A WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING
Celebrating 250 years of Sir Walter Scott, the man who invented Scotland
When I was a schoolboy, a local lawyer asked me to help with sorting out the effects of the late Dr James Corson, the cantankerous librarian at Sir Walter Scott’s home, Abbotsford, along the banks of the River Tweed. There was his vast personal library, some of which was to be sent to Edinburgh University, as well as reams of newspaper clippings and box loads of objects and trinkets all associated with Scott. My recompense for this was to be allowed to take away some of the unwanted books.
The lawyer – and now with age but perhaps not wisdom, it strikes me as like a scene from a Scott novel – asked if I wanted a set of the Waverley Novels. With all the arrogance of youth I proclaimed that Scott was just a second rate Dickens or Balzac, and headed home with copies of Browning, Tennyson and Longfellow.
“I underestimated Scott, and that only changed when I actually read him
I underestimated Scott, and that only changed when I actually read him. If you were to ask the average reader which adjectives they would use to describe Scott I would wager that words like boring, old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy and reactionary would come up. I would suggest that experimental, innovative, radical and avant-garde might be more appropriate.
Scott straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, being born in 1771 (which is why this year we are celebrating his 250th anniversary) and dying in 1832. But he was of both eras. His father was a douce Hanoverian lawyer but his grandfather had been a Jacobite.
Scott was extremely ill as a child, with polio, and in the ways he was treated we see the same stranded nature of the man. His mother’s family came from the Edinburgh medical aristocracy, and so he was sent to the very strange James Graham, later known as ‘the Emperor of Quacks’, who used a galvanic battery to shock Scott’s leg. It didn’t work. So he was sent to the family
“By such efforts, feeble as they are, I might contribute somewhat to the history of my country
in Smailholm in the Scottish Borders, where his leg was wrapped in the caul of a new-born lamb. New technology and folktale superstition were with him from the start.
He attended Edinburgh University where he was a member of the Speculative Society, and trained as a lawyer. His dissertation was, rather gruesomely, ‘On The Disposal of the Dead Bodies of Criminals’, and was dedicated to Lord Braxfield, a judge notorious for saying ‘Let them bring me prisoners and I will find them law’. Once Scott was himself a judge – a Sherriff for Selkirkshire – he was markedly more generous. When one Tam Purdie was found poaching on Scott’s own land, instead of punishing him, Scott took a shine to him and gave him employment as a ‘general assistant’ on his estate.
But aside from legal affairs, Scott had an ulterior career. He had always written, and took it more seriously in the 1790s. Again, we see him stranded between the past and the future. His first publication was a translation of the most modern and daring German ballads, as well as a play by Goethe. Scott reminisced he was ‘German-mad’ at the period. But at the same time he was collecting Scottish ballads, which would eventually be published as The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
On one hand he was signalling his affiliation with romantic Sturm und Drang literature; on the other he was devoted to preserving the past. The Minstrelsy was an act of literary salvage. As he wrote in the preface, it was his hope that ‘by such efforts, feeble as they are, I might contribute somewhat to the history of my native country; the peculiar features of whose manners and character are daily melting and dissolving into those of her sister and ally’.
That gets to the nub of his paradoxical politics. Scott was both a Unionist and a patriot. He thought Scotland and England (and Wales, and Ireland) should not be a homogenous Britain, but an
alliance of equals. When the Westminster Treasury tried to stop Scotland printing its own bank notes, Scott went on the offensive with a series of pamphlets where he argued that to do so would mean that England was breaking the Act of Union. It is wise not to cross an Edinburgh lawyer.
The Minstrelsy led to Scott writing his own original poetry. He was the first author in history to receive an advance for a future work, sight unseen, and was so famous he was offered the Poet Laureateship. He turned it down, saying he already had one government job.
In 1814 he published anonymously his first novel: Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. Scott in some ways always had one foot in the eighteenth century and one in the nineteenth. He is the heir to the wit, rambunctious humour and gadding about of novelists like Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett. At the same time he infuses his novels with pathos, history and the eerie, leading the way to writers like Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Emily Brontë.
Waverley is a much weirder book than you might think. It opens with a cadenza that might almost be thought postmodern, with Scott going through all the possible titles he had rejected, fixing on Waverley as a perfect blank slate. The final chapter is entitled ‘A Postscript which should have been a Preface’, and puts the novel’s story about the Jacobite rebellion in its historical context.
It is a novel that is almost literaturemad. Young Edward Waverley, who defects from the Hanoverians to the Jacobites and back again, is a Don Quixote figure obsessed with chivalric romances, entranced by Ossian-like poetry and harps, who does some amateur dramatic Shakespeare and so on. It was an astonishing success. The author himself was in the Northern Isles when it was published, and writing letters about how fun it was to slide down Sumburgh Head. Although Scott was serious, he did not take himself seriously.
Scott the sensible lawyer always had a fondness for rogues, vagabonds, renegades, gypsies and dafties. But his empathy extends further. He was the first novelist to have characters that previously had been stereotypes or caricatures; from the Jewish Isaac of York in Ivanhoe, to the Muslim Saladin in The Talisman, to Tippoo Saib in The Surgeon’s
“Scott had a fondness for rogues and vagabonds
Daughter. The only class that Scott satirises is, predictably, Edinburgh lawyers.
Virginia Woolf has a very good essay called ‘Gas at Abbotsford’ where she hits on something of real importance. Abbotsford was Scott’s ‘Conundrum Castle’, his ‘romance in stone and lime’. Parts of it were a reliquary for his treasures and trophies; locks of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s hair, Napoleon’s letter blotter, Javanese kris knives, the door of the Tolbooth repurposed as a ‘feature’.
Charles Baudelaire captures some of this when he has a character complain about Scott’s ‘bric-a-brac… and cast-off things of every sort, armour, tableware, furniture, gothic inns and melodramatic castles’. But it had gas lighting – Scott was chairman of the Oil and Gas Company – and other such innovations as pneumatic bell pulls. It was antiquarian and futurist at the same time. In the preface to one novel, The Betrothed, Scott imagines a mechanical loom that can write novels.
You wouldn’t think of him as the prophet of the Internet.
When I was dealing with Dr Corson’s bequest, there was a lot of ‘realia’ or
‘ephemera’. Basically, he collected anything vaguely Scott related, including ashtrays, napkin holders, thermometers, piggy banks, bars of soap, cruet sets, action figures of Ivanhoe, tea towels, cigarette cards and much more. In a way the realia shows the extent of Scott’s fame more than statistics about book sales.
You’ve got it made when after your death someone names a pen, a railway station and a brand of cigarette after you.