Like Henry Fielding, Walter Scott came to the novel relatively late in life, at the age of 42, after two other careers, one in the law, to which Scott was brought up, and the other in a different genre of literature. He was born in 1771 to a middle‐class family in Edinburgh; his father, Walter Scott Sr., though descended from Lowland lairds, had become a respected solicitor. The first son to survive infancy, Scott was lamed for life by poliomyelitis at the age of 2, though he was otherwise a healthy and vigorous youngster. He was sent by his parents to live at his grandfather’s country house in the Border country just north of the Tweed, and it was there that absorbed the lore of Scottish nationality, songs and stories about his own distant ancestors, and met men who could tell him from their own experience about the Rebellion of 1745 or the retribution exacted after the battle of Culloden. He received a liberal education at the High School of Edinburgh and at Edinburgh University, where he moved in the circles of the luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment; he attended the evening parties of the philosopher and historian Adam Ferguson, at which he met the poet Robert Burns.
Apprenticed to his father at the age of 15, Scott worked at copying writs and contracts, while keeping novels and poetry at his desk to dip into when business was not pressing. He took an active intellectual role at both the Literary Society and the Speculative Society of Edinburgh, where he read original papers on literature and universal history. Despite distractions like these, Scott took his examinations in civil and criminal law and was called to the bar in 1792. The practice of law never absorbed his full energies, but his father’s legal connections and his own friends in Edinburgh society provided enough work for him to have a decent living and to marry, though he did not begin to earn real wealth until he became a poet and a novelist. And even when he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams as a creative writer, he never gave up the law, although he did stop arguing cases when he became one of the six Clerks of the Court of Session in 1805, an office that came with a salary of £1300. The two sides of Scott, the romantic dreamer and the practical man of affairs, coexisted within him for the rest of his life. In terms of the politics of the day, the unrest caused in Great Britain by the French Revolution, Scott was a Tory, taking the side of established power against the radicals like William Godwin who emerged in Edinburgh, as they did in London.
Scott made his reputation as a poet long before he attempted to write a novel. His earliest literary works were translations from the German of romantic works by Bürger and Goethe, along with literary ballads of his own composition (“Glenfinlas, or Lord Robert’s Coronach” set in the Highlands near Loch Katrine, and “St. John’s Eve”, set near his grandfather’s house on the border) that were first published in M.G. Lewis’s anthology Tales of Wonder (1800). Scott followed this up with Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802; second edition 1803), an annotated anthology of traditional ballads which he had collected on his travels around the Scottish countryside – a revision, from the north side of the border, of Bishop Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). This might be called a work of scholarship, except that Scott, contrary to today’s practices, felt free to smooth out the rough folk poetry that he had found by mending rhymes and adding stanzas. Minstrelsy sold out its first edition quickly, and Scott added a third volume of modern ballads to the second edition, including several more of his own original compositions based on history or folktales. One composition too lengthy to fit into Minstrelsy became The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), a poetic narrative of a border feud, with a sublime description of Melrose Abbey by moonlight that caused tourists to flock to the area to experience the sight for themselves. This went through six editions in three years and made Scott one of the most admired of British poets.
For the next nine years, Scott produced narrative poetry in the same vein, often based on episodes of Scottish history: Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810) were even more successful, the latter selling 25,000 copies in the first eight months. That was the high‐water mark as the public subsequently began to tire of the genre; the later Rokeby (1813) sold only 10,000 copies – though that would certainly be considered a tremendous success by most poets’ standards.1 With the income, Scott bought a farmhouse overlooking the Tweed, along with the surrounding land, and named it Abbotsford, for the nearby Melrose Abbey. His earnings from writing were primarily devoted to making additions to the grounds and the house, which eventually grew into a magnificent baronial castle in the sixteenth‐century style.
Scott’s first novel, Waverley, or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since, was published in 1814. Exactly when it was begun is unclear, partly because Scott’s own account of it, in the 1829 preface to a uniform edition of his novels, confuses the chronology. The novel’s action is set in 1745, the year of the Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland, which the narrator in chapter 1 tells us is “sixty years before this present 1st of November 1805.” Scott’s 1829 preface agrees that it was “about the year 1805” that he “threw together” what became the first volume of Waverley, but he also says that it was the favorable reception of The Lady of the Lake in 1810, with its “Highland scenery and customs,” that led him to think of doing “something of the same kind in prose.” Contemporary scholarship has converged on the years from 1808–10, when Scott took a trip to the Highlands and the Western Isles of Scotland, as the period when Waverley was conceived and the first volume written,2 though it was shelved for several years until the spring of 1814, when he rapidly wrote the last two volumes. It was published in July of that year, and was a tremendous popular and critical success: the first edition of a thousand copies sold out in two days, and new editions followed rapidly. Although Scott published a few more narrative poems, his literary output for the rest of his life was primarily devoted to writing historical romances, and the sales of his work were generally brisk.
Waverley was published anonymously, possibly because in the ordering of the arts novels were thought less respectable, less canonical, than the narrative poetry Scott had signed his name to and become known for. And most of Scott’s subsequent novels were published as “by the author of Waverley, &c.”. Scott also created a second alter ego, “Jedediah Cleishbotham,” as the author/editor of a separate group of seven novels (including Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, and The Bride of Lammermoor) that he called “Tales of My Landlord.” But it was hardly a deeply held secret that Scott was the author of Waverley: Jane Austen, living far from Edinburgh and London at Chawton Cottage in Hampshire, wrote to her niece Anna in September 1814 that “Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. – It is not fair. – He has Fame and Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths. – I do not like him, & do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it – but fear I must.”
Waverley marked an event in the history of the novel comparable to Pamela because its subject‐matter, and its approach to its subject‐matter, changed the gender of the audience for the novelistic romance. The highly influential reviews of Waverley by T.H. Lister and Francis Jeffrey stressed the manliness of Scott, his historical accuracy and truth to life, thus connecting his novel to the genre of history, which was gendered as male reading, and therefore legitimized for men the play of fancy in reading fiction that had previously been a feminine preserve. As Ina Ferris has put it in The Achievement of Literary Authority:
In the dozen years after Waverley, the “Fame and Profit” of Walter Scott that Jane Austen had envied increased enormously. He became Sir Walter Scott, Baronet, in 1818, after leading a group of antiquarians who uncovered, hidden in the deep recesses of Edinburgh Castle, the lost Scottish Regalia – the crown, scepter and sword of state of Scotland. And he became very wealthy at this time, partly because he bought shares in Constable and became a partner in Ballantyne, his London and his Edinburgh publishers, so that he collected dividends as well as royalties on the 22 novels he wrote during those years, plowing his profits into additions to his baronial castle of Abbotsford and nearby parcels of land. But in 1825–26 a general credit crunch occurred in the United Kingdom, a financial panic that took down both of Scott’s publishers. Scott was brought to the edge of bankruptcy himself. From a sense of honor, however, he refused to repudiate either his personal debts or his debts as a partner in Ballantyne, and he set up a trust, with his copyrights as the assets, in order to pay off the creditors. He continued to write novels at a furious pace, along with a massive biography of Napoleon, published in nine volumes in 1827, and he launched a special annotated edition of his complete novels (the “Magnum Opus”) which was issued, in forty volumes, starting in 1829. But Scott had the first of several strokes in 1830, and though he continued to work against his physicians’ advice, his health eventually broke and he died in 1832. The trust he established for his copyrights eventually paid his creditors off in full in 1849.
Studies of the historical novel usually begin with Walter Scott, who is made to seem the inventor of a genre without any predecessors. It is true that he shifted the course of literary history, and that the nineteenth‐century novel would have been very different without him. But the ground for Scott’s achievement had in one sense been long prepared. Elizabethan novellas like Thomas Deloney’s Thomas of Reading (1599?) had been set deep in the English past, here in the twelfth‐century reign of Henry I. Much more recently, Gothic extravaganzas like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) were set during the crusades, in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, while Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), discussed in chapter 9, begins with a time‐stamp set two centuries in the past and in the southwest of France: “On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the province of Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the chateau of Monsieur St. Aubert.” But it is true that Gothic novels, generally, even when they are set in a specific past and a specific place, were really set in a romantic elsewhere and elsewhen that would lack any real contact with historical events their readers might have read about. Sometimes it is precisely this lack of contact that is specifically noted: Radcliffe tells us that the military expedition against Montoni’s castle at Udolpho was so rapid and so successful that it failed to find “a place in any of the published records of that time.”
There were historical romances written in the half century before Waverley that might be thought its predecessors. The antiquary Thomas Leland published in 1762 a novel set in the Middle Ages titled Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, based on the Flores Historiarum by Roger of Wendover and the chronicle history of Matthew of Paris. Following the restrictions on literary probability in fiction proclaimed by Fielding, Leland stuck to probabilities, suppressing his historical sources’ reliance on the impossible and the miraculous. Leland’s novel is shaped not only by his antiquarian’s conception of history but also by the rationalistic historiography of Enlightenment historians Gibbon, Hume, and Robertson. Its reliance for plot materials and character types on the conventionalized sentimental melodrama of its own day unreflectively reproduces the dominant vision of history, in which progress is inscribed in changing manners and institutions, but in which the constant pattern is set by an unvarying human nature. Like Enlightenment history itself, Leland’s historical romance can “teach private virtue and correct public policy” based on exempla that cannot grow stale because they are based on a pattern that is everywhere and always the same.
Romantic historiography, to the contrary, presumes that human nature has evolved, as well as dress and manners, and this vision is what we find in Sophia Lee’s The Recess: A Tale of Other Times (1783). To a contemporary reader, a summary of The Recess would suggest the pastiche of history that appears in television costume mini‐series. The protagonists are twin sisters who discover that they are illegitimate daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots, by the Duke of Norfolk. Matilda secretly marries the earl of Leicester; her sister Ellinor becomes the lover of the Earl of Essex. Matilda’s daughter gets involved with her cousin Prince Henry (the more intelligent and promising of James I’s two sons) until she is poisoned by the mother of her rival in love. The Recess carries the burden of a romantic version of history in one obvious sense: history is turned into soap opera, but it is also a premature parody of Hegel’s idea of the world‐historical individual whose will shapes the world. In The Recess, it is sexual desire that reshapes the world. For Lee, history is 100 percent personal: it is made in the bedroom, the nursery, the court banquet, rather than in the study, or on the battlefield, or in the counting‐house. It may be too easy to patronize this way of understanding history. While educated readers may think today in terms of inexorable forces, most people, when they think of history at all, think about personalities. Lee’s contemporaries were not as sure as we might be that her version of history lacked verisimilitude. One reviewer opined that Lee’s “near approaches to romance” occurred “without trespassing on probability” and “gratify the imagination without insult to the judgment.”
One of Scott’s crucial innovations in the historical romance is the oblique relationship of his narrative to the factual narrative that readers might already know from contemporary historical writings. Leland and Lee had centered their fictions on important figures like William Longsword or the Earl of Leicester whose decisions and actions made history. If Scott had done the same thing, he would have shown us the Rebellion of 1745 as experienced by its leader, the Chevalier, Prince Charles Edward Stuart.3 Instead, Waverley shows us the Rebellion through the eyes of a romantic and sentimental young Englishman who had been raised by his Jacobite uncle and aunt to believe in the legitimacy of the Stuart line descended directly from James II, and who becomes involved, partly by accident but partly through intrigues beyond his ken, in some of the early battles of the Highland clans with the armies of Hanoverian England. It is a novel of education – and what could be more Romantic than that? – in that it presents how Edward Waverley becomes progressively disenchanted with the Jacobite cause and his role in it even as he comes to understand how the public misunderstanding of the circumstances of his involvement may well cost him his life. The Chevalier himself appears briefly in several of the central chapters, we meet him when Edward Waverley does, but his character does not determine the fate of the Rebellion, and his personal fate after its failure, his romantic escape through the Highlands to France, is nowhere described in the text of the novel. In using this oblique strategy for his historical novels – a plot set within and affected by major historical events, viewed through one or more fictional characters of middling significance, and with a mere glance at the principal actors on the historic stage – Scott established a pattern that was picked up by most of his successors through the nineteenth century: Fenimore Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Honoré de Balzac in Les Chouans (1829), William Makepeace Thackeray in Henry Esmond (1852), Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities (1860), and Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace (1869).4
If Scott’s approach to history in Waverley might be seen to be embodying Romantic historiography in its insistence on the spiritual and worldly education of the protagonist, what underlies his narrator’s vision of the political world of the Rebellion is something quite different. It is the stadial history of William Robertson and David Hume, which Scott had learned at Edinburgh University: this viewed human history as a progress from tribal hunter‐gatherer societies through the pastoral and the feudal‐agricultural to the commercial modes of economic and social structure. Scott envisions the failure of the 1745 Rebellion as determined not by the greatness of world‐historical qualities of the individuals at the center of the struggle but rather by the very different organizational capacities of the feudal society of the Highlands, preserved into the middle of the eighteenth century, and the commercial society that had developed not only in Hanoverian England, but also in the areas of the Scottish Lowlands around the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Owing to the integration of England and Scotland since the 1745 rebellion, Scott’s readers may not appreciate the distance of that day from their own: his task, as he presents it in his final chapter, the “Postscript, which should have been a Preface” was to make that distance visible.5
And Scott takes in the specific contradictions that have emerged within the feudal society that the Chevalier hopes to lead to victory. Some of those contradictions emerge from the length of time – almost another “sixty years since” between James II’s abdication and “the Forty‐Five” – during which James’s direct male heirs have been absent from the British Isles, living in exile first in France, and later in Avignon and Rome as guests of the papacy. When Scott portrays Flora and Fergus MacIvor, he lets us see their Scottish patriotism and their Jacobite ideology, but we also see the elaborate continental education that has made them as much French as Scottish, particularly in the apologetic tone they take with Edward Waverley about the primitive art of the Scottish bard or the primitive quality of Highland hospitality. Similarly in chapter 39, when Waverley arrives at Holyrood House, where the Chevalier is holding court, Scott suggests that there may be something equally artificial about the appeal to the ancient ancestry and pedigree of the Chevalier:
Scott presents within the novel other contradictions that arise from within the feudal social system itself that prevent it from really working effectively. In chapter 19, Scott explains that Fergus’s prestige and power as a Highland chieftain depends on the number of broadswords he can put into the field under his command, and therefore “he crowded his estate with a tenantry, hardy indeed, and fit for the purposes of war, but greatly outnumbering what the soil was calculated to maintain.” To keep up his number of soldiers Fergus practices economies within his own castle, but that alone will not balance the books. He therefore demands “black‐mail” (in its original meaning: protection money) to be paid by the Lowland farmers within reach of his forces, like the Bradwardines of Tully‐Veolan. He also in effect licenses bandit gangs working under independent brigands like Donald Bean Lean, who is introduced as the leader of the cattle‐theft at Tully‐Veolan in chapter 15. Fergus makes sure that British militiamen attempting to enforce the Hanoverian king’s law never find the thieves they are looking for; meanwhile on the other hand, any independent cattle‐reivers who do not give an appropriate share to Fergus are turned over to royal justice. The problem with the black‐mail system is that dividing the country into Highland predators and Lowland prey ensures that the Chevalier will not find a politically united Scotland he can command in his campaign. While the Baron of Bradwardine, with his Jacobite family traditions, is personally just as eager for the return of the direct Stuart line as Fergus MacIvor is, even he balks at paying black‐mail, and the romantic Edward Waverley, raised in a commercial society of laws, is astonished at the practice.
For various reasons a large part of the Scottish population that is not a part of the clans’ feudal system is by and large out of sympathy with the chiefs of the clans and their political overlord, the Chevalier. One issue is religion: Presbyterian believers in Scotland are fiercely anti‐Jacobite, just as the Catholic clans flock to the banner of the Chevalier. Scott shows this in the sequence beginning in chapter 29, at Cairnvreckan, a town bitterly divided by pro‐ and anti‐Jacobite sentiment, where Waverley is physically attacked by, and kills in self‐defense, the local blacksmith, for which he is imprisoned by the local Justice of the Peace.
In terms of class, the bourgeoisie were the most likely to be loyal to the government in London and the least likely to come out with the Chevalier. An exception that proves this rule is Jamie Jinker, an elderly lowland horse‐dealer whom Waverley meets briefly at Doune Castle in chapter 39. From his class, Jinker seems an unlikely person to be serving as an officer, master of the horse, for the Laird of Balmawhapple’s highland regiment. He explains that the reason he has taken arms is that the Laird had bought all his horses on credit, based on landed wealth which the Laird will lose if the Rebellion fails, and so the only way Jinker is likely to be paid in coin for his horses is to join up with, and help to lead, the regiment, despite the mortal risks that entails:
When Waverley arrives with Balmawhapple’s regiment in Edinburgh, it is clear that, though the army of the Highland clans has invested the city itself without a struggle, it has been unable to take its fortress, Edinburgh Castle, which holds out for the Hanoverians with cannons the Highlanders do not possess. Balmawhapple’s troops prudently give the castle a wide berth as they take Waverley to Holyrood House, where the Chevalier holds court. It is into the castle, however, that the Royal Bank of Scotland – the key institution of the commercial Hanoverian society – has transferred all the gold in its possession, so that the Chevalier may be able to recruit volunteers in Edinburgh, but cannot replenish his dwindling treasury.
After the Jacobite army turns south and marches through the northwest English countryside, even volunteers are in short supply. The north of England was where many of the recusant Catholic families lived who might be expected to support the Jacobite cause. But nearly sixty years after James II’s abdication, religious differences within England are tolerated, and so the Tory support that the Rebellion needs to succeed is simply no longer there – a fact which comes as a surprise to the Chevalier who was born and bred in Rome. Waverley sees
Without a Tory rising in the northwest of England, and without the support of a French army with artillery, the Rebellion cannot succeed. Scott’s narrative leaves the Chevalier’s army just after the decision is made to begin a long retreat from Derby back into the Highlands, pursued as they go by the Duke of Cumberland. And Scott does not dramatize the brief but bloody battle of Culloden – the last ever fought on British soil, in April of 1746 – which constituted the final disaster of the Chevalier’s campaign. In effect the causes of that defeat are already all too clear.
As Scott tells us in the final chapter of Waverley, “A Postscript, which should have been a Preface,” the Rebellion signified in history precisely because of its defeat. It had been dangerous enough to make the Hanoverian government in London tremble, and its aftermath was “the destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs, – the abolition of the jurisdictions of the Lowland nobility, – the total destruction of the Jacobite party.” But construction followed in the wake of destruction: Roads built into the highlands, at first to facilitate military patrols, helped to integrate the economies of Scotland and England. Their political differences quickly subsided leaving only the nostalgic memories of the Rebellion preserved in the songs and stories Scott had learned in his youth, and which may be still told and sung today.6 In the penultimate chapter of his novel, Scott creates a symbol of this nostalgia, which could stand as an emblem for the novel as a whole:
Like the integrated Scottish and English economies, the sketch was made in Edinburgh and the painting in London. And like the paintings of the Scottish kings in Holyrood House, it records legend rather than fact. The “genius” would have had to make his sketch of Edward and Fergus just after Edward had received his MacIvor tartan in Edinburgh, and before the battle of Prestonpans, whose swampy topography does not feature “a wild, rocky, and mountainous pass.”
Today’s reader may have difficulty becoming as captivated by Waverley as its first readers were. This is partly because, although the plot generates a great deal of momentum in volumes II and III (chapters 24–72), like a snowball rolling down a hill, it takes quite a long while to get itself going. Scott hints from the very beginning that it will have to do with the Rebellion of 1745, but he does not in obvious ways telegraph the direction of the plot.
Like Fielding, Scott begins with an introductory chapter in an authorial voice, jocosely contrasting the novel the reader is about to encounter with four other genres that were popular at the time Scott began his novel in the first decade of the nineteenth century: the Gothic tale of terror, the Germanic horror story, the sentimental novel, and the romantic comedy of fashionable life.
Although Scott denies Waverley is any of these things, it is in fact a bit of all of them. It is of course an original historical romance in the form of a Bildungsroman – but Scott’s descriptions of the four rejected popular genres, at least on a second reading, can strike us as apt, if oblique, descriptions of many of the elements of this compendious novel.
Edward Waverley is never imprisoned in a castle like Udolpho, but in chapter 31 he is imprisoned by Major Melville in Cairnvreckan as a homicide, a rebel and a traitor, and sent for trial to Stirling Castle. And Baron Bradwardine’s manor house, when Waverley returns to it in chapter 63, is a “ruinous precinct,” having been sacked and partially burned by the invading Hanoverian army. Similarly, while there are no “Rosycrucians” in Waverley, there is certainly plenty of enigmatic intentions and of stealthy plotting, including Fergus MacIvor’s “secret and mysterious” plans for involving the hero in the Rebellion in ways that will further his political ambitions. Waverley is also a “Sentimental Tale”: much of the action in chapters 33–8 and 60–7 includes Waverley’s hazardous journeys, often guided by peasants speaking an incomprehensible dialect. The harp and the beautiful songs, however, are not our hero’s creations but those of Flora MacIvor. And while Waverley is not a story of contemporary life in 1814, its conclusion, with the happy marriage of Rose Bradwardine to Edward Waverley, after questionable choices by the hero, and hardships and dangers to both hero and heroine, is that of a romantic comedy like Tom Jones. It is certainly a part of Scott’s strategy for the romantic comedy to join hands with the history: the marriage of Rose and Edward becomes a figure for the union between Scotland and England which, however they were legally joined by the Act of Union of 1707, could not be truly united until after the last of the Jacobite rebellions.
Like Fielding in Joseph Andrews, Scott insists in his preface that, despite setting his story in 1745, he wants to paint “a description of men rather than manners, … the passions common to men in all stages of society.” And Scott wants his novel to be seen in what he already viewed as a literary tradition of the comic realism that we found in Tom Jones. For example, Scott’s Baron of Bradwardine bears comparison with Fielding’s Squire Western as a comic creation: both have eccentric personality traits that are funny and annoying at once. And unlike the Squire, whose west‐country dialect is only passingly strange, the Baron speaks the king’s English so interlarded with Latin learning and frivolous jokes in French that the reader requires either careful footnotes or a simultaneous translator to comprehend a mere invitation to dinner:
Five further chapters are devoted to introducing Edward Waverley’s education and his family history, which in fact are closely allied. The young man is far more moved by tales of romance, and specifically by his aunt Rachael’s stories about the family’s loyalty to the doomed Lancastrian side during the Wars of the Roses, and their loyalty to the doomed Charles I during the English Civil War, than by any reading that might lead him to a professional career. In part, this seems to be a projection by Scott of his fascination with literature and history during his own youth and young manhood, but he is also slowly and carefully preparing the reader for what is to come: the moments of decision in volume II when Captain Waverley, who has become an officer in the British dragoons, first resigns his commission and, then, following in his family’s footsteps, joins – first casually and later by formal warrant – as a volunteer in the Chevalier’s Highland army in the doomed 1745 Rebellion. These chapters may seem inert on a first reading, their significance only becomes clear on a second reading, when we have a sense of where all this is leading.
Even on subsequent readings, however, these chapters are the first sign of a problem that has kept Waverley from being a favorite with students: the mediocrity (as Lukacs called it) of the hero. For Scott, this was not a defect but a feature of his novel; Scott not only recognized Edward Waverley’s mediocrity, he has Flora MacIvor dismissively explain his character to us, in conversation with Rose Bradwardine:
All this is what will make Waverley, in the denouement, the fortunate husband of Rose Bradwardine, and she his devoted wife, as they all live happily ever after, not at Waverley‐Honour but at Tully‐Veolan. This description of Edward Waverley to Rose Bradwardine is anachronistic, in that the sensibility pictured here is that of a late eighteenth‐century Man of Feeling, as it was portrayed in a novel of that name written by Scott’s friend and mentor Henry Mackenzie, to whom Scott dedicated Waverley.
But just as it explains why Flora MacIvor is indifferent to her English suitor, and why Scott’s contemporaries might have identified with the hero, it also explains why today’s reader endures rather than enjoys his presence at the center of Scott’s tale. Unlike Fielding’s Tom Jones, who generates sympathy because of the opposition he faces from ill‐natured hypocrites from his very birth, Waverley has had a coddled childhood and drifts into a captaincy in the English cavalry because he is bookish and dreamy, with no interests in or talent for anything more demanding. He later also drifts into his situation within the Chevalier’s army, the unwitting victim of the strategies of Fergus MacIvor, who has caused the letters from his colonel summoning him back to his post to go astray, and so put Waverley into a position where he will be reckoned a traitor whether he joins the Chevalier’s army or not. Even Waverley’s role among the Highlanders is to be a mere figurehead, a renowned name which the Chevalier can use in the hope – ultimately disappointed – of tempting other Tory English squires to join him. And after the Chevalier’s cause is lost, Edward’s rescue and rehabilitation are not of his own doing but that of family friends like Colonel Talbot, so that he is as passive in his journey from peril to security as he was in his journey from security into peril. In this Scott again departs from Fielding’s practice in Tom Jones, whose scapegrace hero often blunders into danger, but almost always seems in active control of his own situation, even in the London scenes, when Tom is temporarily the victim of plots by others.8
The long, slow journey into danger begins in chapter 8, when he leaves his billet to pay a visit to his uncle’s friend, Cosmo Bradwardine at Tully‐Veolan, and the rest of the volume is a travelogue of sorts detailing Edward Waverley’s movements through Scotland from the Lowland manor house of the Bradwardines to the hold of the brigand Donald Bean Lean and up to the Highland castle of Fergus MacIvor. Just as people’s desire to read right through the Bible often bogs down fatally in the book of Leviticus, the reading of Waverley often runs into trouble in chapters 9–14. There is a linguistic component here, partly from the introduction for the first time of difficult Scottish dialect, partly from the incessant learned quotations from the Latin that choke the conversation of Baron Bradwardine. But there is also what seems an intentional avoidance of incident. There is a banquet, with a quarrel, and a duel, but Waverley sleeps through the duel.
And although Rose Bradwardine, Waverley’s future bride, is introduced in these chapters, any expectation of this generating an instability is destroyed by the narrator’s coy comment that Rose, “beautiful and amiable as we have described her, had not precisely the sort of beauty or merit which captivates a romantic imagination in early youth. She was too frank, too confiding, too kind; amiable qualities, undoubtedly, but destructive of the marvellous, with which a youth of imagination delights to dress the empress of his affections.” This passage ends with an intimation that “poor Rose” is more taken with Waverley than he is with her, but since Waverley’s blindness to Rose as an object of desire is qualified by the narrator’s statement that this is a function of “a romantic imagination in early youth,” it seems predictable at this point that another more romantically attractive woman – Flora MacIvor – will in fact kindle Waverley’s desire, and equally predictable that, once Waverley has grown up and has focused on real life rather than on romantic dreams, he will be able to see what a prize Rose is.
In volume I, during the launch, we become aware of Waverley’s areas of blindness; it will be the matter of volume II to entrap Waverley in increasingly desperate and entangled situations on account of that blindness, and of volume III to develop Waverley’s éclaircissement with growing insight and maturity as a prelude to a denouement in which he finds a way, with the help of others who understand his essential innocence, to avoid shameful disgrace and death.
Scott tells his novel in the third person through a narrator not only temporally later but emotionally and morally more mature than his protagonist and chief focalizing character. During the launch, Waverley is naïve about what life is like in Scotland, but then again so are we: his introduction to it becomes ours. But as we read along, we need to pay attention to whose voice we are hearing, that of Waverley himself or that of Scott’s older and wiser narrator:
The description so far seems to operate on two levels, both of them arising from Waverley’s consciousness: on the one hand the young Scottish maidens in the landscape remind him of the Italian contadine of his romantic dreams; on the other hand the enlightened English lover of the neat and the cleanly registers the miserable hovels and their unwashed occupants. But the description concludes in what seems to be quite a different voice:
The judgments here expressed sound more like those of the narrator, a native of Scotland who will have had the opportunity for a closer examination of the “natural genius” and “acquired information” of the “hardy, intelligent, and reflecting” lowland peasantry.
Or so a careful reader might think – except that the opening of the very next sentence (“Some such thoughts crossed Waverley’s mind”) would seem to ascribe that very different conclusion to Waverley himself at the moment he encounters the village and its inhabitants. And here I think we need to trust the tale rather than the teller, the voice rather than the focalizer, to let us know which level of discourse we are reading. Here Scott is not channeling his fictional Waverley, rather Waverley is channeling Scott.