Speculating about the identity of the Author of Waverley was an industry in itself. In 1822, Robert Chambers – who would, in later life, write the most successful exposition of pre-Darwinian ideas of natural selection, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation – published Illustrations of the Author of Waverley. Unlike Adolphus’s Letters to Richard Heber, Chambers was not intent on unmasking the author, but rather unmasking the fictions. He catalogued the real-life counterparts of characters and incidents – Helen Walker is the original of Jeanie Deans; David Ritchie is the Black Dwarf; Janet Dalrymple’s story mirrors Lucy Ashton’s. No reader, browsing through Chambers’ research, would be in any doubt about the only other person to have such a voluminous knowledge of the more recondite episodes in Scottish history. To emphasise the point, the book had a portrait of the Author of Waverley: an engraving of Scott from his poetry, but with his entire face concealed by a drape. The curtain would soon be drawn away.
Woodstock was to be the last Waverley Novel by the Author of Waverley. It was begun before the crash and concluded after it, and the shadow falls over it. Sir Henry Lee, a noble Cavalier, is languishing under Cromwell’s republic and facing eviction from his Oxfordshire lodge. He is a widower, and although Scott began it as a married man, he too was a widower when it was published. Woodstock is also notable in that it is set in roughly the same period as one of the Waverley forgeries, Pontefract Castle. There are uncanny similarities: haunted houses with secret passages were not typical of Scott, but appear in both novels, and the characterisation of the Parliamentary radicals is similar. Cromwell appears in both novels, and the opposition of Shakespeare readers and Milton readers also coincides.
The next work, Chronicles of the Canongate, is marbled through with Scott’s own situation. It appeared in two volumes, rather than three, for fear that any three-volume work might be considered part of the outstanding agreement with Constable and therefore jeopardise the settlement with the creditors. The book has often been filleted: the ‘stories’ – The Highland Widow, The Two Drovers and The Surgeon’s Daughter – have often been cut from their frame and presented as independent, self-standing works. The framing story is Scott’s most elaborate. The narrator, Chrystal Croftangry, is another avatar of Scott: after the half-pay soldier Clutterbuck, the antiquarian Dryasdust, the enigmatic Eidolon, the eccentric Cleishbotham and the swindler Dousterswivel, Croftangry is the broken and resilient Scott. He is ‘a Scottish gentleman of the old school, with a fortune, temper, and person rather the worse for wear’. He has ‘known the world … and does not think it is much mended’. He was a lawyer, and ‘emulated to the utmost the expenses of men of large fortune’. His ruin – partly his own fault, partly the fault of the ‘fat man of business’ he allowed to run his affairs, a nasty dig at Constable – means that he now lives in the debtors’ quarter of the Canongate. The sanctuary of the Canongate is beautifully evoked, as is Croftangry’s bemused fury: ‘all Elysium seemed opening on the other side of the kennel, and I envied the little blackguards, who, stopping the current with their little damdikes of mud, had a right to stand on either side of the nasty puddle which best pleased them’. Having wasted then sold his estate, he returns to it while posing as a prospective buyer, but a bruising encounter with an old family retainer disabuses him of any romantic notions of returning in triumph. Nevertheless, he pays a significant sum to his veteran accuser, along with a sarcastic poem. If Croftangry resembles any part of Scott, it is the part that is so ashamed and livid at his situation that his only catharsis can be fictional.
Having been forced to sell 39 Castle Street, Scott took lodgings in Edinburgh when he was conducting business there. There is an element of self-dramatisation in his refusal to stay with rich friends and pay cash for a bedbug-ridden mattress instead. In an awful way, he liked his distress. It is as if love during success is merely flattery, but love in calamity is proof. The Croftangry prefaces show a dim awareness of diminishing returns. At first, Chrystal has the aged society lady Mrs Martha Bethune Balliol as a source for stories, but even then only after her death. The second story is snaffled from his landlady, while the publisher’s boy is standing at the door waiting for copy. The third is from the lawyer who is dealing with his bankruptcy (and is the worst story, although it does involve an elephant stamping the villain to death). The second series of the Chronicles features Chrystal wholly reliant on his own invention, although it begins with a witty description of a Cockney visitor to Holyrood Palace trying to remove Rizzio’s bloodstains with Detergent Elixir Scouring Pills. Chrystal describes the murder to Mrs Balliol: ‘You surely mean to novelize, or to dramatize if you will, this most singular of all tragedies?’ she asks. ‘Worse – that is, less interesting periods of history have been, indeed, shown up, for furnishing amusement to the peaceable ages which have succeeded; but, dear lady, the events are too well known in Mary’s days, to be used as vehicles of romantic fiction.’ Scott seems dimly aware of his own waning powers. Periods which once easily furnished him with the material for romances now seem exhausted and too well known.
The Chronicles of the Canongate still claims to be by ‘The Author of Waverley &c’ on the title page, but its prefatory preface is the grand unveiling. Scott finally confessed to being the Author of Waverley on 23 February 1827, at a dinner for the Edinburgh Theatrical Fund. He began his speech with a haunting comparison. He opens by discussing Arlecchino, or Harlequin, the commedia dell’arte clown with a black mask and diamond motley. ‘The mask,’ he says, ‘was essential to the performance of the character.’ But the character is worth staying with: subconsciously, Scott reveals a huge amount about himself by choosing this particular avatar during his most public speech. Arlecchino started as Hellequin in French passion plays and was a demon who scoured the country with a troop of monsters, seeking souls to drag to Hell. He was, in the Italian pantomime version, physically agile and mentally clumsy. Harlequin was in love with Columbine, but his venal nature and stupidity usually prevented any happy ending. He was also, crucially, a servant. Scott had spent a lifetime indulging in his self-image of a demonic sorcerer; he now downplayed his role in public as a mere functionary. Scott was not physically agile – his lameness had been the source of many of his fantasies – and finally revealing himself as a clown, albeit a nimble clown, is psychologically acute. It is as easy to imagine the laughter of the audience, who all understand that Scott was no kind of Harlequin, as it is to imagine his sadness, unveiled as the clumsy, pitiable dependant he had become.
The extended discussion of Harlequin is a preamble to an anecdote about the actor who
played Harlequin barefaced, but was considered on all hands as having made a total failure. He had lost the audacity which a sense of incognito bestowed, and with it all the reckless play of raillery which gave vivacity to his original acting. He cursed his advisers, and resumed his grotesque vizard; but, it is said, without ever being able to regain the careless and successful levity which the consciousness of the disguise had formerly bestowed. Perhaps the Author of Waverley is now about to incur a risk of the same kind, and endanger his popularity by having laid aside his incognito. It is certainly not a voluntary experiment, like that of Harlequin; for it was my original intention never to have avowed these works during my lifetime, and the original manuscripts were carefully preserved, (though by the care of others rather than mine), with the purpose of supplying the necessary evidence of the truth when the period of announcing it should arrive. But the affairs of my publishers having unfortunately passed into a management different from their own, I had no right any longer to rely upon secrecy in that quarter; and thus my mask … having begun to wax a little threadbare about the chin, it became time to lay it aside with a good grace, unless I desired it should fall in pieces from my face, which was now become likely.
Scott’s speech continues in a manner reminiscent of Chambers’ Illustrations, as he describes the genesis of some of the most famous novels – the ‘real life’ Old Mortality, the locations he transformed, the family friends who might have inadvertently exposed him when they realised they appeared, thinly disguised, in the novels. It would seem to be the success of this speech that led to the structure of the Magnum Opus. Finally, he addresses the question of why. As mentioned earlier, Scott would later cite Shylock. At this time, however, he quotes Corporal Nym’s refrain in Henry V – ‘that is the humour of ’t’. Nym was in his mind a great deal during these months. The quote ‘Things must be as they may’ was his constant bulwark when thoughts of his crash, bereavement and illness got too much.