Sir Walter Scott: Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1814)
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| Alice, the daughter of Donald Bean Lean, preparing breakfast for Edward Waverley, painting by Alexander Johnston (1815 - 1891) |
[Image source: https://www.myartprints.co.uk/a/johnston-alexander/alice-the-daughter-of-don.html .]
WAVERLEY ;
OR,
'TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
______________________________________
Title pages can tell us a lot. In this case, one of Waverley's principal themes is right here in front of us. The quotation from Shakespeare seems to say, with vehemence, Choose which side you're on! But that divisive political challenge is undercut if we remember its original context, Ancient Pistol striking an absurd pose. Meanwhile, the subtitle "'Tis Sixty Years Since" hints at the reconciliation of opposed sides, with the mollifying implication that It was all a long time ago.
That way of putting it suggests the burial of past differences in oblivion. But as most of us amateur psychologists are prone to think, suppression of the past doesn't truly heal. Scott was aware of the healing powers of time, but he aimed at a deeper kind of reconciliation: bringing past events back into the spotlight but trying to create a balance in the reader's mind, persuading us to drop our stereotypes, recognize and duly honour opposed points of view, and not feel the need to take sides.
His novel had to negotiate several unconciliatory viewpoints that were still very current. 1. English prejudice against all things Scottish. 2. Prejudice against the benighted Highlands in particular (both in Scotland and England). 3. Detestation of the Jacobitism that had been prepared to plunge Britain into another civil war. 4. Scottish and Tory resentment of the rule of Westminster and Hanover, disgusted by the harsh reprisals once the rebellion had been crushed. 5. Religious intolerance towards Catholics and between the different strands of Protestantism.
What better way to bring reconciliation than in an unpretentious adventure story whose manner and very genre disclaim political intention?
"It is the object of this history to do justice to all men...", the author says (II.5). He says it while preparing a joke about the drummer of Anderton, and we don't notice that this exactly describes his book's serious purpose. Or rather, we take it as a romancer's modesty and not as a self-appointed judge's arrogance, which was just as he intended.
Scott's own idea of reconciliation was a Tory and Unionist one, but that needn't stop us appreciating his aim and his success; least of all amid the widening divisions of our own time.
*
Scott breaks the fourth wall straight away, to inform us that his hero's and book's name were selected by the author to avoid raising clichéd expectations: the novel's title was to be a blank canvas.
I have therefore, like a maiden knight with his white shield, assumed for my hero, WAVERLEY, an uncontaminated name, bearing with its sound little of good or evil, excepting what the reader shall hereafter be pleased to affix to it. (I.1)
I suppose, all the same, that Scott had heard of the ruins of Waverley Abbey near Farnham in Surrey (England's first Cistercian Abbey), and perhaps of its Annales de Monasterii Waverleia (valuable to medieval historians), and perhaps of Waverley Abbey House, built nearby in 1725 using some of the abbey stone. [Information: https://www.secret-bases.co.uk/wiki/Annals_of_Waverley; Waverley Borough Council, created in 1974, is named after the abbey.]
In the novel no precise location is suggested for Waverley-Honour, but Edward Waverley passes through London on his way to Edinburgh and Dundee (I.7), which would be consistent with a Surrey location.
Scott's remark slyly overlooks the name's obvious suggestion of wavering, which will turn out to be entirely apposite to his hero's story.
The name doesn't tell the whole story, perhaps. When his father Richard "was returned for the ministerial borough of Barterfaith" (I.2), that name is a crushing judgment on Richard turning Whig, seen from the perspective of his elder brother Everard.
But Edward Waverley's own changes of allegiance arise from other motives than his father's venality. The young, dreamy Edward seems never to have quite taken on board the real political context that's comically sketched in these opening chapters. Uncle Everard painfully feels the implication of Edward joining the regular army; Edward himself does not. Being brought up in the households of both brothers has made him indifferent to political colours. And political allegiance is the last thing on his mind as he makes his naïve way through the enchantments of his Scottish leave in the first half of the novel; but it turns out to be the first thing on everyone else's. The hero, abetted by the sly narrator, keeps making light of it. The "Demon of Politics" that arises at Luckie Macleary's (I.11) is just the unfortunate consequence of people having too much to drink; his Colonel's warning about keeping company with those not well affected to government is unnecessary fussing and Presbyterian prejudice . . .
Readers have been apt to follow the hero's lead; Waverley didn't raise hackles within Scotland as e.g. Old Mortality did. Scott's effort at reconciliation was so successful that it wasn't seen for what it was.
Though indeed, Scott's method in Waverley did foreshadow the later novel in one respect. How to view the Jacobite rebellion was in some sense an argument within Toryism. That, no doubt, was why the ultra-Tory Anti-Jacobin Review remarked that a novel about the events of 1745 was "a task of peculiar delicacy". But the most radical opponents of Toryism had no real stake in that argument. One way to bring about reconciliation is to unite in mockery of a common enemy, and Scott didn't entirely resist it. Hence the novel's ridicule of the West Country Whigs and Cameronians: Jabesh Rentowel and Master Goukthrapple and Ebenezer Cruickshanks and Gifted Gilfillan. It's a gentle rather than a ferocious ridicule, and it produces some of the novel's most brilliant pages, but you can't help noticing the tactic.
There's little evidence that most early readers considered Waverley a political novel. Of course it's much more than that; but political it certainly is.
Edward's youthful naïvety is wonderfully excoriated by e.g. Major Melville, but it isn't simply wrong. Taking a longer view, his insensibility (or rather his sensibility to other things, including romantic infatuation) is one of the hopeful ingredients that can, eventually, bring healing to a wounded body politic. (It's the same faith that ultimately underlies Romeo and Juliet.)
*
'Is it of Fergus Mac-Ivor they speak thus,' thought Waverley, 'or do I dream? Of Fergus, the bold, the chivalrous, the free-minded, the lofty chieftain of a tribe devoted to him? Is it he, that I have seen lead the chase and head the attack, the brave, the active, the young, the noble, the love of ladies, and the theme of song,—is it he who is ironed like a malefactor, who is to be dragged on a hurdle to the common gallows, to die a lingering and cruel death, and to be mangled by the hand of the most outcast of wretches? Evil indeed was the spectre that boded such a fate as this to the brave Chief of Glennaquoich!' (II.39)
'Do you remember,' she said, looking up with a ghastly smile, 'you once found me making Fergus's bride-favours, and now I am sewing his bridal garment. Our friends here,' she continued, with suppressed emotion, 'are to give hallowed earth in their chapel to the bloody relics of the last Vich Ian Vohr. But they will not all rest together; no—his head!—I shall not have the last miserable consolation of kissing the cold lips of my dear, dear Fergus!' (II.39)
'We part not here!' said Waverley.'O yes, we do; you must come no farther. Not that I fear what is to follow for myself,' he said proudly. 'Nature has her tortures as well as art, and how happy should we think the man who escapes from the throes of a mortal and painful disorder in the space of a short half hour? And this matter, spin it out as they will, cannot last longer. But what a dying man can suffer firmly may kill a living friend to look upon. This same law of high treason,' he continued, with astonishing firmness and composure, 'is one of the blessings, Edward, with which your free country has accommodated poor old Scotland; her own jurisprudence, as I have heard, was much milder. But I suppose one day or other—when there are no longer any wild Highlanders to benefit by its tender mercies—they will blot it from their records as levelling them with a nation of cannibals. The mummery, too, of exposing the senseless head . . .' (II.40)
Neither Waverley, nor Flora, nor Fergus are very specific about the form of the execution, and modern readers might be somewhat in the dark, as I was.
But Scott didn't need to spell it out to readers of his own time. The penalty for high treason, for men, was to be hanged, drawn and quartered. For women it was burning (changed to hanging in 1790). But the sentence for men was still in place when Waverley was published, though by now it was carried out in a slightly less gruesome manner than in former times. Catherine Despard persuaded the government to waive the disembowelling and dismemberment when her husband and six others were executed at Horsemonger Gaol on 21 February 1803. Likewise, Robert Emmet (20 September 1803) and the Cato Street conspirators (1 May1820) were hanged until dead and then beheaded.
When the Jacobite Col. Francis Towneley was executed on 30 July 1746 (Kennington Common) he too was hanged until dead before being eviscerated. Three Jacobite nobles had their sentence commuted to beheading, carried out on Tower Hill on 18 August 1746 (Lords Kilmarnock and Balmerino) and 9 April 1747 (Lord Lovat)).
But at Carlisle (the scene of Fergus's death in Waverley) it seems that the thirty-three Jacobite executions in Oct-Nov 1746 followed an older and more protracted recipe; the victim was revived after hanging and then disembowelled while still conscious before finally being beheaded. (The executioner, the "most outcast of wretches", was William Stout of Hexham.)
[See Julia Hickey's post here: https://thehistoryjar.com/2017/07/10/the-end-of-carlisles-jacobites/ . Surprisingly, Wikipedia's two entries on the penalty of Hanged Drawn and Quartered (here and here) make no reference either to the Carlisle executions of 1746 or to those that followed the 1715 rebellion.]
So this was, in Waverley, the fate of Fergus Mac-Ivor and Evan Dhu Maccombich.
*
Reconciliation is a great thing, but the reconciler's role can be a thankless one. Inevitably, starting from where he did, Scott conceded more to the above prejudices and stereotypes than we'd approve now; it's a kind of tribute to his success that we may feel, as with his portrayal of Jews in Ivanhoe, that his Highlanders are too much constructed out of stereotypic motifs derived from others: in this case passionate, violent, perversely honourable, thieving and blackmail, etc.
' . . .Where the guilty are so numerous, clemency must be extended to far the greater number; and I have little doubt of procuring a remission for you, providing we can keep you out of the claws of justice till she has selected and gorged upon her victims; for in this, as in other cases, it will be according to the vulgar proverb, “First come, first served.” Besides, government are desirous at present to intimidate the English Jacobites, among whom they can find few examples for punishment. This is a vindictive and timid feeling which will soon wear off, for of all nations the English are least blood-thirsty by nature. But it exists at present, and you must therefore be kept out of the way in the mean-time.' (II.33)
That's Colonel Talbot, a figure whose cold wisdom is relished by Scott. No character on the Jacobite side comes anywhere close to his moral authority. The reader is supposed to take him seriously.
But we might suspect that Waverley uses some sleight of hand in its account of the rebellion's aftermath. Talbot's point about clemency being extended to the majority of rebels is carefully placed; "clemency" was not how the aftermath would be remembered. But affecting to lament the punitive harshness (which Scott no doubt did), does Waverley really face up to it? Their penalties were barbarous, but of the two victims in the novel Fergus was a prime mover in the rebellion, perfectly conscious of the risk he took, and Evan Dhu is shown as voluntarily incurring (through loyalty to his chieftain) what the law would willingly have spared him. Waverley himself and the Baron of Bradwardine are both pardoned by His Royal Highness the Commander in Chief (i.e. William Duke of Cumberland), though with increasing reluctance. Scott contrives (is that the right word?) to avoid describing Culloden or any of the battles the government forces won; the only battles in Waverley are Prestonpans and Clifton Moor, the two Jacobite successes. We have a lyrical account of the destruction of Tully-Veolan, but the subsequent speed of its renovation (partly effected by Talbot's good offices) images a reconciliation with the present powers that may be a little too easy. For instance, Alice Bean, who "smiled and smirked with the best of them" at Waverley's wooing of Rose (II.38), an image barely troubled by the execution of her father and not at all by the imminent execution of her lover. We never get a closer view of what the aftermath meant for the Highland way of life celebrated in earlier chapters.
As the Anti-Jacobin reviewer noted, "The author ... steer[ed] clear of every thing which could give offense to the reigning family ..." That included "Butcher" Cumberland's ruthlessness at Culloden and during the Highland purges afterwards; after all, he was the reigning monarch's uncle.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/17218815.aftermath-culloden-end-jacobites/
Then again, Scott probably went too easy on the Jacobite incursions too. There's more to military campaigns than romance.
But I would rather celebrate his unprecedented re-creation of history than judge it by the aims of e.g. The Debacle or The Red Badge of Courage.
*
Not everyone thought the historical novel a good idea. The London Quarterly Review , concluding a long and appreciative survey of Waverley (though the reviewer confused "Proud Preston" in 1715 with Prestonpans in 1745) warned:
We confess that we have, speaking generally, a great objection to what may be called historical romance, in which real and fictitious personages, and actual and fabulous events are mixed together to the utter confusion of the reader, and the unsettling of all accurate recollections of past transactions ; and we cannot but wish that the ingenious and intelligent author of Waverley had rather employed himself in recording historically the character and transactions of his countrymen Sixty Years since, than in writing a work, which, though it may be, in its facts, almost true, and in its delineations perfectly accurate, will yet, in sixty years hence, be regarded, or rather, probably, disregarded, as a mere romance, and the gratuitous invention of a facetious fancy.
This, again, is a tacit recognition of political implications: the "confusion" of the reader may, on this view, get in the way of "accurate recollections". But the reviewer (John Wilson Croker, I think) didn't sufficiently recognize the creative power of the historical novel, the way it can bring things to life, the way it welcomes the reader into a fully-imagined past world as histories themselves never do. You can forgive him; there had never been a historical novel like this.
*
In his 1829 "General Preface to the Waverley Novels", Scott remarked:
. . . I must frankly confess that the mode in which I conducted the story scarcely deserved the success which the romance afterwards attained.The tale of WAVERLEY was put together with so little care that I cannot boast of having sketched any distinct plan of the work. The whole adventures of Waverley, in his movements up and down the country with the Highland cateran Bean Lean, are managed without much skill. It suited best, however, the road I wanted to travel, and permitted me to introduce some descriptions of scenery and manners, to which the reality gave an interest which the powers of the Author might have otherwise failed to attain for them. And though I have been in other instances a sinner in this sort, I do not recollect any of these novels in which I have transgressed so widely as in the first of the series.
It's strange that Scott's extraordinary memory for what he'd read and heard didn't apparently extend to his own works and their creation. These later notes are often interesting but often unreliable e.g. he says the novel was begun in 1805, suggested by the Lady of the Lake -- which he didn't write until 1809!
And what are we to make of "his movements up and down the country with the Highland cateran Bean Lean"?
At the end of II.7 Donald Bean Lean and his people rescue Waverley from Gilfillan's party while they're on the march from Cairnvreckan towards Stirling (a distance of 18 miles, we're told) . The Highlanders run with the injured hero for a couple of miles, then slow to a fast pace and are soon above a glen, containing Janet's hut. Here Waverley recuperates in II.8, then in II.9 they travel on again, slip past some soldiers in a sheepfold and after an uneventful night's journey deliver Waverley to the Castle of Doune (8 miles NW of Stirling). (Donald Bean Lean himself is invisible, though probably he played the pedlar of II.7, as Fergus surmises.)
It's a very small part of the novel, and I doubt it has disturbed many readers other than Scott. It's true that, in hindsight, you might wonder why Waverley doesn't recognize the glen as part of Tully-Veolan, a ground he has hunted over (I.13). And we're perhaps surprised to find Tully-Veolan so close to Gilfillan's line of march towards Stirling, but as both Tully-Veolan and Cairnvreckan are imaginary locations we can't really complain.
But this brief section doesn't really fit with what Scott gives as his excuse, "descriptions of scenery and manners, to which the reality gave an interest which the powers of the Author might have otherwise failed to attain for them". This real scenery could refer only to the Castle of Doune; and there isn't much of manners, real or otherwise, since no-one converses with Waverley.
My feeling is that Scott in 1829 must have had II.10 in mind, though in that chapter Waverley's no longer with Bean Lean but with Balmawhapple's troop; they leave Doune, pass Stirling and Falkirk, and skirt Edinburgh to arrive at Holyrood.
But that still wouldn't really account for the manners, and I wonder if Scott was vaguely thinking of the whole stretch from when Waverley and Fergus part above Bally-Brough (I.29) to when the friends are re-united at Holyrood (II.11); thus incorporating the hero's encounters with Cruickshanks and Morton and Melville and Gilfillan . . . But those are some of the novel's finest chapters.
So I think we must take Scott's 1829 comment as somewhat impressionistic. He felt that his first novel had been very improvised. Readers have been more inclined to apply that description to his next novel, Guy Mannering.
Unplanned it may have been -- or at least, not very consciously planned -- but I actually consider Waverley a miracle of form.
There are imperfections of course. It starts slowly, not really gaining full momentum until Waverley meets the Baron and his daughter (I.10) -- though contemporary readers were evidently much impressed with the preceding two chapters of still-life description of Tully-Veolan, and most reviewers selected them for quotation. [Book reviews in those days were immense, but much of the bulk was simply long quotations from the book itself.] At the other end of the book, the tidying up of earlier mysteries isn't very artful. And other readers might share my slight feeling of restiveness during the Edinburgh chapters in the Chevalier's court.
But those are small criticisms compared to the epic sweep of the novel, something Scott never quite attempted on this scale again. The hero's journeyings, in the Highlands and then the Lowlands and later in England, are central to its success. Scott re-imagined the picaresque motif of the journey as a way of doing two things: portraying a whole society in cross-section, and conveying the shape of an individual's changing experience. Edward Waverley isn't the first character in fiction to have a mindset -- think of Emily's in The Mysteries of Udolpho -- but he's the first where the implications are fully considered : what he sees is real and what he doesn't see is also real.
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| Rose Bradwardine, painting by John Bostock (1826 - 1869) |
[Image source: https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/john-bostock-1826-1869-rose-bradwardine-the-heroi-50-c-rpel4knxsp .]
He found Miss Bradwardine presiding over the tea and coffee, the table loaded with warm bread, both of flour, oatmeal, and barleymeal, in the shape of loaves, cakes, biscuits, and other varieties, together with eggs, reindeer ham, mutton and beef ditto, smoked salmon, marmalade, and all the other delicacies which induced even Johnson himself to extol the luxury of a Scotch breakfast above that of all other countries. (I.12)
The reindeer ham at Tully-Veolan came as a surprise to me. It must have been exported from Lapland, like the reindeers' tongues mentioned in Southey's Letters from England. Reindeer were once native in Scotland, but they became extinct in the thirteenth century or thereabouts. In the eighteenth century there was some interest in their reintroduction. The Duke of Atholl had fourteen reindeer brought to Dunkeld and released on the hills of Atholl -- pretty near to where we might suppose Tully-Veolan to be located -- but only one of them survived into a second year (information taken from James Richie, The Influence of Man on Animal Life in Scotland (1920)). A reindeer herd was successfully established in the Cairngorms in 1952 by the Sami herder Mikel Utsi and his wife Edith Lindgren: there are 150 reindeer in the herd now (https://www.cairngormreindeer.co.uk/ ).
*
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| The Pass of Bally-Brough, 1836 engraving by J.H. Kernot after a drawing by Henry Melville. |
[Image source: The Corson Collection (Walter Scott Digital Archive) . Evan Dhu is about to take aim at the eagle.]
The cool and yet mild air of the summer night refreshed Waverley after his rapid and toilsome walk; and the perfume which it wafted from the birch trees, bathed in the evening dew, was exquisitely fragrant. [Footnote: It is not the weeping birch, the most common species in the Highlands, but the woolly-leaved Lowland birch, that is distinguished by this fragrance.] (I.16)
This is true, though having such a poor sense of smell myself, I've never noticed it.
Bo Jensen's site tells us: "The tender leaves of downy birch, B. pubescens, are protected by a delicate balsam, endowing the birch moor with an enchanting fragrance in the early springtime."
The sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me
(Robert Burns, "Sweet Afton")
But I'm surprised by the claim in Scott's note that the "weeping birch" -- i.e. Betula pendula or Silver Birch -- is more common in the Highlands than Betula pubescens (Downy Birch). BSBI shows both birches across the region, but my impression is that Betula pubescens (in its shrubby upland form) predominates there, especially in wet, peaty ground.
*
It's a remarkable thing that this seminal novel, an influence on all subsequent adventure stories, has never been made into a movie or TV serial, as far as I can make out. If you want to see Edward Waverley arriving by boat at the lochside cave of Donald Bean Lean, you'll just have to imagine it!
Remarkable, but explicable. While there's much to be said for Goethe's opinion that Scott's first novel remained his greatest, its influence on popular culture has tended to be indirect. By the time movies were invented, Scott's own fame had declined: he was remembered more for his medieval romances, Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward (both filmed), than for his Scottish novels, which had been superseded in the popular imagination by the tributes of other authors, Kidnapped and the like.
But even in Scott's heyday Waverley proved resistant to treatment in other forms. There is no Waverley opera. Berlioz's Waverley Overture, Op. 1 (1827), is an exception, but it focuses only on the lines quoted in the score:
I should also mention Sarah Scudgell Wilkinson's short Gothic bluebook or "shilling shocker" Waverley; or, The Castle of MacIver: A Highland Tale, of Sixty Years Since (1821) -- I would love to read this.
On radio the book has fared a little better -- a very little.
It was dramatized as a Classic Serial on Radio 4 (7 - 28/1/1994), in four one-hour episodes with Richard Greenwood as Edward Waverley. (Radio Times)
Back in 30 January 1949, a Sunday, the Scottish regional alterations from the Home Service schedule were as follows:
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| Bailie Duncan McWheeble at Breakfast, 1854 painting by James Eckford Lauder |
[Image source: https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/5071/bailie-duncan-mcwheeble-breakfast-scotts-waverley . In the Scottish National Gallery.]
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Bibliographic minutiae, of interest to no-one except myself!
Waverley was published in July 1814, in three volumes. However, most online texts divide the novel into just two volumes, the first of 29 chapters and the second of 43 chapters. (Chapter references given above are based on this arrangement. It's taken from Andrew Lang's Connoisseur Edition of 1893, which I believe follows the 'Magnum' edition of 1829.)
The original arrangement was like this:
Volume I, Chapters I-XXIII. The last chapter is Waverley continues at Glennaquoich, ending with the words "At a late hour he fell asleep, and dreamed of Flora Mac-Ivor."
Volume II, Chapters I-XXIV. (I.24 - II.18 in the two-volume arrangement.) The first chapter is A Stag-hunting and its Consequences, beginning with the words "Shall this be a short or a long chapter? --" . The last chapter is The Conflict (i.e. Prestonpans), ending with the words "Such was the elegy of the Laird of Balmawhapple."
Volume III, Chapters I-XXIV. (II.19-43 in the two volume edition.)The first chapter is An unexpected Embarrassment, beginning with the words "When the battle was over, and all things coming into order, . . ."
The narrative claims to date from 1805 (i.e. sixty years after 1745) but scholars are increasingly doubtful whether Scott really began to write it as early as 1805; more likely it was 1808. But at any rate it took him at least six years to complete Volume I (including several years when the MS was mislaid, following Scott's removal to Abbotsford in 1811). Volumes II and III, on the other hand, were written in a mere three weeks in 1814.
The title-page extract that I reproduced above, including its Shakespeare quotation, appears at the start of all three volumes.
Speaking of quotations, most of the chapters of Waverley have authorial titles and not the epigraphs familiar to readers of Scott's later novels. Towards the end, beginning at III XVIII (misnumbered XVII) / II.37 titles are replaced by epigraphs. Yes, the epigraphs are a replacement for the titles, not an additional feature. The final chapter (III.XXIV / II.43) reverts to an authorial title: A Postscript, which should have been a Preface. It's a moot point if Dulce domum (III.XXII / II.41) is to be regarded as a title or an epigraph.
Most of Scott's novels from Guy Mannering (1815) onwards have chapter epigraphs and not chapter titles. However, Quentin Durward (1823) and St Ronan's Well (1824) have both. The unusual form of Redgauntlet (1824) dispenses with epigraphs; instead, each letter or chapter announces what kind of thing it is, e.g. Narrative of Alan Fairford, Continued. With the Tales of the Crusaders (1825) Scott resumed his usual practice: epigraphs only (or sometimes no heading at all, e.g. The Talisman Chs 2-4).
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| Fergus MacIvor sees the Bodach Glas, 1903 engraving by Gordon Browne |
[Image source: https://www.europeana.eu/en/item/9200267/BibliographicResource_3000059120725 . Gordon Browne, youngest son of 'Phiz', was a prolific illustrator, especially of "boy's stories", historical adventures and tales.]
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