Those dusty, dull-bound,
heavy books lie like pre-Cambrian bedrock on the lower shelves of pubs and
hotels. Such is the fate of the former best-seller, the man who popularised
tartan shortbread tins, the man who speckled the suburbs of Birmingham with
houses called Loch Lomond in streets called Waverley Crescent and Lammermoor
Close, where the daughters were once named Rowena, the sons Nigel.
Scott is the most
under-rated writer in the canon of British literature, second only to Dickens
among our great nineteenth-century novelists, readable, fertile, vivid,
profound, a master. Like every great novelist, he has huge faults. His English
prose style is clumsy and slipshod; he “sows from the sack, not from the hand”
and the impact of his best work, essentially poetic, is hard to represent from
quotations. His output is vast and many of his novels fail. He promulgated, if
he did not initiate, the curious Victorian literary convention that sexual
feelings don’t really exist; his scenery and weather are often perfunctory, his
heroes and heroines are for the most part as stiff as bookmarks. He was also a
Tory and a Unionist, which meets with little favour here. In Scotland itself, later writers have sometimes needed to fight against Scott's legacy as has never been the case with, say, Balzac in France or Dickens in England.
But still, Scott's massive
humanity, comedy and invention are triumphs: once discovered, he is never
abandoned. So here goes: 25 novels in six pages, a lifetime of reading.
THE SCOTTISH PERIOD (1814-1820)
Although these are his earliest novels, they are not
beginner’s work. When he published Waverley
anonymously he was already 40, a celebrated man of letters thanks to his
sensationally popular narrative poems. The novels of this period include his
greatest achievements. Some of the later novels are deeply immersed in
(lowland) Scottish culture too, but here it’s a continuous presence, the
lifeblood of the books.
1. Waverley (1814)
Seminal, and deeply pondered over many years, this is the
first historical novel worthy of the name in world literature. Perhaps his
masterpiece, although subtler achievements were to follow. Here are all his
great themes: the process of change in society, adolescence, humour,
ideals, compromises, reconciliation, progress and extinction. Every adventure, every western
movie, every sci-fi fantasy adventure you’ve ever read is indebted to this
brilliantly innovative book; not to mention Balzac, Tolstoy, George Eliot... A
great place to start.10 out of 10. (
Longer Note on Waverley.)
2. Guy Mannering (1815)
Scott with a head of steam up, this is frankly an
improvisation. Despite its many wonderful scenes and characters, it’s
carelessly executed and doesn’t run very deep. The Victorians loved it, but in
our severer times: 7 out of 10.
3. The Antiquary (1816)
On the surface this is even more chaotic and heterogeneous
than Guy Mannering; but this time it all works out. This is Scott’s supreme
book about conversation, conviviality and human company: a little-known
delight. 9 out of 10.
But
his sister understood these looks of ire (rescued from drowning, and no food in
the house). “Ou dear! Monkbarns, what’s the use of making a wark?”
“I make no wark, as ye call it, woman.”
“But what’s the use o’ looking sae glum and
glunch about a pickle bains? – an ye will hae the truth, ye maun ken the
minister came in, worthy man – sair distressed he was, nae doubt, about your
precaurious situation, as he ca’d it, (for ye ken how weel he’s gifted wi’
words,) and here he wad bide till he could hear wi’ certainty how the matter
was likely to gang wi’ ye a’. He said fine things on the duty of resignation to
Providence’s
will, worthy man! that did he.” (The Antiquary, Ch 9)
4. The Black Dwarf and 5. Old Mortality (1816)
Old Mortality is Scott's most exciting and perhaps
greatest book, one of the best-imagined stories in English. A profound
meditation on violence, fanaticism and repression; pick it up at Chapter 2 (as
the Calders advise) and watch how Scott’s insidiously slack-limbed narration
sucks you in. 10 out of 10. (
Longer Note on Old Mortality. And a
Follow-up Note: The Whig's Vault.)
The Black Dwarf, a short novel published alongside
Old Mortality, has
some fine pages but never gets far off the ground. 5 out of 10. (
Longer Note on The Black Dwarf.)
6. Rob Roy
(1818)
A brief, fiery and penetrating book lies hidden inside a
baggier, more uneven one. In no book does Scott come closer to a critique of
the conventional ruling class that he approved, in no book is the
fact
of the
Highlands more challengingly posed. But we have to wade through a lot of idling and Gothic plotting in Northumberland to
get to the serious heart of this, so all in all: 7.5 out of 10. (
Longer Note on Rob Roy. And a
Follow-up Note: A Sentence in Rob Roy.)
7. The Heart of
Mid-Lothian (1818)
Scott told the publishers, before he had written a word of it, that it was going to be his best book. And after many readings I've come to feel that he was probably right. The mundane, terrible, triumphant yet ultimately sad story of Jeanie and her family has a psychological penetration that Scott never deployed so fully elsewhere. And great as that story is, there's much more to this longest and most complex of the novels. Still, it's problematic in some ways. Even back when it was published some readers wondered if the fourth volume was really needed (it really is!). It regularly switches genres in a way that admirers of other classic novels might find unsettling, is sometimes demanding (e.g. on Scottish religious history) and sometimes uneven. So to deter readers who aren't already passionate Scott fans, I'm giving it a paltry 9.5 out of 10. (
Longer Note on The Heart of Midlothian. And another note:
Time trouble in The Heart of Midlothian.)
8. The Bride of
Lammermoor (1819)
Rumoured to have been dictated in delirium and subsequently
unremembered by its author (whose life was a catalogue of sicknesses), this is
the most un-Scott-like of his masterpieces: a brilliant, bleak, secretive
tragedy that operates with intense restraint. Beautifully structured, it shows
(along with Old Mortality, Kenilworth etc) that Scott was the
most naturally gifted designer of a novel in our tradition. (The French
equivalent, in this respect, is Balzac’s Une ténébreuse affaire.) 9 out of 10.
9. A Legend of
Montrose (1819)
This is Scott’s book about war; but that scarcely does it justice. It's a book about violence of peculiar ferocity; a book about war crimes might be nearer the mark. The topic is pondered via unmitigated highland blood-feuds and, in very fertile contrast, the amoral mercenary Dugald Dalgetty. The book is seriously under-rated. A bit thin and creaky in places, certainly, but fully deserving of 8 out of 10. (
Longer Note on A Legend of Montrose.)
THE COSTUME DRAMAS (1820-1826)
It’s commonly supposed that the unprecedented success of Ivanhoe,
his first book set outside Scotland, turned Scott’s head, and led him away from
the true sources of his inspiration (with the anomalous exception of Redgauntlet).
The reality is more complicated. Scott’s books always occupied the borderland
with romance anyway, and the best books of this period (e.g. The Abbot, Kenilworth) are as good as all but the very best
of his earlier novels – and arguably stranger.
10. Ivanhoe
(1820)
Anyone who wants to understand the Victorian imagination
needs to start with this.
England
went
Ivanhoe-crazy; this is the public-school boy’s book par excellence. So did America. So did Europe. And
today? Well, it’s a rich and humane adventure with a few deeper chords
(Rebecca, the greenwood...). But when all’s said, only half of Scott’s
greatness is on view here. 6 out of 10. (
Longer Note on Ivanhoe.)
11. The Monastery (1820)
This was considered a failure even at the time of its first
publication, so is now never read. The November weather, the Tweed
and the reformation period suit Scott well, and though the story doesn’t quite
add up he’s in easy spirits throughout. 6 out of 10.
The
river was not in flood, but it was above its ordinary level – a heavy water, as
it is called in that country, through which the monk had no particular
inclination to ride, if he could manage the matter better.
“Peter, my good friend,” cried the sacristan,
raising his voice; “my very excellent friend Peter, be so kind as to lower the
drawbridge. Peter, I say, dost not hear? – it is thy gossip, Father Philip, who
calls thee.”
Peter heard him perfectly well, and saw him
into the bargain; but, as he had considered the sacristan as peculiarly his
enemy in his dispute with the convent, he went quietly to bed, after
reconnoitring the monk through his loop-hole, observing to his wife that
“riding the water in a moonlight night would do the sacristan no harm, and
would teach him the value of a brig the neist time, on whilk a man might pass
high and dry, winter and summer, flood and ebb.” (The Monastery, Ch 5)
12. The Abbot
(1820)
Characteristically, Scott’s response to his first avowed
failure was to write a sequel to it.
Roland and Catherine are Scott’s most lively young couple, and the
tension of the theme (Protestantism outlawing Catholism) make this a romance
with an edge. 8 out of 10.
“You talk riddles, my lord,” said Mary; “I
will hope the explanation carries nothing insulting with it.”
“You shall judge, madam,” answered Lindesay.
“With this good sword was Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, girded on the
memorable day when he acquired the name of Bell-the-Cat, for dragging from the
presence of your great-grandfather, the third James of the race, a crew of
minions, flatterers, and favourites, whom he hanged over the bridge of Lauder,
as a warning to such reptiles how they approach a Scottish throne. With this
same weapon, the same inflexible champion of Scottish honour and nobility slew
at one blow Spens of Kilspindie, a courtier of your grandfather, James the
Fourth, who had dared to speak lightly of him in the royal presence. They
fought near the brook of Fala; and Bell-the-Cat, with this blade, sheared
through the thigh of his opponent, and lopped the limb as easily as a
shepherd’s boy slices a twig from a sapling.” (The Abbot, Ch 21)
13. Kenilworth
(1821)
Perhaps his most under-rated book, this tragedy of
ostentation and gorgeous surfaces is a not unworthy companion to The Bride
of Lammermoor, the extended description of the revels at Kenilworth
unmatched in moral and dramatic intensity. Scott’s sixteenth-century England
is utterly unlike what we expect, a nightmare of fortune-hunters and trapdoors
that unfolds with a dreadful logic and expires like a thunderclap on the last
page. 8 out of 10.
14. The Pirate
(1822)
Scott had loved visiting the Shetlands, but he couldn’t
raise a good novel out of it. The things that had moved him were
untranslateable into any fiction even he could imagine. Dreary, tame and
unconvincing. 3 out of 10.
15. The Fortunes
of Nigel (1822)
Like all the other books he set in the seventeenth century,
Scott’s London
novel suffers from the inevitable comparison with his own Old Mortality,
and in a different way with the Jacobean city comedies from which he plundered
so much material. Nigel is colourful but inadequately felt, and dead
from the waist down. 4 out of 10.
16. Peveril of the
Peak (1822)
Much derided, this long book is good for about half its
length before finally coming apart at the seams. The prelude is excellent, and
Peveril’s journey across England
beautifully poised, but Scott abandons his most arresting characters and the ending turns into a wearisome game of chess. 4 out of 10.
17. Quentin
Durward (1823)
If the marks were for literary historical significance, then
Durward would come near the top; it opened the floodgates to historical romance in Europe. It's architectural, expansive, finely conceived and often penetrating. You also have to put up with some of Scott's most slovenly prose. 6 out of 10. (
Longer Note on Quentin Durward. And a
Follow-up Note: Quentin Durward again.)
18. St Ronan’s
Well (1824)
Strange book. Often seems remarkably un-Scott-like: What's with that scene with the tableaux from Shakespeare? Set nearly, but not quite, in the present day (some "twenty years" ago, a similar time-gap to
The Antiquary). Compared to
Durward or
The Talisman, the author's sharp intelligence seems to have sprung to life; it's comparable even to
Redgauntlet in that respect. But I keep getting the feeling that I ought to enjoy it much more than I do. Scott as satirist, his lack of sympathy for most of the characters, is maybe part of the problem. And then there's the very damaging suppression of the most shocking element in the plot, insisted on by James Ballantyne. So all in all, 5 out of 10. (
Longer Note on St Ronan's Well.)
19. Redgauntlet
(1824)
For many, his greatest book. Beneath its casual surface is a
profoundly poetic meditation on romance itself, intuitive, mature and
brilliantly imagined. Its innovative structure incorporates, along with much
else, that supreme short story, “Wandering Willie’s Tale”. The closing chapters
in Cumberland,
alas, fall a bit short. 9 out of 10.
20. The Betrothed and 21.
The Talisman (1825)
The first of the “Tales of the Crusaders” is indisputably
minor, a book that can be read (like
The Pirate) only for the pleasure
of hearing its author’s voice. 3 out of 10. The second is intermittently lively, and Scott's excursion into Palestine is an intriguing record of western conceptions of Islam. 5 out of 10. (
Longer Note on The Talisman.)
RUIN AND DECLINE (1826-1832)
In 1826, the fragile financial system of the printing and
publishing trade collapsed. Scott, who was a secret partner in his own printing
house, was brought down with it. Rather than plead bankruptcy, he offered to
pay his creditors off with the proceeds of future writing. It was a decision
that saved his honour and his home, at the cost of literally writing himself to
death. (Apart from the novels, these last years produced such daunting
monuments as his gigantic Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, now never seen or
read: also, his private Journal, a grievous and brilliant book.)
22. Woodstock (1826)
This intricately rotating microcosm in the unsettled
backwash of the English civil war was half-completed when financial ruin,
bereavement and illness dropped on its author in quick succession. But in the
finished novel it doesn’t show; Scott was a stoic at noon and midnight; the
full but sombre palette is there from the start. 6 out of 10. (
Longer Note on Woodstock.)
23. The Fair Maid
of Perth (1828)
The best novel of his last period, this warm and wintry
adventure, full of incident and humour, shows that Scott had lost none of his
inner wisdom and imagination, if only circumstances would allow him to deploy
them. 7 out of 10.
24. Anne of
Geierstein (1829)
More interesting than I expected. The book concerns the later history of Charles the Bold, previously seen in Quentin Durward. The initially arresting narrative doesn't manage to retain its hold on us, but the book is rich in detail (it feels long) and it never declines below the level of an impressively sombre history. 4.5 out of 10.
25. Count Robert
of Paris and 26. Castle Dangerous (1832)
I've led you astray -- I still haven’t read these two. Universally described, by those few who have ventured in, as the worst novels he wrote. Count Robert is set in
eleventh-century Byzantium, Castle Dangerous in
medieval Scotland. (Some of Count Robert was quietly rewritten by Lockhart after Scott refused to modify the story as the publisher wanted; Scott was never told.) Presumably 1 or 2 out of 10.
27. The Siege of Malta
Desperately ill, Scott went on a recuperative trip to the Mediterranean, collapsing during his return and dying in
his own bed. While abroad, he wrote this book and also a novella called Bizarro. Lockhart decided they were not
publishable and when they eventually appeared (in 2008) you could see why. No
amount of tidying up broken sentences can disguise the calamitous decay of the
author’s mind. These spasms of compulsive writing are fascinating from a
medical point of view. The imaginative faculty is the first thing to go, and the second half of The Siege of Malta is a bare-bones
re-telling of history with no fictional characters at all.
My other Scott-related posts:
Scott's translation of Goethe's
Goetz of Berlichingen.
Scott's Life of Dryden:
The Lady of the Lake:
Audubon visits Scott:
Scott and American violence:
J.C. Trewin's Selected Prose of Sir Walter Scott:
The Scott era
This selection of my other posts ranges from writers of the 1750s that were formative for Scott (Le Sage, Smollett, Fielding) to writers of the 1880s who still saw Scott as a predecessor to be reckoned with (Stevenson, Galdós, James). In between, Scott connections are everywhere (though usually that's not what I'm writing about).
William Harrison Ainsworth (Rookwood):
Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (Det går an):
Matthew Arnold (The Scholar-Gipsy):
Matthew Arnold (Balder Dead):
Matthew Arnold (Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse):
Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility):
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice):
Jane Austen (Mansfield Park):
Jane Austen (Emma):
Joanna Baillie:
Honoré de Balzac (Colonel Chabert):
Honoré de Balzac (The Unknown Masterpiece):
Honoré de Balzac (The Lily of the Valley):
Honoré de Balzac (The Curé of Tours):
Honoré de Balzac (Letters of Two Young Married Women):
Honoré de Balzac (Cousin Pons):
Charlotte Brontë:
Charlotte Brontë (Villette):
Emily Brontë:
Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights):
Anne Brontë:
George Gordon, Lord Byron (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage):
George Gordon, Lord Byron (The Corsair):
George Gordon, Lord Byron (Manfred):
Thomas Campbell (The Pleasures of Hope):
Thomas Campbell ("Lochiel's Warning"):
Sculpture in Chateaubriand and Shelley:
Coleridge and the Wordsworths:
Wilkie Collins (Armadale):
George Crabbe:
Charles Dickens (The Pickwick Papers):
Charles Dickens (The Old Curiosity Shop):
Charles Dickens (Barnaby Rudge):
Charles Dickens (David Copperfield):
Charles Dickens (Bleak House):
Charles Dickens (Little Dorrit):
Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities):
Charles Dickens (A Child's History of England):
Charles Dickens (Somebody's Luggage):
Samuel Astley Dunham (The History of Poland):
George Eliot (Scenes of Clerical Life):
George Eliot (Adam Bede):
Henry Fielding (Tom Jones):
Benito Pérez Galdós (Trafalgar):
Benito Pérez Galdós (7 de julio):
Benito Pérez Galdós (Fortunata and Jacinta):
Nikolai Gogol (Taras Bulba):
Henry James (The American):
Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady):
John Keats (I stood tiptoe...)
John Keats (Endymion):
John Keats (Isabella, Or The Pot of Basil):
Charles Kingsley (The Saint's Tragedy):
Charles Kingsley (Andromeda):
William Laidlaw:
Prosper Mérimée (Carmen):
Prosper Mérimée (Colomba):
Mérimée, Sir Humphry Davy:
Ann Radcliffe (A Sicilian Romance):
J. L. Runeberg (Tales of Ensign Stål):
Alain-René Le Sage (Gil Blas):
George Sand (Indiana):
Etienne Pivert de Senancour (Obermann):
Tobias Smollett (Peregrine Pickle):
Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde):
Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace):
William Wordsworth (Tintern Abbey):
William Wordsworth (The Excursion):
Tracking the moon in Wordsworth, Charlotte Brontë and Scott:
*
Scott has probably lost his popular audience forever, but I don't want to give the impression that reading him needs to be a solitary experience. It's true that I've found the Wikipedia entries for his novels to be mostly pretty poor, containing little other than contentious plot-summaries. (I haven't checked them out recently and some may have improved.) But Scott is certainly not neglected by scholars. His presence looms too large over the cultural history of Scotland, Britain, Europe and America. There's masses of enthusiastic and thought-provoking academic work out there. I'd urge you e.g. to sign up for a free account on JStor and get access to hundreds of Scott articles.
Here's a few other things that I've happened across:
The Walter Scott Digital Archive (Edinburgh University Library) gathers lots of useful information and links. (Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have been kept up to date since about 2011.)
Don't miss the Image Database, with its wealth of visual materials and realia from the Corson Collection.
J. G. Lockhart's Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott is available on Gutenberg. Indispensable, even though Lockhart evidently "managed" his father-in-law's reputation. [The first chapter is Scott's own fragment of an autobiography, written in 1808.] This link is to the the first volume (of ten):
If you or your library card has access to Oxford resources, you can see David Hewitt's very comprehensive entry on Scott in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004, revised 2008):
The Maclise Portrait-Gallery is now partially available on Wikisource (2021). A remarkable book, containing Daniel Maclise's 1830s drawings, with an entertaining prose commentary added in 1883 by William Bates. The link below is to the chapter on Scott; many of his friends and contemporaries are also here.
Noctes Ambrosianae (1822-1835), mostly by John Wilson (=Christopher North), is a highly readable series of table-talk colloquies, mostly on matters Scottish and literary, first published in Blackwoods magazine. (One of the other regular drinking companions is James Hogg.) There are some searchable but almost unreadable texts out there, and some unsearchable but readable texts in image format. The following link takes you to volume 1 of Ferrier's edition:
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| Sir Walter Scott Finding the Manuscript of Waverley in an Attic, 1890 painting by Charles Martin Hardie |
Labels: Sir Walter Scott
