontinuous with the present – Eglinton sought to cultivate an all-encompassing, embodied memory environment. The lavishness I’ve described here can only be understood in terms of a milieu de mémoire. This milieu would reconnect the Earl and his audience with the habits and customs of precapitalist society. Moreover, in its grand demonstration of “the splendid feats and glories of the ancestry of the nobles and gentles of the land – of the dames and demoiselles of days long gone by,” Eglinton aimed to show his spectators that the altruistic fervor and dignity 49 Rigney, 77. 50 Richardson, Introduction. 51 Rigney, 71.
of the British nobility had not yet run its course.52 “That good feeling, and that proper attention to security and to humanity,” instilled in the British gentry was, he hoped to show, a resource willing and waiting to be untapped.53 A simple return to medieval life, led by the valiant aristocracy could ensure, he believed, societal contentment, order, and discipline. Of course, little could the Earl of Eglinton foresee the kind of technical difficulties that would stand in the way of him and his vision of Neofeudalism. The rain, which hung heavily over the entire Eglinton affair, drove away its target audience and forced many of its ceremonial procedures – which were to rhetoricize the chivalric spirit laid out in Ivanhoe – to be skipped. Eglinton Tournament thus failed on a ritual level because it did not achieve the kind of spectator involvement needed to confirm the ideological position of its participants.54 In its blundering demonstration of aristocratic integrity, the event merely invited the derision of Britain’s lower and middle classes, signifying for them a preposterously overzealous, not mention impossible, appeal to backward tradition. This response had a curiously tonic affect on Eglinton and his associates, however, as it reiterated for them the public waywardness that they, as the modern day heirs of Ivanhoe, pledged to remedy. “A return to order, discipline and obedience, the preservation of established institutions, and a deeper reverences for the ancient ways:” these were the goals outlined by Lord John Manners in 1841 when, after being strongly influenced by the Eglinton Tournament, he and a group of young, highminded Parliamentarians decided to go forth and establish the political party known as 52 Richardson, Introdution 53 Ibid. 54 Poinke, 27.
Young England. 55 Armed with medieval manners and a devotion to righting modern wrongs, this group of wealthy English gentlemen sought to create a new cultural program in Britain based on Ivanhoe’s tenets of noblesse oblige: “In a word, let society take a more feudal aspect than it presents now,” their party slogan stated.56 Implementing such a social agenda without incurring public disapproval would require great care, they realized. Even the most callow parliamentarian could see that. But the fate of the British nation could be put off no longer: The Eglinton Tournament had proved as much. “Let us show the people, i.e. the lower orders, by adding to their comforts and pleasure . . . that we are their real friends . . . let our men of power in their individual capacities assume a more personal and consequently a more kind intercourse with those below them.”57 If Ivanhoe could persuade the reader that Britain’s “lower orders ” could indeed become “real friends” with “men of power,” then surely Young England could perform a similar feat. In the end, Scott’s book helped lay the groundwork for nothing less than a medieval revival in Britain – a movement that would electrify the heart and mind of many a restless nobleman. *
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Naturally, there is much more that could be said about the Waverley Novel’s migration across popular visual culture in nineteenth century Britain. Due to Scott’s prodigious literary output, countless images of auld lang syne took the Victorian world 55 Lord John Manners, “England’s Trust,” in England’s Trust and Other Poems (London, J. G. F. & J. Rivington, 1841), sec. 3, 24. 56 Lord John Manners to the Marquis of Granby, 10 September 1842, quoted in Charles Whibley, Lord John Manners and His Friends, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1925), 1: 137. 57 Ibid.
by storm, thrilling and suffusing a mass cultural climate already obsessed with new technologies of visual reproduction.58 As I have attempted to outline here, each case of these artistic remediations resulted in the formation of a new ideological platform. How do we explain such creativity? The visual scope of the Waverley Novels certainly provides us with one answer. It is generally agreed by Scott scholars that the author’s attention to detail is his most defining feature.59 Take the following passage from Waverley (1814): This avenue was straight, and of moderate length, running between a double row of very ancient horse-chestnuts, planted alternately with sycamores, which rose to such huge height, and flourished so luxuriantly, that their boughs completely over-arched the broad road beneath. Beyond these venerable ranks, and running parallel to them, were two high walls, of apparent antiquity, overgrown with ivy, honeysuckle, and other climbing plants. The avenue seemed very little trodden, 58 For example panoramas, dioramas, exhibitions of historical paintings, magic lantern shows, wax displays, travel literature and so forth. See Ina Ferris, “’Before Our Eyes’: Romantic Historical Fiction and the Apparitions of Reading,” Representations 121.1 (2013): 62; Though the term “auld lang syne” is consistently used in nineteenth-century critiques and commentaries regarding the Waverley canon, the phrase was actually coined by Scott’s predecessor, Robert Burns. In standard English, the Scotch phrase translates to “old long since” or “long long ago.” Today, the expression is frequently used to denote what we would term “days gone by.” 59 Stephen Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995); Richard Maxwell, The Victorian Illustrated Book (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002); David Daiches “Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist. Part One.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 6.2 (1951); Debra N. Mancoff, The Return of King Arthur: The Legend Through Victorian Eyes (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1995); Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 18301870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Richard J. Hill, Picturing Scotland through the Waverly Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010); James T. Hillhouse, The Waverley Novels and Their Critics (New York: Octagon Books, 1968); Ann Rigney “Portable Monuments: Literature, Cultural Memory, and the Case of Jeanie Deans” Poetics Today 25.2 (2004).
and chiefly by foot-passengers; so that being very broad, and enjoying constant shade, it was clothed with grass of a deep and rich verdure, excepting where a foot-path, worn by occasional passengers, tracked with a natural sweep the way from the upper and lower gate. This nether portal, like the former, opened in front of a wall ornamented with some rude sculpture, with battlements on the top, over which were seen, half-hidden by the trees of the avenue, the high steep roofs and narrow gables of the mansion, with lines indented into steps, and corners decorated with small turrets. One of the folding leaves of the lower gate was open, and the sun shone full into the court behind, a long line of brilliancy was flung upon the aperture up the dark and gloomy avenue.60 Here an invitation to imagine the unfolding scene is beautifully extended. Scott handles illustrative techniques such as light, color, and depth with a picturesque, almost painterly know-how. Reminiscent of Barthes’ “reality effect,” this type of prose elaborates a continuous sense of verisimilitude for the reader.61 “We have read of bondman, serfs, 60 Walter Scott, Waverley; Or, Tis’ Sixty Years Since, (Edinburgh: R. Cadell, 1842-47), 75. 61 Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830-1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 85. The definition from Barthes goes a follows: “[W]hen Michelet, describing the death of Charlotte Corday and reporting that in prison, before the arrival of the executioner, she was visited by an artist who painted her portrait, gives us the detail that ‘after an hour and a half, someone knocked softly at a little door behind her,’ [this author], like so many others, produce[s] notations [original emphasis], data, descriptive details) which structural analysis, occupied as it is with separating out and systematizing the main articulations of narrative, ordinarily, and up to the present, has left out, either by excluding from its inventory (by simply failing to mention them) all those details which are ‘superfluous’ (as far as structure is concerned), or else by treating these same details … as fillers [and] padding.” Barthes argues for the importance of such “narrative luxury” [original emphasis], in respect to “notation” most of all. For example, he points out that such effects as “the theme of the door, and death’s soft knocking, have indisputable symbolic value” have become nothing short of essential to “any Western narrative.” R. B. “The Reality Effect,” in XXX, 11-2.
and men,” noted one contemporary critic of Scott’s, “but we never saw them before.”62 “The effect, indeed, is almost as startling as the present moment!” noted another.63 Scott’s portrayal of David Deans in HM leaves the reader with a similarly vivid impression: In his best light-blue Sunday’s coat, his strong gramashes of leggings of thick grey – the very copper buckles – the broad Lowland blue bonnet, thrown back as he lifted his eyes to Heaven in speechless gratitude – the grey locks that straggled from beneath it down his weather-beaten ‘haffets’ – the bald furrowed forehead – the clear blue eye, that, undimmed by years, gleamed bright and pale from under its shaggy grey pent-house – the features, usually so stern and stoical, now melted into unwonted expression of rapturous joy, affection, and gratitude . . . 64 We can see how this pictorial floridity – covering all manner of people, places, and things – allowed for the creative transfer of Scott’s works across numerous different media. Hence, the variety of critical interpretations that were once associated with the Waverly Novels throughout the progression of the nineteenth century. Yet we might also consider where this desire for description actually originates. Though Scott undeniably perfected it in his writing, making it the centerpiece of all of his fictional works, the roots of this literary practice run deeper than the Waverley Novels. In the following chapter, I will attempt to uncover the visual methodology that instills Scott’s prose. This, I believe, will bring us one step closer to understanding the nature of his creative legacy.
62 Edinburgh Monthly Review 3 quoted by Ferris, 61. 63 Jeffrey. 64 Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian, ed. David Hewitt and Alison Lumsden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 375.
Figure 2. Playbill from Edinburgh’s Theatre Royal, 1820, Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland.
Figure 3. For the Play of the Heart of Midlothian: Six Scenes, Alexander Nasmyth, 1820, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland.
Figure 4. “Aristocratic Sense; Or the Eglinton Tomfooleryment,” Cleave’s Penny Gazette, 14 September 1839, The British Library, London.
Figure 5. “The Eglinton Tournament: A Mock Heroic Ballad,” Alfred Crowquill, February 1840, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and American Monthly Review.
Figure 6. An illustration from Richard Doyle’s The Tournament, Or, the Days of Chivalry Revived, 1840, The British Museum, London.
CHAPTER 2: THE WAVERLEY NOVELS AND THE ANTIQUARIAN ROMANCE I have been more solicitous to describe manners minutely, than to arrange in any case an artificial and combined narrative, and have but to regret that I felt myself unable to unite these two requisites of a good Novel. — Sir Walter Scott, 1827 Comparatively little has been written about Scott’s obsolescence within the field of English literature, yet the topic raises vital questions. English scholar and Scott specialist John Henry Raleigh marvels that “never before or since in Western culture has a writer been such a power in his own day and so negligible to posterity.”65 The present chapter attempts to fill this lacuna by assessing Scott’s critical reputation, then and now. With the aid of visual references this discussion adds new meaning to Scott’s name: I demonstrate that the Waverly Novels ushered in nothing less than a new literary genre, one that re-shaped nineteenth-century responses to the past via a mode of writing that represented the culmination of historiographical experimentation in Britain over fifty years. A new literary genre, no less: what do I mean by this? On the one hand, Scott’s hybrid category was generated by his remarkable ability to evoke artifacts, fragmentary traces, and curiosities. This imaginative, and I might add, highly visual practice was made possible by the rise of antiquarianism in eighteenth and early nineteenth century historiographical developments. In Scott’s attempt to draw historical reality nearer, no technique was more fitting than the illustration associated with antiquarian study. On the other hand, Scott fashioned his new genre from large, explanatory narratives and 65 John Henry Raleigh, “What Scott Meant to the Victorians,” in Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels, ed. Harry E. Shaw (London: Prentice Hall International, 1996), 47.
reformist principles of social development. Resting on Enlightenment standards, these methodologies would seem to stand diametrically opposed to evocation and minutiae. Yet Scott was able to fuse together these divergent approaches in an exciting synthesis that guided him, I believe, in all of his writing. Inspired by the latest historiographical achievement of the eighteenth century, the Antiquarian Romance, Scott presented a watershed moment in the British literary tradition, one that would forge an unrivaled visual intimacy with the past for the next one hundred years. *
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The title page for the 1842 Abbottsford Edition of Waverley and the Waverley Novels reveals—to an extent scholars haven’t remarked on previously—the pictorial characteristics that fuelled the condemnation of the series as inferior literature by twentieth-century literary critics (See Fig. 7). Almost two hundred years ago, however, these traits provided the reason for Scott’s immense popularity throughout Britain, in addition to numerous other countries like France, Germany, and America.66 Looking at the engraving, we see a trove of ancient curiosities lying scattered before the mouth of a great gothic entryway. Tartan, weaponry, and other antique assortments suffuse the scene in a pleasingly picturesque manner, allowing our eyes and imagination to eagerly wander from one precious object to the next. To the left, Scott’s deerhound Maida and a gaggle of smaller pups devotedly, if somewhat distractedly keep watch over the museal assemblage. Their inclusion in an otherwise static scene alerts us to what I can only 66 For a timeline of the European reception of Sir Walter Scott and its many translations see Murray Pittock, The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe (London: Continuum, 2006) xxiv - lxxiv.
describe as the artistic virtuosity of Scott’s writing. The surrounding historical environment is breathed, as it were, into life: this is the real Scott touch, the vivification of history in all its particulars. In his essay entitled “What Scott Meant to the Victorians” Raleigh notes that “[w]hat immediately delighted [Scott’s] contemporaries was the concrete reconstruction of the past in all its multiplicity and color.” He then goes on to compare The Waverley Novels “to a dam bursting, as through them the past spilled out onto the present.” 67 Sure enough, if we return to the Abbotsford title page, we glimpse in the far distance a marvelous Scotch baronial hall rising from amidst the top of trees and a sprawling parkway. The effect, as it is compositionally implied, is that we stand before the threshold of a kind of living history, and Scott, the small figure made recognizable by the suit and walking stick he carries, turns around momentarily in his progress to beckon us forward. Twentieth-century literary scholars have found this invitation easy to resist. That early twentieth-century master of the short novel, E.M. Foster, once famously scorned Scott’s prose as taking on the characteristics of picturesque “upholstery.”68 Writing on the topic in 1927, he urged his readers to “think how all Scott’s laborious [scenery]” is devoid of feeling because of a pictoriality which “call[s] out for passion, passion and how it is never there!”69 It is not surprising that the 1920s saw Scott’s critical reputation fall into a decline then. As our examination of the Abbottsford title page has shown, Scott’s love for minutiae was exactly the heart of the matter! The most striking features of the 67 Raleigh, 58. 68 James T. Hillhouse, The Waverley Novels and Their Critics (New York: Octagon Books, 1968), 258. 69 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, (New Yorks: Harcourt Inc., 1927) 31-32, quoted in quoted in Waswo, “Scott and the Really Great Tradition,” 73.
Waverley series are, without question, their attention to outer detail, and for the first generation of Scott’s readers, this was more than enough. For them, “upholstery” was the Author of Waverley’s chief appeal. That which Foster found so ill-conceived in the Waverley Novels’ narrative schematizations actually furnished some of the most comprehensive pictures of the past ever known. Thus, the early nineteenth-century reader responded richly when Scott gleefully dallied, sometimes for pages on end, setting up scenes, describing passages, obscure objects, events, and historical backdrops in exhaustive, typically graphic detail. His descriptions of local lore and legend, Highland scenery, customs, and manners enchanted audiences, perpetually drawing them away from the movements of central narrative in the Waverley Novels to what literary scholar Judith Wilt has called “the brilliant periphery.”70 No wonder the dawn of the Victorian era marked the development of a complex and marvelously heterogeneous kind of historical mindedness in Britain. The pedantry that instilled much of Scott’s writing virtually transformed prose history into something that could be experienced, seen, and felt.71 This current of enthusiasm over Scott’s descriptive élan would fade by the turn of the twentieth century. In 1880, for example, historian Goldwin Smith decried, “Scott was a little too fond of unrestrained flow.”72 A decade later, critic D. F. Hannigan described the Waverley project as possessing “scarcely more vitality than the contents of a 70 Judith Wilt, “Steamboat Surfacing: Scott and the English Novelists,” NCF 35 (1981): 461, quoted in Ferris, “Story-Telling and the Subversion of Literary Form in Walter Scott’s Fiction,” 101. 71 Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830-1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 84. 72 Goldwin Smith, in The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward (1880) 4:186-93.
museum.”73 Scott was a costume novelist and nothing more. For readers in the subsequent century then, the prose behind the Waverley Novel’s pictures of the past was perceived as cumbersome and fussy. It is important to distinguish, however, that such dismissals derive almost exclusively from a turn from outer to inner: what I am referring to here is the modernist “ideology of the freedom of the private self,” an anti-determinist, realist concept that came to dominate forms of nineteenth century prose fiction after the life and times of Scott.74 The bias that presently overwhelms critical discussions of his work thus stems from an inherited system of literary standards predicated on the profundity of feelings, unmediated thought, and experience freed from its worldly context. This explains, despite the remove from its proper historical context, the recurrent complaint among contemporary scholars that Scott’s books are all surfaces and no depth – they simply do not heed the assumed criteria of the prevailing literary genre we now know as “serious” fiction. Significantly, the term “serious” fiction is an invention of relatively recent vintage: it comes from the school of thought associated with Cambridge don F.R. Leavis (1895-1971). In one of his most influential contributions to the field of literary criticism, The Great Tradition (1948), Leavis discusses what he discerns to be a key shift in modern fiction writing from that of earlier, nineteenth century literary standards. This involves a new authorial preoccupation with the narration of interior life and moral complexity; emotion, spontaneity, and instinct are qualities brought to the forefront of the
73 D. F. Hannigan, Westminster Review, 135;256 (1891). 74 Richard Waswo, “Scott and the Really Great Tradition,” in Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels, ed. Harry E. Shaw (London: Prentice Hall International, 1996), 75-77.
modern novel as they impart “a reverent openness before life.”75 According to Leavis, all the great works that comprise the early twentieth-century literary canon in Europe and North America utilize this standard. Authors such as T.S. Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, along with Foster—in his works of fiction— thus earn preeminent distinction in his appraisal for their works’ intent toward psychological depth and feeling. According to Scott expert Richard Waswo, it was Leavis’ conviction (one shared among mid-twentieth-century literary critics of Scott) that the prose behind the Waverly Novels stood in direct opposition to this new line of moral intensity. Exhibiting what was then considered to be three major novelistic flaws, a weakness of plot, tedious stretches of personal commentary, and a disinterest in the interiority of main characters, Scott was quickly relegated to the level of “inspired folklorist.”76 No wonder the Waverley Novels have been routinely described as being peripheral and slow moving; no wonder their writing is often termed as being “overly broad, not deep.”77 Failing, in modernists’ terms, “to strike at the movements of the heart,” Scott’s narrative schematizations were indeed superficial and full of tushery. 78 These derisive commentaries received a new lease on life as late at 1976 when Northrop Frye complained that, compared to the emotional complexities seen in the works of late nineteenth century writers like Henry James, the Waverley series seemed second-rate at
75 F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), 9. 76 Ibid, 5. 77 Waswo, 72. 78 Waswo, 72.
best, or worse still, juvenile.79 This perception of a lack of seriousness in Scott’s fiction has continued then, unabated to the present. Fry’s’ reference to “juvenile” is worth lingering on because it revives the terms of a criticism made by Henry James in 1864. “And thoroughly to enjoy [Scott],” said James witheringly, “we must again become as credulous as children at twilight.”80 I would contend that the pictorial expression of James’s and later twentieth century literary criticisms are found in an intriguing canvas from 1871. Victorian genre artist Charles Hunt’s Ivanhoe (See Fig. 8) was produced nearly forty years after Scott’s death, but the very subject of this painting affirms how cultural familiarity with the Waverley Novels in Britain lasted until the end of the nineteenth century. Ivanhoe, by far the most popular and critically acclaimed Waverley Novel, is shown here as a children’s play game. This was an extraordinarily prescient choice on Hunts part. At the center of the painting we see two boys reenact the famed tournament scene from Ivanhoe, a passage cited many times over in popular Victorian culture (as we clearly saw with the Eglinton Tournament), but never depicted as a juvenile pastime. “Ivanhoe,” a plucky lad garbed in moth-eaten uniform and feathered helmet, sits staunchly astride a quilt-covered bench and brandishes a padded stick. An expression of mock determination crosses the young knight’s face as he and his noble steed engage with their opponent, the villainous “Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert.” “Guilbert,” a sweet-faced boy with unkempt hair and painted mustache, is shown in the comic moment of toppling backward off his makeshift mount
79 Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), quoted in Waswo, “Scott and the Really Great Tradition,” 71. 80 Henry James, North American Review (Ocotober,1864), xcix, 580-7.
with eyes and mouth agape. Such work, while undeniably pleasing to look at, aptly recalls the derisory comments made by James. Hunt’s interpretation of Ivanhoe gives us, I believe, the painted moment when Scott’s critical reputation began to waver. Shown as a game and set in what appears to be the attic of a country house (the resting place of forgotten writers and unwanted household items), the depiction tracks the very beginning of the decline of Scott’s works from fictional classics to comic twaddle. We should note, the Waverley Novels virtually disappeared from popular visual culture in Britain in the late nineteenth century and, as has already been briefly discussed, entered via a disastrous transition, the canon of the modern novel in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Where then do the books fit in, if not with the context of their very own century? To answer this question I believe we need to return to the previous hundred years of their making, the period of the Scottish Enlightenment. Such a regression, so to speak, transforms novelistic “imperfections” into key features of the culture in which they were generated. We arrive then at the reasons why Scott’s reputation in general and the Waverley Novels in particular have suffered so much from changes over the course of a hundred years in the evaluative criteria applied to all kinds of literary forms. A gulf exists—heretofore unrecognized—between two kinds of reader. On one side of that gulf we find our early nineteenth-century appreciator of pictures, and on the other, the twentieth-century devotee of literary fiction. It makes no sense to judge the Waverley Novels according to the likes and dislikes of the later kind of reader, when they existed nearly fifty years prior to the establishment of any kind of modernist literary domain. In fact, the classificatory division of literary genres with attendant criteria did not even exist in the early 1800s.
Prior to this surprisingly late period, literature of any kind, whether history, poetry, or fiction, was still commonly referred to as Belle-Lettres. Our reassessment of the Waverly Novels is therefore very timely . *
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Against the disappointed voices of Foster and his ilk, scholars Hayden White, Anne Stephens, and Mark Salber Phillips have provided useful evaluative principles for taking the measure of Scott’s diffuse, if at times trifling, treatment of word and image. Such has been the paucity of critical attention to this aspect of the Waverley Novels, however, that we must choose carefully from among our sources. For example, White has suggested the ways in which nineteenth century historical texts are “literary artifacts,” borrowing structures and techniques from imaginative literature.81 By contrast, my belief is that the Waverley Novels actually borrowed methodologies from Enlightenment historiography. Moreover, this borrowing enabled Scott to devise his unique formula. On the one hand, it was true to the modes of historiographical expression that gripped Edinburgh of the late eighteenth century, and on the other, it was able to accommodate the pictorialism at the core of Scott’s writing. Of course, Scott didn’t devise this formula overnight. Perfecting it consumed the duration of his young adulthood and into maturity. Nonetheless, the research of both Stephens and Phillips provides strong support for my claim. I turn then, to the context for Phillips’s observation that modern British historiography is much more than a recent arrival on the intellectual landscape. To be 81 Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact” in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (London: Routledge, 2001), 221.
sure, not until the end of the nineteenth century did historiography become a professionalized discipline in Britain. However, instead of concentrating on the matter of when it became an official academic pursuit—one institutionally located in college and university settings—Phillips encourages us to look to the second half of the eighteenth century, at the very latest. By this time, he posits, the foundations for historiography were well in place, superseding the mediocrity that had came before it in the form of didactic chronicles glossing the political and military exploits of eminent rulers. As for proto-sociological areas of interest like everyday life, manners, and customs: these were all but unheard of before the advancements of the Enlightenment. Before mid-century, Stephens argues, history as an object for reflection was seen primarily as a hobby for the rich, the province of aged gentlemen scholars or dilettantes—all in all, a subject unworthy of serious academic pursuit. Focus on the public lives and, on rare occasions, the private dealings of great men was the only goal that was sought-after by historians before the intellectual outpouring that comprised the Age of Reason. In these views Phillips and Stephens underscore the early-to-mid eighteenth century reaction to the belittling of the past. By mid-century, however, the contemporary impatience with dilettantes had reached its peak, an impatience that characterized the French and Scottish Enlightenments alike. To begin with the French: the problem, as put forward by Montesquieu (Charles Louis de Secondat [1689-1755]) in his De l'Esprit des Lois (1748) and Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet [1694-1778]) in his Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751) and Essai sur le moeurs et l’esprit de nations (1756), was the limited scope of historical discourse. “Historians, like kings,” Voltaire once contemptuously stated, “sacrifice the human race to a single man.” He then went on to pose this famous
question: “Have there been none but princes on the earth?”82 What exasperated Voltaire were the inadequacies that plagued conventional forms of historical knowledge. Political and military histories, he asserted, spoke little of everyday life and even less so about the existence of common men and women. What of their history? Leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment were equally disgruntled on this front. In the published writings of Adam Smith (1723-1790), John Millar (1735-1801), Adam Ferguson (1723-1816), David Hume (1711-1776), and Lord Kames (1694-1782) a more nuanced framework for speculation about the historical processes of civilization was adamantly called for.83 Importantly, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith established that it was the inclination toward sympathy, in addition to the vividness of the account concerning the conditions of past events and people, which contributed toward the best forms of historical writing.84 In his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Ferguson similarly urged historiographers to consider the importance of elaborating social life over that of statecraft. For Millar, this inquiry into the ordinary was pivotal as it proved to be no less than the “the interior police and government of a
82 Voltaire, The General History and State of Europe, From the Time of Charlemagne to Charles V, With a Preliminary View of the Oriental Empires (London: J. Nource, 175457) quoted in Stephens “An Antiquarian Romance: British Historiography and Historical Fiction 1760-1820,” 47. 83 For a synthesized treatment of these person’s opinions concerning historiography see Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 (2000) and Anne Stephens An Antiquarian Romance: British Historiography and Historical Fiction 1760-1820 (2002). For individual study, refer to Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) & Dissertation on the Origin of Languages (1767), Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Kames’ Sketches of the History of Man (1774), Millar’s Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771), and Hume’s The Natural History of Religion (1757). 84 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Edinburgh: T. Cadell, 1759), Ch. 2.
country.”85 William Robertson later joined the chorus of voices when he suggested that “to complete the history of the human mind, and attain to a perfect knowledge of its nature and operations, we must contemplate man in all those various situations wherein he has been placed, [and] follow him in his progress through the different stages of society.”86 All those “various situations” wherein man has been placed: What Robertson doesn’t say here, but clearly implicates, is a yearning for a more intimate connection to the details of past life. Particularly vivid evidence for this dissatisfaction with the breadth and substance of pre-Enlightenment historiography comes from the work of Horace Walpole (Third Earl of Oxford, 1717-79). In the preface to his book Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III (1768), Walpole complained, “If we take a survey of our own history, and examine it with any attention, what an unsatisfactory picture does it present to us!” Note how Walpole refers to a picture: for him, it was an image that was inadequate, not a narrative. And Walpole went on to regret “how dry, how superficial, how void of information” that picture was. He even described a picture waiting for the busy, packed, absorbing details that Scott would later supply: “How little is recorded” Walpole regretted, “besides battles, plagues, and religious foundations!”87 It is time to bear down on what I believe to be the significance of Phillips’s contention that it was the Scottish Enlightenment’s push toward “sentiment” and experiential engagement that truly revolutionized the field of history. Edinburgh’s 85 John Millar, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society ed. J. V. Price (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1990) quoted in Phillips, 184. 86 William Robertson, The History of America, 3 vols. (London: A. Straham, 1788), 50. 87 Horace Walpole, Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard III (Dublin: G. Faulkner, 1768), ix.
thriving intellectual climate, Phillips contends, gave rise to the very concept of historical inquiry as new institutions, new subjects, styles, and forms of historical knowledge flooded onto the cultural scene in response to the historiographical deficiencies first laid out in the works of De l'Esprit des Lois and Essai sur le moeurs.88 Unlike the French, however, men like Smith, Ferguson, Kames, Millar, and Hume were interested not so much in supplementing lists of historiographical inadequacies, but rather overturning and rewriting many of the methods by which the past had formerly been seen and studied. As the titles to some of their written works suggest – Dissertation on the Origin of Languages (1767), Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Sketches of the History of Man (1774), Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771), and The Natural History of Religion (1757) – Smith, Ferguson, Kames, Millar, and Hume respectively moved beyond the level of critique to expand the field of history. By investigating social aspects of the past that were not limited to the traditional themes of war and rulers, their endeavors prompted a reconceptualization of history as well as a new sensitivity to the uses to which history had been put. The emphasis was on more humanized, emotive engagements with the past.89 Of the aforementioned texts, Millar, Ferguson, and Kames are especially worth noting. Their work sought to actively replace the archaic “great man” approach the French had been content to inveigh against by what they called the new “philosophical” or “conjectural” mode of historical writing. These were tracts that strove to narrativize the development of the human mind—and, following Phillips’s emphasis, the human 88 Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5. 89 Ibid.
heart—throughout various stages in history. As for the importance of the protosociological that many found lacking in the dilettante scholarship of the seventeenth century, discussions of local manners, the arts, science, religion, education, domesticity, race, class, gender and legislature took on heightened significance in their investigations as they were used as ballast for an unprecedented willingness to speculate on and conjecture about the reasons why eighteenth century Western societies achieved their preeminence through historical progression. In Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), for example, Ferguson outlines a four-stage history of civil society in order to demonstrate the origin and progress of the human race in all aspects of life. The details of this treatise include passages involving hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce. Building off this model of economic determinism, Millar wrote his Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771), a history that repeatedly underscores “the advancements of commerce and the arts” and the impact “these [factors have had] upon the manners, laws, and government of people.”90 It was Kame’s Sketches of the History of Man (1774), however, which best embodied the distinguishing scope of conjectural inquiry. In this book a deluge of descriptive passages or “sketches” have been compiled in order to comment upon topics as wide-ranging as the “Origin and Progress of the Arts,” “Progress of the Female Sex,” “Progress and effects of luxury,” “manners,” “sentiments of patriotism,” and more.91 In his similar tendency toward expansiveness and graphic description, we can see Scott emulating this desire to “sketch” history fully. In the preface to Perevil of the Peak (1823) he writes, “a poor fellow like 90 John Millar, Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society ed. J. V. Price (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1990) quoted in Phillips, 185. 91 Henry Home, Sketches of the History of Man, 2nd ed. 4 vols. (Edinburgh, 1778) quoted in Phillips, 174.
myself, weary of ransacking his own barren and bounded imagination, looks out for some [inspiration] in the huge and boundless field of history.”92 Its profusion of characters, shades, and manners present a “lively picture.”93 One novel practice that exemplified the conjectural method of historiography was the enthusiasm for including “anecdotes.” These formed a key component of Hume’s writing. While the gist of his astounding, six volume History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688 (1754-62) remained largely political, its subsections entitled “miscellaneous transactions” were widely praised for their cultural detail and close treatment of Saxon versus Norman customs and manners. By integrating short descriptions concerning antiquarian material (i.e. ancient texts, artists’ works, cultural artifacts etc.) into a sweeping historical saga of British monarchs and civic leaders, he greatly expanded a discursive practice taken from Voltaire’s De l'Esprit des Louis. Robert Henry, a devotee of Hume, took this expanded range of historical commentary to an entirely different level in his History of Great Britain . . . on a New Plan (1771-95). Dividing his descriptive accounts by era, civil and military history, ecclesiastical history, legal history, the history of learning, the history of the arts, the history of commerce, and the history of “manners, virtues, vices, remarkable customs, language, dress, diet, and diversions,” his was the first written history to try to systematize historical knowledge into a format of separate but close readings.94 Clearly then Hume and Henry were able to see the potential of Voltaire’s explanation that, 92 Walter Scott, Perevil of the Peak, (Edinburgh: R. Cadell, 1842-47), Preface. 93 Ibid. 94 Robert Henry, History of Great Britain, from the First Invasion of it by the Romans Under Julius Caesar. Written on a New Plan, 6 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1771-1795), 1: iv.
“Anecdotes are the gleanings left over from the vast harvest field of history.” 95 Later, we can virtually see Scott underlining the passages where Voltaire praised anecdotes as the “details that have long been hidden.”96 It was this hiddenness, according to Voltaire, that was key: “hence their name of anecdotes.”97 In due course, Scott would be able to use this potential in his fiction. Anecdotes supplied information on peoples, places, or things, in a colorful, semi-factual way where few historical records actually existed. This use of the “micro” in turn could support the broader attention to the “general spirit” of ages past—what Georg Hegel (1770-1832) would later amplify as a zeitgeist.98 With the insertion of hypothetical embellishments becoming a readily accepted and, in line with Phillips’s claim, a greatly enlivening practice, it is no wonder that the Scottish Enlightenment would be so important for Scott. In 1783, by which time Scott was already attending Edinburgh University, the rhetorician Hugh Blair described the historiographical scene of Enlightenment Scotland as “a great improvement,” which had introduced a more particular attention than was formerly given to laws, customs, commerce, religion, literature, and every other thing that tends to shew the spirit and genius of nations. It is now understood to be the business of an able historian to exhibit manners, as well as facts and events; and assuredly, whatever displays the state
95 See Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV Trans. Martin P. Pollock (London: Dent, 1966), 255. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 98 See G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, Trans. Robert S. Hartman (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1953), 9.
and life of mankind, in different periods, and illustrates the progress of the human mind, is more useful and interesting than the detail of sieges and battles.99 It is easy to understand then the confidence Hume felt when he asserted in 1770 that “this is the historical Age, and this the historical Nation.”100 Hume’s nation is singular here as he had Edinburgh’s historiographical innovations in mind. Scott was consequently given a historiographical inheritance aiming to evoke the totality of human life as it was in every particular. However, we need to consider the final, and perhaps most decisive player on the stage that Scott would soon dominate, the field of antiquarianism. To accommodate an expanding historiographical arena without succumbing to grand narratives or accounts of sheer progressivism, ever more enlivening detail, and ever more evidentiary support were also deemed necessary to history’s continuing improvement. Hence, the influence that came to be exerted by the sphere of late eighteenth century antiquarianism. Antiquarian detail provided the perfect solution to broader-based conjectural techniques. In fact, antiquarianism, I want to posit, was one of the first concepts to open the field of history to the possibilities of imaginative reconstruction and engagement. Practically limitless contextualization: this is what antiquarian activities afforded Enlightenment historians. It is what first drew Scott to the field. Intriguingly, antiquarian study originally developed as an offshoot of the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh. 101 At its most basic level, the fledgling field 99 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belle Lettres, Ed. Charlotte Downey (Delmar, NY: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1993), 366. 100 David Hume quoted in Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740-1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8. 101 The name in full was The Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge, and it was founded in 1660. The Society of Antiquaries of London was officially formed in 1707 and received its Royal Charter in 1751. Throughout the
consisted of what we would now call classificatory work, that is, scholarship “lacking a synthetic or evaluative dimension.”102 Was this a sudden return then, to the dreaded days of the dilettantes? Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), looking back on this period from his first forays into existentialism certainly thought so. Nietzsche defined the antiquarian sensibility as an irresistible attachment to the material traces of the past, a kind of historical fetishisaztion for “all that is small and limited, moldy and obsolete.”103 Indeed, throughout the eighteenth century, historical studies that focused on empirical evidence of the past but were purely descriptive and made no analytic claims were often denounced as belonging to the province of antiquarianism, while antiquaries themselves were often stereotyped as myopic pedants, collectors, or fops. If we want to agree with Nietzsche then, the preservationist elements of antiquarian practice certainly point to this kind of cursory set of interests. However, what I want to suggest here instead is that antiquarianism was a form of historical consciousness deeply motivated by the desire to experience, see, and feel. The field embraced everything we have seen at work in the title page to the Abbottsford Edition of Waverley. Before we can return to Scott though, we should consider the richness of that pictorial desire that Scott would later inherit.
eighteenth century, both societies regularly met on Thursdays and shared a common staircase at Somerset House in London. Royal Charter incorporated the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. These societies also shared accommodations. For a full discussion of the overlap between the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries in London and Scotland, see David P. Miller “’Into the Shadow of Darkness’: Reflections on the Royal Society in the Eighteenth Century” History of Science 27 (1989): 155-66. 102 Stephens, 38. 103 Friedrich Nietzche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1978) quoted in Bann, Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 63.
It was common practice among the Society of Antiquaries in London and Scotland to implement research techniques roughly analogous to those used at the Royal Society. Thus antiquarian study customarily began with an individual artifact such as a relic, coin, or manuscript. Then, in a manner akin to the laboratory experiment—just as compelling, just as absorbing, just as intense—the object was carefully scrutinized, described, sometimes formally compared with collected items of a similar type, and analyzed for the purpose of revealing certain historical truths. Frequently, antiquarian analyses ended with a written thesis concerning the object’s possible date of origin, its function, or value in illuminating a particular historical moment. Antiquarian papers often went so far as to incorporate elaborate technical vocabularies, lengthy quotations, marginal citations, and meticulously engraved images of the artifacts as seen from multiple viewpoints (See Fig. 9-11). Francis Grose’s Antiquarian Repertory (1775) is a particularly fine example of this latter strategy.104 In the introduction to his publication he lists the range objects illustrated in his work. These include: Accounts of various pieces of ancient Furniture; - of singular feats of Activity, Fragments and Specimens of early English poetry; - Anecdotes of Dress, particularly that of the Court, the Church, and the Army; - Original Characters; Jocular Tenures; - Manners and Customs; - Views of the Purveyance and Housekeeping of Royal and Noble Personages; - Heraldic Antiquities; - the Arms and Bearing of the Nobility and Gentry of England, arranged according to their loyalty; - Religious Ceremonies; - Tournaments; - Masques and Theatrical 104 Francis Grose, Thomas Astle, and other eminent antiquaries, eds. The Antiquarian Repertory: a Miscellaneous Assemblage of Topography, History, Biography, Customs, and Manners. Intended to Illustrate and Preserve Several Valuable Remains of Olt Times. 4 vols (London: Edward Jeffrey, 1807), i.
Exhibitions; - State of Architecture; - and in short, every topic connected with, or elucidative of, the Civil, Military, and Political History of our Ancestors. Similarly, in publications such as Archaeologia, the Society of Antiquaries’ annual journal and Gentleman’s Magazine, the antiquarian scholar incorporated complex paratextual devices such as footnotes, endnotes, prefaces, dedications, glossaries, and indexes.105 We can already see how the use of these devices would later filter through to Scott. The reasons why he embraced cumbersome features like preambles, epistles, personae, notes, glossaries, and appendices is apparent: in presenting artifacts in such a descriptively painstaking, pseudo-scientific manner, it was believed the personality of the researcher or any biases he held would be overcome by the weight of historical fact. History, then, would essentially be spoken for via its material trappings. Overly scrupulous though the practice later appeared to Nietzsche, antiquarianism’s remarkable capacity to illuminate a wide range of aspects of everyday life led contemporaries to believe it was nothing less than the most effective historiographical practice to date. The following table documents the growth of the Society of Antiquaries in London as it achieved increasing institutional credibility. 106
Decade New Members
1710’s
1720’s
1730’s
1740’s
1750’s
1760’s
1770’s
1780’s
1790’s
54
102
81
70
125
172
239
270
261
A List of the Society of Antiquaries from the Years 1717-1796
105 Stephens, 63. 106 Ibid, 28.
Intellectuals influenced by the conjectural histories of the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular, recognized the merits of antiquarianism in creating a more organic understanding of the cultures of various historical epochs. “Few men have had so much experience and acquaintance with the different [ways of life] . . . in remote ages and nations” than antiquaries wrote Smith.107 The perceptual immediacy associated with antiquarian source materials provided the perfect means for fleshing out the widened purview of Enlightenment historical inquiries. On top of this, historical remnants not only stood as authentic proof of past events and things, but also appealed to the imagination in ways that conventional textbook prose could not. This historical proximity as ensured through careful antiquarian descriptions as well as through the objects themselves, guaranteed a more sympathetic and, hence, more profound awareness of past ages. In his 1803 lectures on historiography, Enlightenment theorist Joseph Priestley explained the illustrative value of antiquities in aiding new historical rhetoric. He wrote: We find upon them traces of customs and manners, the figures of ancient buildings, instruments, and habits, and of a variety of things which show the state of the arts and conveniencies of life, in the age wherein [they were produced]; and many things in nature which historians have passed unnoticed, as being familiar in the times in which they wrote, or have omitted, as not being aware that they should ever engage the curiosity of after ages.108
107 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments 1759 (Amherst NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 283. 108 Joseph Priestly, Lectures on History and General Policy (Philadelphia: P. Byrne, 1803), 120.
In the attempt to draw historical reality nearer then, no historiographical technique was more fitting than antiquarianism. Thematically aligned with the Scottish Enlightenment’s interests in revealing truths about human behavior and the general workings of society, it was a practice uniquely equipped to provide quotidian detail in addition to new ideals of historical verisimilitude.109 “The Antiquary [is] that Interpreter by whom history is rendered intelligible . . . The Antiquary sets before our eyes, and puts into our hands, in a way that the historian does not, every component part and whole frame of the acting system,” explained Thomas Pownall in a letter written to the Society of Antiquaries in 1795. “He makes his reader live as it were in the times and through the scenes he describes.” 110 To state the obvious: Scott did not belong to this first wave of antiquarian enthusiasm, nor did he fully participate in the conjectural activities established by the first generation of Enlightenment historiographers. After all, Scott received his education in the years 1779 to 1786, in the immediate aftermath of the Scottish Enlightenment, first at Edinburgh High School and later at Edinburgh University. As we might expect then, innovation and generative originality had given way by this time to synthesis and dissemination. Rather than dismiss these derivative activities, I want to suggest here that we think of them as due their own significance in the development of early British historiography. We might think of Scott then as belonging to a third, but no less important, generation of the Scottish Enlightenment. It is against this previously
109 Stephens, 105. 110 Thomas Pownall, An Antiquarian Romance Endeavoring to Mark a Line by Which the Most Ancient People and the Procession of the Earliest Inhabitancy of Europe May Be Investigated (London: John Nichols, 1795), 76.
overlooked backdrop that we should figure in what he was attempting to do as a fiction writer. By the turn of the century, the representation of antiquarian material combined with Scottish conjectural technique had become the vogue for historians wanting to appeal to a wider audience. Conjectural histories brought together a compelling sequence of socio-cultural items and facts, while antiquarianism, borrowing from empirical techniques, offered to make those wider-reaching accounts more tangible than previously thought possible. Explanatory abstraction and representational immediacy: the intermingling of these approaches produced a new, story-like record of past ages that was readable, dynamic, and perceptibly concrete all at once. On the eve of the Romantic literary movement in Britain, historian Thomas Pownall evocatively referred to this new historiographical phenomenon as the “Antiquarian Romance.”111 Seeking to narrativize the progress of society through more select areas of concentration, it was a body of historical scholarship that uniquely resembled the format of the novel. Tellingly, some of the first historians to experiment with this hybrid form of historiographical expression were Joseph Strutt, Thomas Warton, and Thomas Percy – men whose works we know Scott was in possession of and studied closely throughout the entirety of his early career.112 In The Regal and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of England (1773) as well as Horda Angel-cynnon: or a Compleat View of the Manners, Customs, Arms, Habits, & c. 111 Pownall, ix-x. 112 Scott makes references to the works of Strutt, Warton, and Percy sporadically throughout the Waverley Novels. Often this is in the form of critique, as is the case with his discussion concerning Strutt in Waverley, though we know from personal correspondence in addition to his son-in-law’s biography Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1837-38) that he had great admiration for these authors and studied them religiously. For more on Scott’s interaction with Strutt, Warton, and Percy see Stephens.
of the Inhabitants of England (1775) Strutt presented British readers with what are now considered to be the first progressive accounts of English clothing and accouterments in written history.113 With a heavy emphasis on visuality, these publications offered collections of engravings from illuminated manuscripts as well as other forms of historical documentation. Miscellaneous representations of royalty, costumes, armor, and seals were carefully placed in chronological order and accompanied by rich, explanative texts in the interest of unifying them through a single, determinist discourse. Likewise, Warton’s the History of English Poetry (1774-84) and Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) were some of the first historical publications in Britain to attempt to trace of the field of English literature from start to finish. In the preface to his book, Percy aptly demonstrates the influence of both antiquarianism and Enlightenment progressivism on his and his peers’ work, declaring “No active or comprehensive mind can forbear some attention to the reliques of antiquity; it is prompted by natural curiosity to survey the progress of life and manners, and to inquire by what gradations barbarity was civilized, grossness refined, and ignorance instructed.”114 In this statement we see the roots of Scott’s fiction emerge. While previous authors in Britain such as Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Daniel Defoe had sought to write fictional narratives merely set in past ages, Scott set out on a completely different literary project with the Waverley Novels: to reconstruct the total environment of human life as it was in past ages. Scott himself frequently intimated as much, stating in numerous publications that he fancied himself the “painter of the past,” and that the “description of scenery . . . was 113 Stephens, 72. 114 Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets: With some Few of Later Date. 1765. 3 vols. (London: Henry Washbourne, 1847), 1: iv.
more the object of the Author than a combined and regular narrative.” 115 We might interpret the Waverley Novels, then, not just as a series of uniquely vivid fictional works but as a kind of experimental expansion on the Enlightenment idea of the Antiquarian Romance. Conceptually, Scott picks up where Strutt, Warton, and Percy left off. The narrative components of the Waverley Novels, for example, speak more directly to the rhetorical precedents established by eighteenth century historiographical practices than they do to imaginative literature; they play an ancillary role in Scott’s grand design to visually recreate the world of history. Modern literary critics perceive this to be the weakness or mediocrity of Scott’s texts, when it is in fact the careful and studied craftsmanship of a writer steeped in philosophical tradition. We may observe, the Enlightenment interest in surveying all aspects of everyday life in past ages had necessitated a unifying principle of sorts that would make sense of the expanding field of history and help place it within an ethical context. To that end, the assembly of a series of historical events, peoples, and places into a broad narrative schema had proven to be a highly effective model for historians wishing to validate universal ideas like the origins of society or social progress. Historical “truths, which come forward veiled in the fable of Romance . . . steal upon [a person’s] beliefs,” more forcefully than those presented as mere fact, wrote Thomas Pownall.116 Within the trajectory of a narrative, moreover, any and all aspects of historical consciousness could potentially be made meaningful. It can be argued that the fictional stories Scott employs in the Waverley Novels function more 115 Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (Edinburgh: A. Constable & Company, 1805), Preface, quoted in Maxwell, The Victorian Illustrated Book, 3. 116 Pownall, ix-x.
or less as an elaboration of this technique in addition to the conjectural concept of the “anecdote.” They serve a discursive purpose, then, and are not intended to function as autonomous literary devices, but rather as the textual agents that bolster and cohere every historical fragment or “truth” that Scott wishes to evoke. For lack of a better analogy, fictional emplotment can be understood as the stitchwork that helps patch together all of Scott’s “picturesque upholstery.” It is this then, the multicolored tapestry of history, which is supposed to stand out in the Waverley Novels, much as it did with the Antiquarian Romance. Once we understand that plot in the Waverley Novels is conceived of as a subsidiary vehicle for framing history, we can appreciate the bulk of Scott’s work for what it really is, an antiquarian tour de force. What we see in the Abbotsford title page suggests the miraculous extent to which the Waverley Novels appealed to the imagination and harnessed the visualizing powers of the mind’s eye. The level of historical detail in the Waverley Novels is a feature remarked upon often enough by scholars, but it is specifically the antiquarian nature of that detail that I think should be scrutinized here more readily since it was a historiographical practice institutionalized in Scotland in the 1780’s amid the hype of Enlightenment activities and Scott’s education. In the past, historians have frequently underestimated the theoretical importance of antiquarianism in aiding early historiographical developments because of its principal focus on artifacts, fragmentary traces, or curiosities. In the grand scheme of things, historical writing that centers on matters of this kind is read as trifling or insignificant. Here we see the proof, however, of just how effective “the little things” can be. Scott’s minutiae furnish us with a comprehensive picture, or rather, an entire world, which can be virtually explored.
The terrible prolixity of Scott’s texts then, their tendency to alight on exterior details and omit interior characterizations can each be interpreted as homage to the antiquarian way of investigating history. With every turn of the page in the Waverley series Scott endeavors to uncover the past with a telescopic intensity, describing temporal, spatial, and sociological realms with astonishing precision and gusto. A profound sense of realism is achieved through the over-abundance of these accounts as they move up and down the historiographical spectrum, illustrating all manner of people, places and things. Castles and crags, Scottish characters, clothing, portraiture, heraldry, weaponry, and other antique assortments loom large at the expense of developed plots and protagonists. We might view this visual trend in Scott’s writing as an attempt to simulate the antiquarian ideal of historical objectivity. Scott’s exhaustive commentary aims at rendering human life in all its spheres and thus generates an impression of historical authenticity and truth that, in a manner of speaking, strives to substitute the phenomena of actual lived experience. Importantly, the materialist basis of antiquarian study in Britain relied on the same pictorial concept for knowledge of the past.117 Through the language of the senses, primarily, though not exclusively, that of the eyes, it was believed historical truths could be laid bare. This is not the only evidence to support Scott’s appropriation of antiquarian methods, however. By way of preambles, epistles, personae, notes, glossaries, and appendices we can see him mimicking the format of the antiquarian publication as well (See Fig. 12-13). Here, the historical impetus of Scott’s work is perhaps most glaring as he tries to stylistically legitimize his texts as
117 Ina Ferris, “’Before Our Eyes’: Romantic Historical Fiction and the Apparitions of Reading,” Representations 121.1 (2013): 60.
compendiums of historical fact and information.118 The frequency with which paratextual features like footnotes, illustrations, prefaces, dedications, glossaries, and indexes appear in the Waverley Novels would seem to indicate that Scott indeed identifies himself as a historical writer attuned to antiquarian methods. Today, as we continue to rethink the boundaries of English literature and historiography, we should be able to look back on the early example of the Waverley Novels with a newfound appreciation for the technical virtuosity they present. Scott culls numerous fictive, visual, and historical elements in order to produce compelling accounts of historical reality. I have submitted here how we might consider those aspects of his work responsive to what was then the latest trend in historiographical thought in Britain, the Antiquarian Romance. Little has been said or written about the concept of the Antiquarian Romance in relation to nineteenth century history or literature, though to my mind it offers rich insight into the historiographical developments that would later overtake Europe at the beginning of the Victorian era. Building off of the Enlightenment interest in surveying culture and progress, while simultaneously borrowing features from antiquarian-based historiography, it provided a unique solution to the desire to both see and assess history. With the Waverley Novels Scott clearly took this amalgamative technique and expanded it. Capitalizing on the ferment for everyday detail, historical immediacy, and color he attempted to transform prose history into a panoramic experience.119 In his memoirs, Scott’s contemporary Lord Henry Cockburn recalled the
118 Raleigh, 51. 119 Rosemary Mitchell, Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830-1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 84.
miraculous extent to which the Waverley Novels revived past ages, thus superseding the historical texts that had preceded them. He wrote, . . . no work that ha[d] appeared in my time made such an instant and universal impression. It is curious to remember it; the unexpected newness of the thing, the profusion of . . . characters, the . . . language, [the] scenery, men and women, . . . the writing and the graphic force of the descriptions, all struck us with an electric shock of delight.120 Seeing the past in proximity hitherto unknown, the first generation of Waverley readers extolled Scott’s use of elaborate description and dramatic force. His profuse use of word and image gave the later nineteenth century nothing less than a new means of engendering historical consciousness.
120 Lord Henry Cockburn, Memorials of his Time, (Edinburgh & London: T. N. Foulis, 1856), 266, quoted in Hillhouse, The Waverley Novels and Their Critics, 8.
Figure 7. Illustrated Title Page for Waverley, W. Harvey, 1842, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
Figure 8. Ivanhoe, Charles Hunt, 1871, New York, Forbes Magazine Collection.
Figure 9. Details of St. Peter’s Church in Oxon, Engraving for Archaeologia, 1779, vol. 1, page 151.
Figure 10. A Curious Botanical Table, Engraving for Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1766, page 113.
Figure 11. Detail of a massive footnote used by William Tytler in his “Dissertation on the Scottish Music,” Archaeologia Scotia or Transactions of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, vol. 1, 1792, page 477.
Figure 12. The above is a page taken from the “Appendix to the General Preface” of Waverley; Or Tis’ Sixty Years Since (Abbotsford Edition, 1842). Before even starting the novel one must wade through two prefaces, three appendices, and an introductory essay – all of which are supposed to “set the scene” for the reader. Waverley’s lead character, Sir Edward Waverley, does not even speak until the eighth chapter of the book!
Figure 13. The lengthy footnote pictured above is taken from Ivanhoe (Abbotsford Edition, 1842) and contains epistolary fragments from the “annuls of Queen Mary.” Scott attempts here to carefully delineate the horrors of 16th century interrogation procedures, taking up this and the entirety of the following page to do so.
CHAPTER 3: ENVISIONING SCOTT-LAND Distance, in truth, produces in idea the same effect as real perspective. [ . . .] There are mists too in the mental as well as the natural horizon, to conceal what is less pleasing in distant objects, and there are happy lights to stream in full glory upon those points which can profit by brilliant illumination. Sir Walter Scott, 1814
Thus far, we have seen the ways in which the Waverley Novels attempted to draw historical reality nearer. We have seen how Scott’s writing, stylistically and conceptually influenced by the historiographical developments of the late Scottish Enlightenment, was uniquely suited for aestheticization. What these discussions have led us to understand is that the Waverley Novels gave rise to a kind of historical consciousness intent on the visualization of the appearance of the past and all its various events, persons, and places. As we’ve seen, Scott’s fiction rendered history accessible for what many felt was the first time. Thomas Carlyle drew upon the romantic novelty of this literary practice when he appraised the Waverley Novels in the decade succeeding Scott’s death. He extoled the Waverley canon for revealing that “bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men [. . . ] Not abstractions were they [. . .] but men, in buff or other coats and breeches, with colour in their cheeks, with passions in their stomachs, and the idioms, features, and vitalities of very men.”121 What Carlyle stressed in this commentary was the poetic fire at the heart of Scott’s writing. It was difficult to imagine a writer before him who possessed the same ability to infuse the dry stuff of history not only with high emotion, but also the toil and trouble of everyday living. Thanks to the Author of Waverley, Carlyle was able to paint a picture of living, breathing humanity as history’s 121 Thomas Carlyle, review of Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Baronett, vols. 1-6, in London and Westminster Review 6 (1838): 337.
palpable population. In doing so, Carlyle demonstrated the sense of contiguity between past and present that typified the Waverley Novels – an extraordinary, albeit imaginary, suspension of temporal domains. Repeating Carlyle’s emphasis on the palpability conveyed by Scott’s prose, another, anonymous critic explained in 1820 that we “live in the eventful days, and mingle among breathing persons.”122 The descriptive force of Scott’s writings thus gave history unprecedented purchase in the mind. It is no wonder literary scholar Ina Ferris has been moved to describe this effect as nothing less than a kind of magical presence.123 Given the strands that this chapter gathers together, a concentration on exactly what assumption underlay Scott’s devotion to historical evocation is in order. Our author’s musings about distance began this chapter, and here they provide a guiding light to what this assumption entailed: namely, that any encounter with the past is prefigured by metaphors of distance and alterity, which can even give rise to a form of “heterotopia,” as we will see in due course. Nowhere was this concept truer than early nineteenth-century Britain, where according to historian Peter Fritzche, there was a widespread feeling of being “stranded in the present.”124 The 1793 nadir of Bourbon regicide had sent shock waves across the Channel, and that Francophobia had intensified during the Revolution’s Napoleonic aftermath. In addition to such specific traumas, nineteenth-century Britain was also undergoing industrialization, colonial expansion, and urbanization. Fritzche’s compelling analysis cannot but lead us to the view that the great 122 Review in New Monthly Magazine 14 (October 1820): 422. 123 Ina Ferris, “’Before Our Eyes’: Romantic Historical Fiction and the Apparitions of Reading,” Representations 121.1 (2013): 61. 124 Peter Fritzche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
British public for whom Scott was writing were suffering from the belief that the present was somehow cut-off from the past and its indeterminate future. The former domain was commonly referred to as a “foreign country,” so distant was it perceived to be from the rapidly changing present. Swept along by the tides of modernization, contemporaries increasingly looked on history as something mysteriously remote, irretrievably lost even, and strange. It is against this unremitting socio-political upheaval and estrangement that the appeal of the Waverley Novels is best understood. Insofar as Scott made historical reality the object of intense scrutiny in his fiction, he made the past a seemingly familiar place for readers once more. And this was achieved through his genius for evocation, for allowing the “full glory” of familiarity to illuminate history’s best “points” as chosen by Scott. This “singular vividness” of the Waverley canon is cast in an especially intriguing light when analyzed in reference to a select body of Scott’s fictional works known as the Scottish or Scotch Novels.125 This collection includes Waverley (1814), Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), Old Mortality (1816) Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and Redgauntlet (1824). Cited by the majority of literary critics for their exemplary pictorialism, these books were almost unanimously favored by the Victorian reading public for their illustrations of early-to-mid-eighteenth-century Scottish history: in particular, the vernacular settings, local customs, and habits of post-union Scotland. Here Scott chose to narrativize the movements of a diverse and markedly earthy troupe of characters, bringing the elements of common historical life to the forefront of his writing in a manner unparalleled in the 125 Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (London, 1899), 4:76.
rest of the Waverley series.126 Traipsing across moors, whistling bawdy tunes, and stoking the fires of modest country kitchens, a host of unheroic, middling types – such as smallholders, petty criminals, lairds, tradesmen, farmers, gypsies, minstrels, and dairymaids – pervaded these works. It was the Author of Waverley’s principal focus on this cast of fictional unknowns, rather than the titular heroes of the then conventional gothic romance, which delighted his early nineteenth-century audiences. By renting the veil of high life away from his narrative schematizations in the Scotch Novels and choosing to alight on the details of an ostensibly simpler time, Scott produced what appeared to be the most “faithful depiction[s] of historical actuality” to date.127 Therein, however, lay one fundamental problem: for as tangible as historical Scotland appeared to be in these works, the underlying condition of historical distance remained a contributing factor in their success. As we’ve seen, only recently have scholars begun to uncover the historicizing rhetoric at stake in the Waverley Novels.128 This investigative turn has broadened our understanding of Scott and the myriad illustrative endeavors inspired by him in the years succeeding his death. In particular, the writings of Pierre Nora have yielded insights essential to the analytic work of this thesis. But, I would argue, we haven’t exhausted their possibilities yet. Keeping as our guiding star that delighted description with which this chapter began – Scott’s love letter to mists both historical and meteorological – my 126 David Daiches, “Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist. Part Two,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 6.3 (1951): 173. 127 Harry E. Shaw, Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels (London: Prentice Hall International, 1996), 5, 58. 128 Bruce Beiderwell, Power and Punishment in Scott’s Novels (Athens, Georgia: University of Athens Press, 1992); Daiches; Stuart Kelly, Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2010); James Kerr, Fiction Against History: Scott as Story-Teller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Shaw.
closing discussion profits still more from Nora’s concepts. Here, a reexamination of his work reveals that his theorization on historical distance is perfectly applicable to two of the Scotch series’ most enduring legacies, Waverley and Rob Roy. With the title page from the illustrators of the 1842 Abbotsford Edition of the Waverley Novels already examined, this chapter ultimately delivers us to the poignancy of the Abbotsford’s vignettes. Depicted items of clothing and weaponry, empty of the person but redolent of the historical personage, translate views of historical distantiation and transience entrenched in Waverley and Rob Roy, an entrenchment that Nora’s theorizing has made evident. The demands of a concluding chapter however, send my analyses of Waverley and Rob Roy into modes both summarizing and surveying. While earlier chapters pointed the way to just how seamlessly Scott-land became Scotland, this chapter shows how the edges between the two nationscapes became further blurred. My discussion thus brings us up to date, while also sending us back in time. A model, based on those analyses of Waverley and Rob Roy, is in our sights: one that yields an understanding of the most popular visualizations of Scotland today. These visualizations, I argue, are nothing without a cargo of historical distance and otherness. This cargo came not so much from Scott himself, as by the longevity of his influence: the creative endeavors inspired by Scott in the years following his death. Such endeavors, as we’ll see, show how Scott’s legacy has wielded the greatest impact over developments in popular visual culture. Let us now consider Waverley and Rob Roy both together and separately. Though each made a significant contribution to the Waverley canon in their own right, Waverley and Rob Roy present an overlap in narrative configuration that is striking in terms of the historical epochs they illuminate. Set against the Jacobite Uprisings of 1745 and 1715
respectively, each story focuses on the moral growth of a protagonist from starry-eyed youth to adulthood: Edward Waverley and Frank Osbaldistone, two guileless and impressionable sons of the British Empire, journey north into the Highlands of Scotland at times when Stuart sympathies are running high. Partly by commiseration and partly by accident, each character then comes into close contact with the passions and activities of the rebellious Scots. Driven by incidents of extreme heroism, “primitive vigor,” loyalty, and love they find themselves enmeshed in the historical events leading up to the defense and subsequent loss of the “Good Old Cause.”129 Here Scott is careful to overlay his plots with what we by now recognize as Scott’s hallmark representations of old Scotland: scenes that are compellingly graphic yet quaint. Readers are moved across fields of heather and gorse, wood-beamed taverns, great halls, quiet, moonlit trails, and rocky glens. Peopled by men and women who are hearty and mischievous, bantering, affable, eccentric, and bright, one is easily swayed by the romantic coloring of it all. It was precisely this tendency of Scott’s to soften, or in some instances completely overlook the major socio-political controversies of the times which made Waverley and Rob Roy such enjoyable works of fiction. Replacing the harsher points of historical reality – the starvation, poverty, and bloodshed of thousands of Scots for example – with pastoral scenes and people, Scott essentially recreated the face of eighteenth-century Scotland. So charming and so enthralling were the features of this imaginary nationscape that nineteenth-century audiences believed in its past existence whole-heartedly.130 But there, of course, was the crux of the matter: not only did these great fictions perpetuate 129 Daiches, 84. 130 James A. Coleman, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Commemoration, Nationality and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 27.
revisionist images of Scottish history that neutralized its more distressing aspects, they also displaced and depoliticized the country’s tragic past by obliging it to assume what has been called a modality of “having been, but no longer.”131 The Scottish past may be glorious in Waverley and Rob Roy, but it is decidedly over. Nowhere is temporal distance made clearer than in the concluding chapters of the novels where Scott extricates his protagonists from the illusory mists of the “other side.”132 This move, it is important to understand, would have been deemed necessary by a unionist supporter like Scott since he, having full knowledge of the fate of the Scots on account of the infamously doomed Jacobite rebellions, would have wished to keep his reputation as a Scotch novelist clean. To dwell too long in the subversive realm of recent Scottish history might have implied getting one’s tartan dirty! Therefore, just as Waverley and Osbaldistone are about to drift away forever into the solitary vales of the Highlands, they are brought to their senses by the onset of self-recognition, disenchantment, and maturity.133 Crucially, Scott presents this “coming-of-age” moment as a sort of gradual awakening. Take the following excerpt from Waverley: It was at that instant, that, looking around him, he [Waverley] saw the wild dress and appearance of his Highland associates, heard their whispers in an uncouth and unknown language, looked upon his own dress, so unlike that which he had worn from his infancy, and wished to awake from what seemed at that moment a dream, strange, horrible, and unnatural.134 131 Ferris, 78. 132 Daiches, 90. 133 Kerr, 35. 134 Walter Scott, Waverley; Or, Tis’ Sixty Years Since, (Edinburgh: R. Cadell, 1842-47), 156.
In Rob Roy, Scott masters the same effect through the literal transcription of a nightmare: “I awoke from fancied horror to real apprehension,” conveys Osbaldistone.135 Note how historical Scotland, thanks to its being situated within Osbaldistone’s dream, is construed here as a place of unreality. The “picturesque wildness,” which practically leaps from the pages at the start of Waverley and Rob Roy, has been turned on its head and defamiliarized.136 Realizing (with what is obviously Scott’s own projected wisdom) that to fight for the dynastic claims of the exiled House of Stuart would be futile, Waverley and Osbaldistone hastily cut ties with their northern friends and return home from whence they came. The glorious Jacobite past, they conclude, must be left behind where it belongs. It is with no small degree of reluctance then that they yield to the inevitability of the Hanoverian empire, progress, and change. At the close of Waverley and Rob Roy, the controversial world of eighteenth-century Scotland literally fades into the distance, a political threat no more. It should come as no surprise that this turn of events, a veritable dream-space pulled asunder by competing geo-political factions, returns us to Nora’s theorization concerning lieux de mémoire or “sites of memory.” On the one hand, Waverley and Rob Roy attempt to cultivate distilled visions of the Scottish past, which leave an impression of proximity or being continuously connected to historical reality. On the other hand, these novels generate a sense of distantial ambivalence. Such extremes of closeness and distance can be understood, I would argue, via Nora’s elucidation of the fabrication of memory, which he argues, is an instrument of wish fulfillment for readers whose imaginations are closed-off by the ongoing crises and ruptures of the present. And as we 135 Scott, Rob Roy, (Edinburgh: R. Cadell, 1842-47), 293. 136 Scott, Waverley, 138.
recall from Chapter 1, Scotland at the turn of the nineteenth century was particularly beleaguered by change. The onslaught of socio-political displacements that had occurred there throughout the eighteenth century – the Union of 1707, the Hanoverian Succession (1707), The Clan Law Act of 1715, the Jacobite Risings (1688-1746), the 1746 Acts of Proscription, and the Highland Clearances, to name a few – had contributed to a general feeling that the ideal of a Scottish nation had somehow slipped beyond the horizon. As dense repositories of historical meaning, we can see how Waverley and Rob Roy, like Nora’s lieux de mémoire, attempted to remedy this. Scott’s narratives serve up compelling pictures, places, and things for the purpose of re-envisioning relationships to the Scottish past. In other words, they seemingly recall and therefore repossess what has been lost to time. More can be said, however, about the import of Nora’s theories. The concept of lieux de mémoire makes palpable the gap across which the past and present have been bridged, creating at once a vivid illusion of presence and, at the same time, a sense of distance that is paradoxical. Nora concedes that this is the one great dilemma which the concept of lieux de mémoire inevitably generates.137 In spite of their ability to revitalize elements of the past, they must do so predicated on the knowledge that the real past has gone already, never fully to return. Hence the name lieux de mémoire. These points of reference acknowledge that any experiential engagement with the past is limited and therefore demarcated from the present. The weight of argument amassed in this thesis allows, I believe, for the following claim: that Scott’s narrative structure in Waverley and Rob Roy clearly submits to this conceptualization of Nora’s. Therefore, as we’ve seen, 137 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations no. 26 (1989).
the unfortunate Waverley and Osbaldistone are granted access to the bygone age of Jacobite feudalism, but only to a certain extent. Brilliant, tantalizing locations or “sites” of memory are offered to the reader at the expense of others. (Those disdained, obfuscated, sites are left without “happy lights to stream” on them “in full glory.”) While remembering the past at these designated spots contributes to a greater, more concentrated sense of historical realism, it is then rhetoricized at the end of these tales – via the incursion of a nightmare, and the transformation of an appealing, “picturesque wildness” into an “uncouth and unknown language” – that if one is to truly survive in the modern world, calling on such places of memory must eventually be laid aside. A unionist moral is thus made clear: the colorful Highland people, their speech, rude humor, and customs Scott deems rich and indispensible to the perpetuation of memory, but only within the larger context of a British, post-union contemporaneity. So unavoidable and so powerful was this message on historical distance that illustrators of the 1842 Abbotsford Editions of Waverley and Rob Roy immediately picked up on it. Their interpretation of Scott is significant here because posthumous editions of the Waverley Novels produced between the years 1830 and 1850 achieved the highest distribution and renown in Europe. What accounted for this continent-wide level of success were the books’ inclusions of pictorial illustration starting in 1829 with the Cadell Magnum Opus Edition. As technology and expertise in print techniques developed in Britain in the late 1820s there followed an abundance of new, illustrated versions of the Waverley Novels at increasingly affordable prices. The extravagant imagery that typified the Abbotsford Edition of 1842 marked the highpoint at which illustration, as a newly assertive component of British publishing practices, began to
enhance the appeal of the novels.138 The Edinburgh Evening Courant advertisement that first announced the publication of the Abbotsford Edition confirms this. It explains “This is the age of graphically illustrated Books; and it remained to affix to these Works, so interwoven everywhere with details of historical and antiquarian interest, such Engraved embellishments.”139 Similar announcements in The Literary Gazette, The Athenaeum, The Dublin University Magazine, The Spectator, and The Art-Union herald the arrival of the Abbotsford Edition as the new and improved “Pictorial Waverley.”140 These passages highlighting the illustrative component of the novels stand out in bold, allcapital letters. In these documents, it is also significant to note the frequency with which the name of Scott shares equal prominence with illustrators and engravers. “[E]minent Artists engaged by the Proprietors” are frequently listed in the reports covering the debut of the Abbotsford Edition.141 This promotion of book illustration is made evident in the list of illustrations included in the Abbotsford Edition as well. Here an unprecedented number of image titles, their page numbers, artists, and engravers are listed at the front of every novel. No fewer than two thousand images, approximately one illustration for every three pages of text, fill the span of this edition. It is therefore a pictorial anthology as much as it is a collection of literary works. The majority of illustrations in the Abbotsford Edition are wood-engraved. This reflects the expansion and prevalence of the technique in Britain throughout the first half 138 Richard J. Hill, Picturing Scotland through the Waverly Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel. (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2010), 6. 139 Edinburgh Evening Courant, 1842. 140 The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belle Lettres, Arts, and Sciences &c, 1, October, 1842; The Athenaeum, 30, April, 1842; The Dublin University Magazine, June, 1842; The Spectator, May, 1842;The Art-Union, May, 1842. 141 Edinburgh Evening Courant.
of the nineteenth century. Formerly used for only small, cheap printmaking projects like broadsides and chapbooks, wood engraving came into its own by mid-century, becoming the favored method of book illustrators everywhere.142 Thanks to the pioneering work of Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), the practice had been elevated to a fine art.143 In the last decade of the eighteenth-century the Newcastle master popularized a technique that diverged from earlier woodcut traditions in two important ways. First, Bewick introduced metal-engraving tools to the practice, thus replacing cruder woodcarving instruments such as the knife and chisel with the burin. And second, he chose to cut hard boxwood across the grain. Older woodcut techniques in Britain had standardized the use of side grain, which was softer. These technical innovations not only facilitated greater artistic virtuosity in wood engraving, but also increased the hardness and durability of the printing block itself. In contrast to copper plate engraving, woodblocks created using the modified Bewick technique required only low amounts of pressure to create successful imagery that would last for many thousands of prints. Since wood engraving was a form of relief printing, this also ensured that metal type and print blocks could be integrated in a single run. This was not the case with copper plate engraving, which necessitated images to be printed separately from the text and at far greater expense.144 The result of 142 Edward Hodnett, Five Centuries of English Book Illustration (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988), 107. 143 Niamh O'Sullivan, The Toms of a Departed Race: Illustrations Of Ireland's Great Hunger (Quinnipac: Quinnipac University Press, 2014), 19. 144 Copper plate engraving is a form of intalgio printmaking in which the incised line or sunken area of the printing plate holds the ink. Before printing, the face of the plate must be wiped clean of ink in order to transfer the image properly. High pressure must also be applied in order for the ink to transfer. This has a greater wearing effect on the printing plate than it does wood engraving, meaning that fewer images can be successfully produced. Copper plates also have to be printed separately from type set, which is more time consuming than the use of woodblocks.
Bewick’s work was high quality book illustration that could be turned out at a cheaper, more efficient rate. For a printing project as mammoth as the Abbotsford Edition, the cost effectiveness of this technique would have been too good to resist. Still, the complexity of book illustration at the time meant that the Abbotsford Edition required the collaboration of many hands. Book illustration continued to be a protracted process in the nineteenth century, despite the advantages of wood engraving. To accelerate production time, printmakers often divided the procedure into stages with each one under the care of a different specialist. The process began with the original artist’s sketch. The sketch was then copied and transferred by an illustrator draftsman onto wood panels, passed to an assistant engraver or apprentice, and subsequently divided into separate printing blocks. Following this step, a master engraver or group of engravers then incised the illustration, section by section. By the time the final image reached the printing press, it had already passed through the hands of no fewer than three individuals, several of which were usually anonymous jobbers. Wanting the Abbotsford Edition to be on the market as early as possible, publisher Robert Cadell commissioned twenty-six artists and thirty engravers to complete the project over a period of five years. This estimate of how many artists and engravers were involved, however, merely includes the “prominent” persons given credit at the front of the Abbotsford Edition, however. According to Ruth M. McAdams, the real number of contributors involved in the Abbotsford’s illustration was likely more around three hundred.145 Trying to disentangle the creative originality behind each picture in the Abbotsford Edition would 145 Ruth M. McAdams, “The Posthumous British Editions of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly Novels, 1832-1871 And the Evolution of his Literary Legacy” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2008), 84.
therefore be irrelevant. One name is salient, however, as it brings us back to the rhetoric of distance instilled in these images. The superintendent chosen to oversee illustration of the Abbotsford Edition was English printmaker and engraver William Dickes (1815-1892). A former apprentice to Robert Branston Junior (1803-1877), Dickes was a leading practitioner of the London school of wood engraving. His teacher Branston had studied carefully under the tutelage of his father, Allen Robert Branston (1778-1828), who had been a pupil and competitor of Thomas Bewick in the late eighteenth century.146 Dicke’s artistic background warrants consideration here because it sheds light on the choice of illustration that pervades the Abbotsford Edition. In particular, Dickes specialized in the production of wood vignettes, a type of graphic design revived by Bewick and his followers and admired for its “miniature intensity.”147 Integrated into the top or bottom of a page of text, vignettes were small, pictorial impressions incised with nuance. The objects that vignettes depicted formed the center to each composition. This meant that the engraver was able to provide greater focus on the center of a scene than would have been the case had he been obliged to render the entire prospect. A single object was typically made dominant in vignette imagery, thus allowing the engraver to convey small, sharply observed details in a manner more embellished than conventional woodcut drawing. Bewick excelled at this. Using a repertory of different strokes and cut marks, his illustrations gave objects the illusion of tonal gradation, depth, and texture. Bewick also demonstrated how lowering the surface of a printing block in certain areas could heighten the effect of atmosphere 146 Hodnett, 109. 147 Jenny Uglow, Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), xviii.
and space in a vignette drawing without actually having to apply perspective. The result was a picture that aesthetically melded with the layout of the page, yet commanded the reader’s attention. Art historians Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner have described this innovation as nothing less than a visual “eruption within literary space,” a bold apparition that emerged from the paper. For a generation of illustrators enthused by the scientific curiosity of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the distinctness of this technique became pivotal. For the young and aspiring Dickes, it would become the main source of his employment. As we recall from the previous chapter, antiquarian and natural histories were all the rage in Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century. Wood vignettes managed to capture the subjects of these publications with a fresh aesthetic that was eye-catching, but at the same time did not threaten to loosen the purse strings of its publishers. Importantly, Dickes launched his career as an illustrator draftsman in 1840 with W. H. Lizar’s The Naturalist’s Library. The illustrations in this book are predominantly singlesubject vignettes reminiscent of Bewick’s illustrative technique.148 They include carefully observed animal drawings and botanical specimens rendered in delicate outline. Dickes was praised for his drawings’ subtlety in addition to their commanding gradation of values. The images in The Naturalist’s Library were described as vivid, clean, and confidently rendered.149 Following the success of this book, Dickes was then 148 Bewick is chiefly recognized today as a master illustrator of animals and pastoral scenes. His illustrative works in A History of Quadrupeds (1790) and A History of British Birds (1797-1804) are often cited by scholars as the pinnacle of his medium. See Iain Bain, Thomas Bewick Vignettes (London: Scolar Press, 1978) and Uglow. 149 Rodney K. Engen Dictionary of Victorian Wood Engravers (Cambridge: ChadwyckHealey, 1985).
commissioned to illustrate Charles Knight's London in 1841. Here his illustrative work shifted to historical subject matter: royal portraiture, artifacts, and ruins. Remarkable in the crispness of their design, these small sketches are clearly what caught the attention of publisher Robert Cadell. Simple yet striking, Dickes’ controlled point of view enhanced the kind of “details of historical and antiquarian interest” suited to Scott’s writing. Drawn in black-line technique, the vignettes in this publication utilized a sparing but forceful stylization that was obviously carried over into the Abbotsford Edition in 1842. This brings us back to Waverley and Rob Roy, whose illustrations have been waiting in the wings. For these novels Dickes supervised and contributed to the illustration of a miscellany of Jacobite relics (See Fig. 14-19). We see eighteenth-century Highland dress, tartan, kilts, bonnets, brogues, sporrans, swords, and dueling pistols – many of which were outlawed in Scotland succeeding the 1746 Act of Proscription – expertly displayed. (Safely tucked away from real-life Jacobite conspirators for the better part of a century, their inclusion in these texts would have been a marvelous sight indeed for early Victorian audiences for whom the plots of earlier, impassioned, generations would have communicated a harmless frisson.) Hovering against stark white voids in finely engraved detail, it would appear these illustrations offer a trenchant impression of auld lang syne. Too be sure, this was Dickes’ intention. The inclusion of such object imagery was supposed to satisfy a romantic desire for historical authenticity and immediacy. Yet something curious happens when viewing these images alongside Scott’s text. The literary use of blur and dream in Waverley and Rob Roy spills over into the pictorial plane. A mental mist settles in, obfuscating the pictorial agency of the Abbotsford drawings. Presented as vignettes, isolated and pinned against empty white
space, we are forced to reconsider the immateriality of these Jacobite relics in the face of the present. Furthermore, shown as rare antiquarian artifacts on display, the objects are rendered static, lifeless. Compositionally, they are left separate from the unfolding plot imagery in Waverley and Rob Roy, even left untouched and unworn by the stories’ protagonists. A distancing aesthetic thus unfolds. It is one that enhances effects generated by Waverley and Rob Roy, but under Dickes’ artistic supervision of the accompanying illustrations, is pictorially specific, a property given to the vignettes themselves. Take the image Highland Brogues in Rob Roy (Fig. 17). Here we see a pair of shoes, lumpy and stretched from habitual wear. Brogues were a type of Highland footwear traditionally worn by clansmen. Made of perforated, untanned hide they were flexible, lightweight, and allowed water to drain when crossing over wet terrain. The illustrator’s sketch conveys these material qualities convincingly. We see that the weight of each shoe hangs easily by a single lace. Dangling close to the wooden peg on which they are hung, they evoke feather lightness. The illustrator’s repetition of short, fine lines indicates a stiff, bristled texture. Around the sole and instep of the brogues these marks appear with greater frequency to the point of blackness. The darkness of these shaded areas suggests repeated use as the grain of fur became flattened over time. Behind this image the surface of the printing block is lowered. This receding patch of grey heightens the spatial dimension of Brogues ever so slightly. The shoes are brought forward. Given these visual clues, we can practically imagine ourselves touching the brogues, taking them off their peg, loosening the laces, even putting them on. But the driving subtext in Rob Roy stops us short. Here Scott reminds his readers through the awakening of
Osbaldistone to eschew such historical fantasies. In order to live in the present, he warns, we must be let bygones be bygones. With this caveat in mind a sense of finality overtakes the image. Empty of person and place, we are left to wonder whether the owner of these Scottish items has hung up his boots for good. A similar sense of futility hangs over the illustration of Gold Broad Pieces in Waverley (Fig. 19). The manner in which these coins are presented to the viewer is striking in respect to the vignette form because they have a definite border. Here the illustrator has made no attempt to soften the imprint around the image whatsoever. The result is severe. With the graver’s lines delineating the curves of the coins, their surface, and figures are wrought with exquisite, needle-thin detail. But the analytic approach to this particular vignette is distracting. The field that contains Gold Broad Pieces would appear to be the page itself, desolate and flat. This compels us to gaze at the coins searchingly. We see that they are in fact the obverse and reverse of a single coin, twenty shillings. On the obverse we see the crowned bust of Charles I (1625-1649) with the value “XX” appearing behind the king’s head. The legend reads CAROLUS D G MAG BR FR ET HI REX - Charles by the grace of God King of Great Britain France and Ireland. On the reverse we see the royal arms and the legend FLORENT CONCORDIA REGNA - Through concord kingdoms flourish. Read within the context of the Jacobite rebellion these messages have a charge of irony. Furthermore, the isolation of such pieces against the cold white space of the page suggests their rarity. Frozen to the page in this orderly manner they resemble the arrangement of an antique coin collection. Indeed, at the close of the sixth chapter in Waverley Scott reminds his readers that the use of gold broad pieces in Scotland has now gone out-of-fashion. Where then were these items
recovered? Or whose pockets did they fill? These are the kind of thoughts that steadily creep into the vacant space behind the vignette. The modulation between object and prospect is precisely what aligns the Abbotsford vignettes with the notion of lieux de mémoire. For all their visual immediacy, we are touched with a strong awareness when viewing these things that they do not have a real place in the present. They constitute the residue of history. Dickes’ Highland Swords From Battle Field of Culloden and Pistols have a comparable effect on the viewer: removed from the heat of battle they request our scrutiny like an antique weapon’s display (Fig. 16 & 18). Here, Dickes’ talent as an artist illustrator is made even more manifest than before. The velvety richness of these vignettes in comparison to the linearity of the images in Brogues, even Gold Broad Pieces is noteworthy. The tactility of these historical items is conveyed by Dickes’ steady gradation of values from black through grey to white. When viewed closely, we see that no cross-hatching has been applied. Rather, a reliance on the luster of white creates these smooth tonal effects. Degrees of light and dark are achieved by the minute cohesion of black and white parallel lines varying in regularity, length, and width. The engraver then intensifies this by lowering the face of the printing block around major areas of reflection. As a result of this we are able to more fully appreciate the sheen of Dickes’ swords. Against the dark grey backcloth we can better assess the craftsmanship Dickes depicted: the beveled grooves in the blade, the curve of the hilt, and its decorative work. Similarly, the metallic mechanisms that ornament the surface of Pistols stand out in relief. Of all the wood engravings seen in the Abbotsford Edition these representations are the most naturalistic. And yet they remain eerily distant, stagnant in the way that
historical props can be when put on display. Like the passive objects that grace the vault of museum space, they seem out of place without the presence of their human counterparts. The lasting impression is one of distantiation. Meanwhile Waverley’s illustrations of Highland garb pursue a more blatant degree of historical remoteness (Fig. 14 &15). Emulating the appearance of mere cutouts from a costume book, the wearers of these garments are sketchy at best, faceless and nondescript.150 Clearly the goal here was to provide a visual supplement that would satisfy viewer curiosity without demanding much labor on the part of the engraver. The image is pure outline. Nineteenth century print specialist Brain Maidment has described the wood engraving technique as a sort of “shorthand visual code.”151 That is to say, the illustration does not strive for naturalistic representation. Rather, its point is to provide a pictorially compressed impression of the past whereby a viewer can imaginatively flesh out the rest of the historical details. In the manner of lieux de mémoire then, the woodengravings used for illustration work to reconstruct a picture that is, in essence, removed from the actuality of the reader. Past and present thus remain distinct from each other. They also remain delightfully distant, misty, and blurred, in the sense that we’ve seen
150 Costume books became a popular commodity item for bourgeois readers in Britain starting in the early 1800s with the advent of print culture. In fact, R. R. McIan, one of the minor illustrators involved in the woodcut illustrations produced for the Abbotsford Edition, launched his career as an illustrator of historical Scotch clothing. A rumored favorite of Queen Victoria’s, his costume book The Clans of The Scottish Highlands (1845) was so popular it was reissued after his death in 1857. To elaborate, costume plates were not depictions of specific people, but were instead generalized portraits, meant only to demonstrate the style or type of clothing worn at a particular moment in history. 151 B. E. Maidment, Reading Popular Prints 1790-1870 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 15.
Scott intend, as if to say the old days – when people actually wore these types of clothing and Scotland was an independent and unruly nation – are over. This sense of detachment as augmented by the Abbotsford illustrations is particularly striking in a series of vignettes that depict the personal effects of Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788) and the legendary Highland catanach, Rob Roy MacGregor (1671-1734).152 Like so many of the Scotch characters in Waverley and Rob Roy, these historic individuals appear larger than life. Both occupy a substantial portion of Scott’s texts, though one would not guess it based on the impassive imagery seen in the Abbotsford Editions (See Fig. 20-25). Scott provides a momentary glimpse into the lives of these controversial figures through dialogue and multiple exchanges with his fictional protagonists, Waverley and Osbaldistone. A sense of their looks, behavioral habits, passions, tastes, and pursuits – even their dreams – is established, thus allowing readers to see a side of the Jacobite past that is tinged with a more forgiving outlook. Scott’s close-up views of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Rob Roy reveal men of integrity who are unwavering amidst moments of great historical change. In the end, however, their appeal does not prevent Waverley and Osbaldistone from questioning the merits of the Jacobite cause: “Reason asked, was it worthwhile to disturb a government so long settled and established and to plunge a kingdom into civil war, for the purpose of replacing upon the throne the descendants of a monarch by whom it had been willfully forfeited?”153 It is precisely this shift in perspective – from intimacy to a kind of tragic, historical 152 The term cateran (in Scots-Gaelic ceathairne) is used to describe a band of warrior fighting men. In eighteenth-century Scotland it was used to refer to a group of men from the Highland clans who were either marauders or cattle-lifters. An individual member of a cateran was typically referred to as a ceithernach or catanach. 153 Scott, Waverley, 290.
pragmatism – that is reflected in the illustrations associated with Charles Stuart and Rob Roy. The Abbotsford illustrators chose to represent these fabled individuals via pictures of their personal belongings, which by the turn of the century, would have been museum pieces. A Scotch bonnet, for example, famously worn by the prince at Holyrood Castle in 1745 after his victory at the Battle of Prestonpans is shown without celebratory embellishment of any kind (Fig. 20). The figure of the prince isn’t depicted in the vignette. Therefore, the rendering allows us to see the object in close proximity, but its political import has been virtually wiped clean. The space of this image, like Gold Broad Pieces, is unnaturally sterile. Under these circumstances the pictured object would seem to exist solely for our viewing pleasure. We see the ornateness of the crown, replete with precious gems depicted at the bonnet’s base and fleur de lis.154 The engraver’s delicate lines convey the airiness of the bonnet’s plumage. In certain areas these lines are rendered with such finesse that the ink does not properly adhere to the page. The result is an almost spectral quality as the edges of the feathers seemingly melt into the whiteness of the page. Pictured from a slightly elevated angle, we look underneath the bonnet, half expecting the prince to appear. But no such luck. The bonnet remains motionless. The Prince’s beloved signet ring and sporran – nationalistic emblems of the Scottish kings of yore – are likewise portrayed with a cool, almost scientific exactitude. Artfully splayed 154 One of the predominant features of the royal coat of arms of Scotland is the fleurs de lis. This decorative feature, which is typically associated with the royal arms of France, was added to the Scottish Regalia in the thirteenth century to symbolize the country’s "auld alliance” with France. The symbol would have been particularly meaningful for Charles Edward Stuart who spent most of his exiled life in Paris, France. Indeed, it was predominantly the French government that provided the financial backing for the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745.
and projected into our space of viewing, they appear tantalizing close, yet void of context. And the possessions of Rob Roy fare even worse. Revered in Highland folklore as the Scotsman’s Robin Hood, the signature items of this lovable rogue – a colossal musket and capacious purse (full of stolen English coins, no doubt!) – have been reduced to the stuff of history. Time, it is therefore implied, has taken its toll on the Jacobite cause; its most charismatic figures are now dead and gone. The notable absence of the Stuart prince and Rob Roy in these antiquarian illustrations would seem to affirm their obsolescence. Though these pictures enable readers to imagine the past comprehensively (think of Rob Roy touching this purse; think of the Bonnie Prince wearing this ring) that world is ultimately kept at a distance. As with lieux de mémoire then, the vignettes in the Abbottsford Edition seem to be at one and the same time within a given history, while also remaining apart from it. Giving the reader a pictorial impression of past events and things that seems both immediate and remote, the vignettes produce a feeling in the reader of being both transported by a sense of historical distance and having that apprehension of distance withheld. As we move towards the close of our discussion then, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Scott’s most enduring legacy may be his ability to convey this duality of place. Surely, it is no coincidence that nearly two hundred years later, contemporary representations of Scotland submit to the same “near-far” aesthetic as seen in Waverley and Rob Roy. Consider the movies The Edge of the World (1937) Brigadoon (1954), Highlander (1986), Braveheart (1995), or the very recent television series Outlander (2014-present). Each of these cinematic depictions toys with the effects of time, space, and memory. The question of where Scotland is located within the context of the present
is constantly held in the balance. It would appear that the country is somehow suspended between fact and fantasy, envisioned as a kind of place that is not altogether here or there. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) once aptly referred to this phenomenon as “heterotopia” or places of “otherness.”155 The idea suggests that there are metaphoric places or “spots” in the contemporary world, discontinuous with the surrounding territory, which exist for the purpose of disrupting the present.156 One can visit these places momentarily as a means of escape from the everyday. They offer a sort of fictive respite that is enlivening, but ultimately outside of scope of reality. As we’ve seen, such is the nature of Scott’s Scottland: the Author of Waverley reconstructs a nation that is experienced as penetrable and real but also bounded by time. Readers are offered an experiential encounter that eventually must be cut short for fear of being lost in time. Lest we lose ourselves, completely. The commercial image of Scotland in mass media today runs a similar gambit. A highly mediated range of memorial sites or images – castle ruins, scruffy, red-haired Highlanders, bagpipes, tartan, kilts, and haggis, for instance – abound in the popular imagination as “counter-amnesiac force[s]” against forgetting history.157 While these representations create a sense of Scottish timelessness that can be celebratory, diverting, even instructional, they do not pretend to be more than what they are: “the visible props of an obsolescent political system.”158 Indeed, the very fact that only a select number of 155 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Architecture Mouvement Continuité 5 (1984): 46-49. 156 Ibid. 157 Rigney, 225. 158 Maxwell, Richard. The Victorian Illustrated Book (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), 26.
these items have been carried over into the country’s contemporary visual culture reminds us of history’s mutability and transience. These fragments celebrate the past, but also teach us the necessity of letting it go. In concluding here, we might consider what this kind of lesson means for an out of date books series like the Waverley Novels. Does it help explain why Scott is largely forgotten today? I would argue that is does. When all is said and done, Waverley and Rob Roy lay the groundwork for a discourse that both honors and quarantines history. On the one hand, Scott demonstrates the palliative influence of the past – its ability, when closely examined, to transport, delight, and inspire audiences – and on the other, its futility in the face of modern progress. The Abbotsford illustrators pictorialize the ambivalence of this sentiment exactly. Robbing their pictures of several vital components, they communicate to viewers the inexorableness and melancholy of time. Some things, they convey, cannot and will not be saved. In order to live in a world that continues to change, we must accept that fate and move on.
Figure 14. Officer of the Black Watch, J.S. Stuart, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
Figure 15. Highland Lady, J.S. Stuart, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
Figure 16. Swords From Battle Field of Culloden, William Dickes, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
Figure 17. Highland Brogues (Shoes), R. R. McIan, 1842, from Rob Roy, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
I
I I
with the hope that might obtain from the captive freebooter some information con should do myself injustice did not add, cerning Rashleigh and his machinations. was too much interested in my singular that my views were not merely selfish. acquaintance not to be desirous of rendering him such services as his unfortunate situation might demand, or admit of his receiving.
Figure 18. Black Watch Pistols, William Dickes, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
Figure 19. Gold Broad Pieces, Fairholt, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
"I
repeat it," said the Colonel, though Heaven knows with a heart distressed
as an individual, that this young gentleman
has studied and fully understood
for him
the desperate
He threw for life or death, a coronet or a coffin ; and he game which he has played. cannot now be permitted, with justice to the country, to draw stakes because the dice have gone against him." Such was the reasoning a vanquished enemy.
Generated on 2016-01-02 21:22 GMT / http://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101063581977 Public Domain, Google-digitized / http://www.hathitrust.org/access_use#pd-google
see the scenes,
Figure 20. Bonnet worn by the Prince at the Ball at Holyrood, 1745, J.S. Stuart, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
Let
of
those times, held even
by brave and humane
men towards
us devoutly hope, that, in this respect at least, we shall never
or hold the sentiments,
that were general in Britain
Sixty Years
since.
Figure 21. Signet Ring of the Prince, William Dickes, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
Figure 22. The Prince’s Sporran; The Belt of the Time of the Knight’s Templars, William Dickes, 1842, from Waverley, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
Z 2
Figure 23. Rob Roy’s Gun, William Dickes, 1842, from Rob Roy, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
Figure 24. Rob Roy’s Sporran or Purse, William Dickes, 1842, from Rob Roy, Waverley Abbotsford Edition.
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