Last summer, when I was in Edinburgh for about four weeks, I conducted a casual survey amongst friends and family, hoping to ascertain whether anyone had 1) read any of Walter Scott’s novels or 2) whether anyone could name at least three of the twenty-six. The poll was entirely unscientific and wildly uncontrolled; the sample included Scots and Sassenachs, young and old – the single criterion for participation being taking tea at our kitchen table. In itself this yields a very particular demographic, one that perhaps freakishly approximates Scott’s ideal readership – the educated Edinburgh professional bourgeoisie – in fact. I should have kept a running total of the law degrees and New Town addresses as well as ascertained their views on the union. Of course, what I found was that only those over 60 had read any Scott (Old Mortality under duress as part of the 1950s curriculum) and that those of my generation couldn’t get beyond Waverley in naming the novels, if that. Incidentally, very few of the native Edinburghers knew why Waverley station was so named.
Of course, like any good survey, these results merely confirmed what is already known: no one reads Walter Scott these days, except for masochists and academics (two categories easily conflated). My drinks party chatter on Walter Scott runs along the the lines of drawing a parallel between Scott’s monument and his reputation: both are monolithic, begrimed, and aesthetically rather baroque, but both tower impressively at the heart of contemporary Edinburgh. Viz:
Constantly looking to account for the relevance of my work, I tend to find Scott’s influence all over the place. My most recent (reductively distilled and not very nuanced) construction of the narrative goes something like this: Scott was a sensational bestseller in the 1810s and 20s, he was the literary celebrity at the centre of Edinburgh’s burgeoning post-Enlightenment literary culture. Generically, his work remasculinised both novel reading and novel writing. The Waverley novels were a force in the literary marketplace and were circulated in myriad forms, some authorised (the Magnum Opus edition with extra annotations), many unauthorised (anthologies and illustrated gift books). His descriptions purveyed a particular image of Scotland (and especially the Highlands) to Britain and, in translation, to the rest of the world, which captured the contemporary imagination to the extent that Scott has been credited with beginning the Scottish tourist trade. Interrogating this claim would take some extended archival elbow grease, but his sentimentalised view of the Highlands is a hallmark of current Scottish tourism. The Waverley novels are examples of a particular historiography that imaginatively reconstructs the past to produce a narrative for the present and future. This narrative promotes the unity and prosperity of Britain in a forward-looking manner, whilst nostalgically preserving Scotland’s cultural distinctiveness in a politically neutralised form. It is an ambivalent endorsement of the status quo.
The Victorians, enthusiastically making his neutralised Highlands their playground, found in Scott’s novels a matrix of vigour, health, and manliness. The trajectory of historical progress was seen reflected in imperial expansion and commercial might. The monument, erected between 1841 and 1844 with an Act of Parliament, is a symbol of their optimism and esteem. It’s tempting to see the decline and fall of Sir Walter Scott as concomitant to the decline and fall of the British Empire. Certainly, swashbuckling adventure stories for boys didn’t survive into modernity retaining the same kind of nationalist/imperialist ideology. In 1916 the lexicographer Sir William A. Craigie prefaced an anthology of selections from the Waverley Novels in an ‘o tempora, o mores!‘ vein:
There are two statements which are very commonly made at the present time about the younger generation in Scotland. The one is that the young people have no proper knowledge of the language of their fathers and forefathers; the other is that they do not, and will not, read the Waverley Novels. Whether the state of things is quite so bad as this may be a matter of opinion, but there can be no doubt that there is a good deal of truth in each of the statements. Now it would clearly be a misfortune, not to say a disgrace, if Scottish children were actually to grow up without a knowledge of their own language, and without having read one of the greatest authors of their country. To prevent this from taking place is the aim of the present book.
(J. K. Craigie, ed. Scottish Selections from the Waverley Novels [Oxford University Press, 1916], p. 3)
Reading Scott is associated with backbone, derring-do, a sense of duty, and the stiff upper lip. Craigie’s prescription for Scotland’s youth is a daily dose of moral fibre and a dash of cultural distinctiveness. The dual nature of the complaint that the anthology is designed to remedy is indicative of the ambiguity at the heart of Scott’s work (something that doesn’t seem to worry Craigie overly). Scots should be culturally literate but remain good citizens of the empire. Given that the above are more like prerequisites for reading and enjoying Scott the question as to whether the novels instill this is still, perhaps, a matter of doubt.
