Sir Walter Scott: The Heart of Midlothian (1818)
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| The Interview between Effie Deans and her Sister in Prison, 1873 engraving by James Faed from a painting by Robert Herdman. |
[Image source: Wikimedia .]
A strangely powerful title, The Heart of Midlothian. (Or Mid-Lothian, as the first edition had it.)
In the introductory chapter, the two young Edinburgh lawyers explain to Peter Pattieson that it means the Old Tolbooth prison, still in use but now scheduled for demolition. (In fact it was demolished in 1817, just a year before Scott's novel was published. ) In those days the historic county of Midlothian included Edinburgh, and the Tolbooth indeed stood at its heart, right next to St Giles' Cathedral. This was because it was originally the burgh's main municipal building (that's what "tolbooth" means in Scotland); it included the town hall and customs offices as well as the jail. It was only after 1639 that the other functions were moved elsewhere, leaving the Old Tolbooth as purely a prison.
There's something remarkable about the idea (however jocular) of the heart of a place being its prison, as Peter immediately comments:
“I think,” said I, with the bashful diffidence with which a man lets slip a pun in presence of his superiors, “the metropolitan county may, in that case, be said to have a sad heart.”
“Right as my glove, Mr. Pattieson,” added Mr. Hardie; “and a close heart, and a hard heart—Keep it up, Jack.”
“And a wicked heart, and a poor heart,” answered Halkit, doing his best.
“And yet it may be called in some sort a strong heart, and a high heart,” rejoined the advocate. “You see I can put you both out of heart.”
(The Heart of Midlothian, Introductory chapter)
This discussion of "the heart of Midlothian" (expression) somehow resonates with our own debate about The Heart of Midlothian (novel). What, many of us have asked ourselves as the story winds on, is the heart of The Heart of Midlothian? Because it isn't the Tolbooth, important as that is. Nor is it the law, important as that is. To readers with expectations of a thematic organisation like those of Little Dorrit (prisons) or Bleak House (the law), Scott's novel, while no less intricate than Dickens' masterpieces, may seem elusive. It is one of his novels with a shifting sort of structure, moving steadily (or sometimes unsteadily) away from the place where it begins. In this respect it most nearly resembles Guy Mannering (1815) among its predecessors. Both books have, ultimately, a sad heart, a tragicomic one anyway, and one of the things they say to us (as it were from the margin, but none the less powerfully), is that in life we (and Guy, and Jeanie, and Effie) can't ever go back.
But as novel-readers, happily, we can: and be stirred and enchanted and troubled and puzzled all over again.
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So to clear our heads it's good to recall that The Heart of Midlothian (like Guy Mannering) was a huge popular success. For the enchanted public, and for the artists whose work is shown in this post, there was no doubt about the heart of The Heart of Midlothian. It was the story of Jeanie and her sister, this simple, profound and deeply affecting tale in which one sister will not lie to save the other but instead sets out on an extraordinary rescue mission. It was a story about a family, that perennial staple of the popular bestseller.
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The sisters
A novel that hinges on two sisters; it might make us think for a moment about Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811.
Scott had read it, of course; he read everything. In his review of Emma (published in March 1816), he has this to say of Sense and Sensibility:
The interest and merit of the piece depend altogether upon the behaviour of the elder sister, while obliged at once to sustain her own disappointment with fortitude, and to support her sister, who abandons herself, with unsuppressed feelings, to the indulgence of grief.
[Source: https://pastnow.wordpress.com/2016/03/31/march-31-1816-jane-austens-achievement/ .]
Scott's remark, the particular aspect that struck him in Sense and Sensibility, vaguely foreshadows the sisterly dynamic in his own novel of two years later. Elinor Dashwood having to be the grown-up both for her younger sister and for her silly parent: yes, you could see a hint of Jeanie Deans in that. But of course the main point of mentioning Austen's novel is to highlight the differences.
Elinor and Marianne are gentlefolk, albeit somewhat impoverished since their father's death. Jeanie and Effie are uneducated peasant girls (though their father has done rather well for himself, if not quite as well as is reputed).
Nevertheless, both Elinor Dashwood and Jeanie Deans become romantically attached to churchmen in search of a living. But there the contrast is almost comical. Jeanie's beau, the sickly Reuben Butler, without prospects or family, has spent ten years looking for a living, with no success. But when it comes to the personable Edward Ferrars, from a wealthy family, the surprise is rather that he's in search of a living, even for a moment.
Elinor and Marianne are close in age (19 and 16 when the novel gets underway), and live with their mother.
Jeanie is ten years older than Effie, and their important relationship is with their fond, fiery, opinionated father. They are only half-sisters; both mothers died when they were young children. (Jeanie must have known Effie's mother, when she was alive, much better than she knew her own. What she really thought of Rebecca McNaught, is one of the novel's many pregnant silences.)
Elinor and Marianne are both, we may assume, good-looking girls (Austen disdains describing the appearance of her heroines). Scott, on the other hand, underlines that Jeanie is wholesomely plain but Effie is a beauty; though they do resemble each other in low stature and full figure.
The word "religion" appears in Sense and Sensibility -- once (and it's Marianne, at the pitch of distress, who uses it). It is a subject one simply doesn't discuss. But on the other hand, it's central to the sisters' story in The Heart of Midlothian. Theirs is a household that stands for an intense, vehement and exclusive religion, though their father asserts it much more in talk than in practice (the portrayal of Davie Deans isn't quite merciless, but it's deeply exposing). The girls react in different ways to this upbringing, yet both, you might say, are driven by a sense of election. Religion is why Jeanie cannot lie (though under extreme temptation), but also why she has the faith and strength to achieve the impossible and win her sister's pardon; it's easy for us to overlook how Jeanie's position on telling a saving lie, which we feel so inclined to indignantly reject, is grounded on a living faith in God. And when Effie goes astray, it's with a commitment to her personal destiny that she understands in religious terms, prefigured by the fearful text from Job, and finally issuing in Catholicism.
Elinor and Marianne spend all their days together. In the unrecounted past, Jeanie and Effie shared a bed and they too must have been together a lot, Jeanie watching over her little sister in loco maternis. But during the course of the novel, they are nearly always apart. Effie's in service in Edinburgh, and then confined to prison, and then exiled; but those are outward manifestations of something more fundamental, that the sisters' lives have gone in different directions. Jeanie is content in the ambit of her father, but for Effie to realize herself she needs to get away: from her father, certainly, and perhaps from Jeanie too.
[We'll say farewell to Sense and Sensibility now, but not without regret. I wrote more about it here.]
Altogether, the central relationship in The Heart of Midlothian yearns towards a true sisterliness, but never attains it for more than a few heartbreaking moments.
The reported exchanges between Jeanie and Effie are brief, compared to the scale of the novel, and for just that reason they have a magnified importance. We don't doubt that the sisters themselves remember every word.
Exchange #1 slides in during a retrospect (introduced, with Scott's customary misleading understatement, as if it's merely a sample of their talk).
“Whisht, Effie,” said her sister; “our father’s coming out o’ the byre.” — The damsel stinted in her song. —“Whare hae ye been sae late at e’en?”
“It’s no late, lass,” answered Effie.
“It’s chappit eight on every clock o’ the town, and the sun’s gaun down ahint the Corstorphine hills — Whare can ye hae been sae late?”
“Nae gate,” answered Effie.
“And wha was that parted wi’ you at the stile?”
“Naebody,” replied Effie once more.
“Nae gate? — Naebody? — I wish it may be a right gate, and a right body, that keeps folk out sae late at e’en, Effie.”
(Ch 9)
Then Effie, throwing off the confinement of this sisterly anxiety, launches her unkind counter-attack, followed by instant remorse. Their conversation settles down, and (the narrator remarks)
It is very possible, that, in the communicative mood into which the Lily of St. Leonard’s was now surprised, she might have given her sister her unreserved confidence, and saved me the pain of telling a melancholy tale . . .
(But it doesn't happen, because their father blunders in and ruins it.)
This is two years before the action of the novel begins, formally speaking; Effie is only fifteen, and it's in that context that we must understand her extraordinary thought, that were she to say more to Jeanie, "she’ll maybe hing it ower my head that she’ll tell my father, and then she wad be mistress and mair". Jeanie as domestic tyrant... Really? (But then her obvious capability, her incredible strength of will... she certainly is the long-established mistress of the household... It might alarm, as well as impress, a younger sister.) Anyway, there's a great difference between fifteen and twenty-five. Effie, we suddenly perceive, feels alone; Jeanie and her admirers seem to belong to an older generation.
The other communications between the sisters are:
2. Visits by Jeanie to Mrs Saddletree's, mentioned in Ch 9 but not described. One of them forms the crucial topic of Fairbrother's questions in court (Ch 22).
It was necessary, he admitted, that he should produce more positive testimony of her innocence than what arose out of general character, and this he undertook to do by the mouth of the person to whom she had communicated her situation — by the mouth of her natural counsellor and guardian — her sister.
(Ch 22)
Under examination Jeanie says she had noticed Effie looked ill and asked what ailed her. But Effie said nothing in reply. (Jeanie has already told George Staunton the same thing.)
3. Another failed communication, when Effie shows up at St Leonards, after giving birth but without a baby. She's in a terrible state and gives no coherent answers when Jeanie plies her with questions. (Ch 9)
4. The meeting in prison the day before the trial, with Ratcliffe in attendance (Ch 19: probably this is the scene portrayed in the pictures by Herdman and Scheffer, though it could also be the post-trial one in Ch 24.) It begins and ends in tears and embraces; in between, this great and painful scene, constantly switching direction, shows the love between the sisters but also their imperfect sympathy, each unable to act differently. Those tears and embraces are not just warmth of affection but also frustration, a lament for a relationship that cannot get beyond its limitations. (As the novel draws on, these tears and embraces almost take on a performative aspect.)
5. Not really a conversation, but, in court, when Jeanie is called as witness, Effie cries "Oh Jeanie, Jeanie, save me, save me!" and
Jeanie in the meantime had advanced to the bottom of the table, when, unable to resist the impulse of affections she suddenly extended her hand to her sister. Effie was just within the distance that she could seize it with both hers, press it to her mouth, cover it with kisses, and bathe it in tears, with the fond devotion that a Catholic would pay to a guardian saint descended for his safety; while Jeanie, hiding her own face with her other hand, wept bitterly.
(Ch 22; the scene shown at the foot of this post)
6. Straight after the trial: another meeting in prison, once more with Radcliffe in attendance.
“What signifies coming to greet ower me,” said poor Effie, “when you have killed me? — killed me, when a word of your mouth would have saved me — ....."
.... “My sister shall come out in the face of the sun,” said Jeanie; “I will go to London, and beg her pardon from the king and queen. If they pardoned Porteous, they may pardon her; if a sister asks a sister’s life on her bended knees, they will pardon her — they shall pardon her — and they will win a thousand hearts by it.”
(Ch 24).
Now follows Jeanie's heroic journey, during which she's of course out of contact with her sister.
7. In Ch 38, after obtaining a pardon for Effie, Jeanie writes to George Staunton, her father, and Reuben Butler, but not to Effie herself. There are many good reasons why this probably isn't significant, but it seems worth mentioning.
8. In Ch 43, Butler tells Jeanie about the letter he received from Effie after leaving her father's house and going aboard with Staunton. Effie knows, of course, that its substance will be passed on to her father and sister.
“... That she could not endure that her father and her sister should go into banishment, or be partakers of her shame ... her father meant weel by her, and all men, but he did not know the dreadful pain he gave her in casting up her sins. If Jeanie had been at hame, it might hae dune better — Jeanie was ane, like the angels in heaven, that rather weep for sinners, than reckon their transgressions. But she should never see Jeanie ony mair, and that was the thought that gave her the sairest heart of a’ that had come and gane yet. ... she would, in some warldly respects, be far better off than she deserved. But she desired her family to remain satisfied with this assurance, and give themselves no trouble in making farther inquiries after her.”
9. Ch 45: the unexpected appearance of Effie on the shore of Jeanie's new home. Before they speak, it's a moment of sheer magic. Then the painful realities break in.
“There is nae danger — there shall be nae danger,” said Jeanie eagerly. “O Effie, dinna be wilfu’— be guided for ance — we will be sae happy a’ thegither!”
“I have a’ the happiness I deserve on this side of the grave, now that I hae seen you,” answered Effie; “and whether there were danger to mysell or no, naebody shall ever say that I come with my cheat-the-gallows face to shame my sister among her grand friends.”
“I hae nae grand friends,” said Jeanie; “nae friends but what are friends of yours — Reuben Butler and my father. — O unhappy lassie, dinna be dour, and turn your back on your happiness again! We wunna see another acquaintance — Come hame to us, your ain dearest friends — it’s better sheltering under an auld hedge than under a new-planted wood.”
“It’s in vain speaking, Jeanie — I maun drink as I hae brewed — I am married, and I maun follow my husband for better for worse.”
(Effie, I suspect, would rather see anyone else than her father and Butler.)
10. Five years later, in Ch 47, Effie's letter (prompted by fear of the Duke of Argyle finding out who she is), to which Jeanie reacts by resentfully detecting "a smothered degree of egotism" before putting herself into "a better frame of mind". Jeanie sends a letter in reply.
In entering into her own little details of news, chiefly respecting domestic affairs, she experienced a singular vacillation of ideas; for sometimes she apologised for mentioning things unworthy the notice of a lady of rank, and then recollected that everything which concerned her should be interesting to Effie.
Further letters pass between them over the next ten years (Ch 48); Effie laments the lack of a child.
“Had he but a child,” said the unfortunate wife, “or had that luckless infant survived, it would be some motive for living and for exertion. But Heaven has denied us a blessing which we have not deserved.”
11. Ten years later (Ch 49), Jeanie sends the account of Meg's confession to Effie, and Effie visits her, staying with Jeanie until the novel's final page. (Effie's term of exile from Scotland has now expired; but perhaps, too, this visit feels more possible because their father is dead.) The sisters' affectionate meeting:
Jeanie was so much overcome by wonder, and even by awe, that her feelings were deep, stunning, and almost overpowering. Effie, on the other hand, wept, laughed, sobbed, screamed, and clapped her hands for joy, all in the space of five minutes, giving way at once, and without reserve, to a natural excessive vivacity of temper, which no one, however, knew better how to restrain under the rules of artificial breeding.
Effie now speaks completely differently; she calls Jeanie "my dear", not "lass". (But actually Mrs Butler, too, speaks in a more refined way as the novel draws to a close.)
When they were alone, her sister could not help expressing her wonder at the self-possession with which Lady Staunton sustained her part. “I daresay you are surprised at it,” said Lady Staunton composedly; “for you, my dear Jeanie, have been truth itself from your cradle upwards; but you must remember that I am a liar of fifteen years’ standing, and therefore must by this time be used to my character.”
This is the last time we'll hear the sisters speak directly to each other, though a lot happens thereafter. On George Staunton's death
In the vivacity of her grief she gave way to all the natural irritability of her temper; shriek followed shriek, and swoon succeeded to swoon. It required all Jeanie’s watchful affection to prevent her from making known, in these paroxysms of affliction, much which it was of the highest importance that she should keep secret.
(Ch 51)
(I suppose this must mean, the secret that Lady Staunton is the sentenced criminal Effie Deans. It's now only of social importance, not legal. Jeanie in these later years has become habitually secretive. She is willingly complicit in maintaining Effie's new, false position, perhaps at root terrified of raking up the past. A pardon doesn't take away the family shame.)
Effie stays with her sister for more than a year after that. Butler and Jeanie conceal from Effie what they learn of her son (now or later isn't entirely clear). Effie is grieving.
In the latter months, [her grief] assumed the appearance of listlessness and low spirits, which the monotony of her sister’s quiet establishment afforded no means of dissipating. Effie, from her earliest youth, was never formed for a quiet low content. Far different from her sister, she required the dissipation of society to divert her sorrow, or enhance her joy.
(Ch 51)
When she goes "the departure was a relief to both sisters".
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| Effie and Jeanie (and Ratcliffe) again. Painting by Ary Scheffer (1795 - 1858). |
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| Jeanie Deans, painting by William Drummond Young (1855 - 1924). |
[Image source: https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/PORTRAIT-OF-JEANIE-DEANS/27D94E9AEB896C63E07BE0109FB2DAC8 .]
Disappointments
When Volume IV begins (Ch 37), Jeanie doesn't even know she has triumphed. That's the first of her disappointments, in a way: that instead of a definite statement that her sister's life will be spared, she's asked to pin her faith on a house-wife case and the Duke of Argyle's confidence in what it will boil down to. In the mean time, the mundanities of real life don't stop; the nosy Mrs Glass has to be negotiated, letters must be written, her return journey must be thought of. The Duke offers transport to Scotland, an offer not to be refused, and a safer journey too; and yet we sense already how Jeanie's freedom, the fierce joy of committing to her own decision and to all its risks ... that era in her life is definitively over. And getting sucked into the Duke's travel arrangements will indeed have consequences.
Jeanie writes her letters (Ch 38). To George Staunton she writes: "Alwaies, sir, I pray you will never come again to see my sister, whereof there has been too much." To her father she writes: "And oh, my dear father, since it hath pleased God to be merciful to her, let her not want your free pardon, whilk will make her meet to be ane vessel of grace, and also a comfort to your ain graie hairs." To Butler she writes: "And mind this is no meant to haud ye to onything whilk ye wad rather forget, if ye suld get a charge of a kirk or a scule, as above said. Only I hope it will be a scule, and not a kirk, because of these difficulties anent aiths and patronages, whilk might gang ill down wi’ my honest father." As it turns out, not one of these hopes will be realized. Of course Butler's school doesn't matter so much, but the point is the same; through extraordinary heroism Jeanie has achieved what she wanted, she has saved Effie from the scaffold. It's huge, but it's not everything. She has no control over how it all plays out, no control over others' wills and dispositions and destinies.
Meanwhile another disappointment comes -- and it's somewhat jarring that the Duke announces it, after all, to nosy Mrs Glass and not to Jeanie -- the condition that Effie is to be exiled from Scotland for fourteen years. It "greatly grieved her affectionate disposition", but Jeanie's somewhat mollified by an unwontedly sweet-tempered letter from her father, which has her dreaming of them all together at "a wild farm in Northumberland". Jeanie's idea is of a return to their lives as they were before Effie's trouble: an Effie free of Staunton, presumably repentant, and happily reunited with her father and sister (and Butler nearby). Alas, Jeanie! It's never going to happen.
He thrust upon her a large piece of cake, nor would he permit her to break off a fragment, and lay the rest on a salver. “Put it in your pouch, Jeanie,” said he; “you will be glad of it before you see St. Giles’s steeple. I wish to Heaven I were to see it as soon as you! and so my best service to all my friends at and about Auld Reekie, and a blithe journey to you.”
(Ch 39)
Thus says the duke, with "the frankness of a soldier". The frankness needed underlining, because, actually, Jeanie will never see St. Giles’s steeple again, not in the novel anyway; and the main reason is the background machinations of this "benevolent enchanter" who is now wishing her godspeed.
Perhaps we should admit that this disappointment (that Jeanie never returns to Edinburgh), and some of the others I've mentioned, are more the reader's than Jeanie's own -- though we shouldn't forget her protesting, in Ch 40, that "[N]ever hunted deer langed for its resting-place as I do to find myself at Saint Leonard’s".
In fact what the duke organizes for Jeanie at Roseneath is a very reasonable simulacrum of Jeanie's own pastoral dream, except for the absence of the one person that he gives no thought to. (Effie, we understand, is pardoned, not forgiven.)
But leaving aside that yawning absence (even Jeanie couldn't control Effie's destiny, and the duke certainly couldn't) it's still an imperfect simulacrum. Saddletree and Dumbiedikes are exchanged for Knockdunder and Mrs Dolly Dutton; well, perhaps that's not the worst of bargains, but it's no idyll either. Jeanie is quite aware, though her father apparently isn't, that all of this fortune comes by grace and favour, not desert. And Butler's appointment is far from the harmonious call of serious Presbyterians that Jeanie had, for fear of her father's reaction, hopefully envisaged; it's Davie Deans himself who (not for the first time, it seems) must bend those so unbending principles to match what's on offer.
Jeanie doesn't complain. She and her husband attain their quiet happiness because they carry it within themselves, not because the world around them is perfect. She's the mother of three children (there are hints that they'll have their own complications). She isn't now the person she became in that strange freedom of catastrophe, though there's a flash of recurrence at the very end when she kind-of-rescues the Whistler from execution; it's just what she does. She can't give any of her own happiness to Effie (or the Whistler). It's a sobering end to what once seemed a fairy tale.
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| The Old Tolbooth, Edinburgh. Engraving based on a painting by Alexander Naysmith (1758 - 1840). |
[Image source: Wikimedia .]
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Placing all this emphasis on Jeanie and her sister, I'm aware that I've said very little, or even nothing, about large parts of The Heart of Midlothian. The Porteous riots, for instance. The comedy, of which there's plenty. Douce Davie, Sharpitlaw and Ratcliffe, Reuben Butler, Madge Wildfire and her mother, Bartoline Saddletree... it's a shame to neglect them.
In small compensation, here's a few discussion questions that you can have fun thinking about.
If Jeanie had been able to consult Butler (conveniently under house arrest), what would he have advised her to say in court?
The real Geordie Robertson wasn't from the owning class. Does Scott's novel gain or lose by making him into George Staunton?
Who actually was the father of Madge's baby? Does Staunton rule himself out, and are we supposed to believe him? Are we perfectly certain the baby even existed?
"And then what is the poor lassie to do in a foreign land? — Why, wae’s me, it’s just sending her to play the same pranks ower again, out of sight or guidance of her friends." Mrs Glass has a point, doesn't she? (In Scott's own time infanticide was no longer punished by execution, but it was typically punished by exile.)
Jeanie keeps a lot of secrets, by the end of the book. Does no-one ever talk about Effie, are the rest all happy just to assume she's disappeared over the horizon and never been heard of again?
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| Jeanie refuses to give false testimony. From the 1914 movie The Heart of Midlothian, directed by Frank Wilson and starring Violet Hopson as Jeanie Deans. |
[Image source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0231704/ .]
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The Heart of Midlothian, online text on Project Gutenberg:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6944/6944-h/6944-h.htm#link2HCH0019
Another post, a deep dive into narrative inconsistencies in Scott's complex narrative:
Time trouble in The Heart of Midlothian
Sir Walter Scott's novels, a brief guide
Labels: Sir Walter Scott
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