1814 It is a moot point as to whether the publication of Scott’s Waverley on 15 July 1814, or Dickens’s first instalment of The Pickwick Papers on 1 April 1836, was the more formative on 19th-century fiction.
Both works had accidental origins. The young Boz would not have become the Great Inimitable had not his senior collaborator on the Papers committed suicide. Scott outlined the accidents that led to the publication of his epochal historical work in the introduction to the ‘Magnum Opus’ editions (itself an epochal venture) in 1829.
The 1829 introduction is a remarkable document, if only for its fantastic modesty. As he tells it, Scott is the Inspector Clouseau of fiction. Some ten years before 1814, he ‘threw together’ seven chapters of a historical romance based on the 1745 uprising, which he showed to a ‘critical friend’ who was discouraging. Scott flung the project aside. It would have been his first novel, but that clearly was not his metier. He would stick to verse.
The chapters were thrown into an ‘old writing desk’ which was itself stored in an attic when, in May 1812, Scott moved in to his baronial mansion, Abbotsford – a pile built to his own Romantic specifications. Scott forgot all about them.
Then came Byron (see 10 March), whose Childe Harold wholly eclipsed Scott’s efforts in poetry. ‘He beat me’, the Scot candidly admitted. But what to do next? In autumn 1813, fate intervened. Abbotsford lay alongside the River Tweed, and Scott loved to fish. As Scott recalled:
I happened to want some fishing tackle … when it occurred to me to search the old writing desk already mentioned, in which I used to keep articles of that nature. I got access to it with some difficulty; and in looking for lines and flies, the long-lost manuscript presented itself. I immediately set to work to complete it, according to my original purpose.
The composition went fluently, Waverley: Or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since was published, and literary history was changed. J.G. Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law and biographer, piously recorded that after Scott’s death, the desk was bequeathed to his steward, William Laidlaw, and that ‘it is now [in 1840] a treasured possession of his grandson, Mr W.L. Carruthers, of Inverness’.
The reading public has always loved the ‘Waverley and fishing tackle’ story. Recently, however, scholars (notably in this case Peter Garside) have become wary about taking Scott’s and Lockhart’s versions of such episodes too faithfully. Some very technical, but convincing, research (involving allusions to current events and watermarks) makes it overwhelmingly probable that the old-writing-desk genesis of Waverley is a myth. But a beautiful myth.