Christopher Scalia

Author Archives: Christopher Scalia

Christopher Scalia is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. He teaches courses in eighteenth-century literature, Romantic poetry, Scottish literature, and creative writing.


Waverley, Scotland’s Referendum, and Scottish Identity

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Joseph Slater, active 1803–died 1847. A Sketch of Sir Walter Scott in a Garden (undated). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Joseph Slater, active 1803–died 1847. A Sketch of Sir Walter Scott in a Garden (undated). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Before the referendum on Scottish independence this past September, commentators pointed out that the historic vote was taking place during the septcentennial of the Battle of Bannockburn, in which Robert the Bruce led an outnumbered Scottish army to victory over English forces.  They speculated this timing would inspire Scots to fight for their freedom from English influence once again.  (Commentators did not point out that election day itself fell on the birthday of Samuel Johnson, who contributed more than his fair share of anti-Scottish jibes.)

Now that Scots have voted to remain with the United Kingdom, perhaps it is more appropriate to recognize that the vote was also held during the bicentennial of Walter Scott’s Waverley—a novel that at once celebrates a distinctively Scottish identity and defends the established Union as a valuable political arrangement.  This complex statement of Scotland’s union with England has echoes in the referendum itself.

Scott’s first novel concerns Edward Waverley, an aimless young officer in the British army who becomes immersed in Highland culture and political intrigue in the weeks leading up to the Jacobite Rising of 1745.  A number of factors inspire Edward to eventually join the Jacobite cause; perhaps the most important is that the romantic atmosphere and culture of the Highlands excite his vivid—but undisciplined—fancy.  A “creature rather of imagination than reason,” Edward is captivated by the region’s natural beauty, the power of its poetry and music, as well as the hospitality, civility, and strength of its people [1].  Even Bonnie Prince Charlie himself is “generous . . . courteous . . . [and] noble-minded” (312).  Edward is not wrong to recognize the value of these traits; his mistake is letting them overcome his reason and seduce him to Jacobitism.  (When describing Robert Burns’s political sympathies, Scott used language very much like what he used to describe Edward’s flirtation with treason:  “I imagine his Jacobitism, like my own, belonged to the fancy rather than the reason” [2].)

In addition to depicting the romance of the Highlands, Scott elevates elements of Scottish law.  When Edward’s friend Fergus Mac-Ivor, a Highland chief complicit in the Jacobite Rising, is condemned to death, he scoffs at the notion that the English were more civilized and enlightened than Highlanders.  He describes the brutal punishment awaiting him—he would be hung (though not to the point of death), disemboweled, decapitated, and then publicly displayed.  Fergus remarks:

This same law of high treason . . . 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—they have not the wit to grace mine with a paper coronet; there would be some satire in that, Edward.  (348)

Contrary to conventional wisdom, and in a remarkably bitter tone, Fergus contends that Scottish law was more humane and civilized before reform imported the “tender mercies” of the English.  The English have barbarized the Scots, not civilized them.

Scott ends the novel by emphasizing the positive elements of Highland culture, mourning that it “has now almost entirely vanished from the land, and with it, doubtless, much absurd political prejudice; but, also, many living examples of singular and disinterested attachment to the principles of loyalty which they received from their fathers, and of old Scottish faith, hospitality, worth, and honour” (363).  The single negative trait he identifies in this passage—“political prejudice”—refers to Jacobitism, but some English characters harbor misguided anti-Scottish political prejudices, so there can be no sense that such bigotry is a purely Scottish shortcoming.  Scott explains that the novel was an attempt to ensure that Highland virtues were not completely lost, to “preserv[e] some idea of the ancient manners of which I have witnessed almost the total extinction” (363).  Saree Makdisi has described such passages as “claims to a sentimental Jacobitism, to the trappings and rituals of a mythic Highland past” by which Scott tries to preserve the “anti-modern otherness” of the Highlands [3].

Yet the novel is certainly not an unalloyed celebration of all things Highland, nor a dive into history’s dumpster to retrieve Jacobite ideals.  Scott challenges the premise of the ’45 when Edward, before he joins the cause, contemplates:  “Since [James II’s abdication in 1688] four monarchs had reigned in peace and glory over Britain, sustaining and exalting the character of the nation abroad and its liberties at home.  Reason asked, was it worth while to disturb a government so long and established, and to plunge a kingdom into all the miseries of civil war, for the purpose of replacing upon the throne the descendants of a monarch by whom it had been wilfully forfeited?” (149).  And because Edward’s eventual allegiance to the Jacobite cause is grounded in Quixotic folly, it does not withstand its early encounters with the enemy.  Just before his first battle against the British forces he abandoned, Edward recognizes the foreignness of his new army:  “he saw the wild dress and appearance of his Highland associates, heard their whispers in an uncouth and unknown language, looked upon his own dress, so unlike that which he had worn from his infancy, and wished to awake from what seemed at the moment a dream, strange, horrible, and unnatural” (236).  The Highlanders are too foreign, too distinct from Edward’s experience of Britain, for him to feel that he belonged in their army.  The “anti-modern otherness” of the Highlands is too much for Edward.

Jacobite foreignness is an important part of the pro-Hanoverian thread in Waverley.  Because they fought to re-establish the Stuarts as the monarchs of the United Kingdom (and not to separate Scotland from that kingdom), Jacobites can be considered Scottish nationalists insofar as the Stuarts themselves were Scottish, and therefore more British than the German Georges.  Yet Scott challenges even the superior British-ness of the Stuarts, frequently reminding readers that Prince Charles and his allies were as continental as they were Scottish.  Kenneth McNeil argues that Fergus in particular “embod[ies] a particular mode of French masculinity that Scott elsewhere associates with the failings of French culture” [4].  This guilt by association with the French would have been especially damning when the novel was published, just at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

The blend of Hanoverian unionism and Scottish nationalism apparent in Waverley is also manifest in Scott’s own life.  He helped organize King George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822, staging elaborate ceremonies to commemorate the first visit of a British monarch to the Scottish capital in nearly two hundred years.  But he also fought parliamentary efforts to reform the Scottish jury system to more closely resemble England’s, and others to prohibit Scottish private banks from issuing notes of currency under five pounds.  Scott’s protests against the former ultimately failed; he was successful in the latter, which is why his portrait still graces all notes minted by the Bank of Scotland.

Which brings us back to the recent referendum.  In its editorial endorsing a vote against independence, the Edinburgh newspaper The Scotsman, asked: “Does the Union cast a dark shadow over us?  It does not seem that way, Scotland is a prosperous, peaceful, successful country.  We are confident in our national identity with our own distinctive society.  We have our history and our heritage.”  This expresses simultaneous, not divided, loyalty to the United Kingdom and Scotland.  Based on such sentiments, one may infer that the 27% of Scots who voted “no” out of “a strong attachment to the UK and its shared history, culture, and tradition” also felt a strong attachment to Scotland and its own distinctive history, culture, and tradition.  It is a fresh version of the complicated patriotism that Scott depicted vividly in Waverley and elsewhere.

I doubt that many Scots were asking themselves, HWSV?—How Would Scott Vote?  But Scott’s simultaneous embrace of Hanoverian rule and celebration of Scottish identity help clarify some of the impulses behind the results of the referendum [5].

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Notes:

[1] Walter Scott, Waverley, 138.  Subsequent citations will be provided in the main text.

[2] John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, 4.181.

[3] Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity, 97.

[4] Scotland, Britain, Empire: Writing the Highlands, 1760-1860, 98.

[5] For a broader consideration of Scottish literature’s relevance to the referendum, see Evan Gottlieb’s recent piece in the The Huffington Post.

The Eighteenth-Century Settings of Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels

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Sir Walter Scott, 1771 - 1832

Sir Walter Scott, 1771 – 1832.  National Galleries Scotland

This year marks the two hundredth anniversary of the publication of Waverley, Walter Scott’s novel about a naïve English soldier’s involvement in the Jacobite Uprising of 1745.  Scott’s first novel and the nearly 30 works that constitute the Waverley Novels had a dramatic effect on the course of not only fiction, but history writing as well.  Scott’s synthesis of historical subject matter, supernatural mystery, and romantic intrigue made his novels both enormously popular and critically acclaimed—no small feat considering the depths to which the genre’s reputation had sunk by the early nineteenth century, as Ina Ferris has shown.

Scott’s influence extended across Europe and into the United States.  His works inspired paintings by (among many others) J.M.W. Turner, John Everett Millais, and Eugène Delacroix, as well as operas by Gaetano Donizetti and Arthur Sullivan.  When Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery, he chose his new name based on a character from Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake.  In the Virginia town where I grew up, there is a street called Waverly [sic] Way, not far from Rokeby Farm Stables; I currently teach about 100 miles away from the town of Ivanhoe, VA.  Along Central Park’s Literary Walk, a statue of Scott accompanies ones of Shakespeare and Robert Burns.  Even his critics acknowledged his enormous influence: Mark Twain blamed the Civil War on Scott, “For it was he that created rank and caste [in the South], and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them.” To illustrate his distaste, Twain named the wrecked steamboat in Huckleberry Finn the Walter Scott.

In short, Scott was enormously popular and influential as both a poet and a novelist—but few people today read his work for pleasure. [1] Go to a bookstore, and you’ll find maybe one or two of his novels, while his contemporary Jane Austen has rows and special displays devoted to her work, not to mention sequels and rewrites featuring zombies and vampires.  Scott’s broader cultural presence has declined as well.  Although Season 3 of Downton Abbey included a couple of references to his poetry, to my knowledge the BBC hasn’t adapted a Walter Scott novel since it produced Ivanhoe in 1982. The 1995 film Rob Roy, starring Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange, bears no relation to Scott’s novel of the same title.  Perhaps the most recent popular film at all relevant to Scott is the 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, in which Andie MacDowell’s character scolds Bill Murray’s with lines from Lay of the Last Minstrel.  (Murray, who plays a weatherman, expresses surprise when she tells him the author of the lines: “I just thought that was Willard Scott.”)  Outraged politicians occasionally recite Scott’s lines from Marmion—“O, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practise to deceive!”—but invariably attribute them to Shakespeare.

Why is Scott so forgotten?  The scholar Ian Duncan explains that he “tell[s his] students: everybody loves Jane Austen.  The real challenge is to say you love Walter Scott.” [2] And a challenge it can be, for a handful of reasons, including Scott’s convoluted plots, digressive narratives, and heavy use of dialect.  But perhaps what deters most general readers from picking up a Scott novel is precisely why most readers of this website would be interested in doing so: the novels draw their dramatic intensity from specific historical events—and very often these events are rebellions, riots, invasions, and other crises of the eighteenth century.

It’s only a slight overstatement to say that the Waverley Novels can be understood as a fictional history of the eighteenth century, albeit from a distinctively Scottish perspective rather than the England-centric model to which most readers may be accustomed.  Scott himself explained that his first three novels were meant “to illustrate the manners of Scotland at three different periods. Waverley embraced the age of our fathers, Guy Mannering that of our own youth, and the Antiquary refers to the last ten years of the eighteenth century.”  Scott’s interest in the eighteenth century continued after this initial trilogy and he would return to Jacobite intrigue.  His fourth novel, The Black Dwarf, involves James III’s failed effort to invade Britain in 1708; the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715 lurks in the shadows of Rob Roy; and Redgauntlet concerns a fictional aborted Jacobite conspiracy of the 1760s (and, unlike his other novels, is told in the very eighteenth-century epistolary style).  But Scott wasn’t exclusively a chronicler of various Jacobite failures.  The historical event behind The Heart of Midlothian is the more obscure 1736 Porteous Riots in Edinburgh, and The Bride of Lammermoor depicts the contrasting consequences of the Act of Union for two Scottish families.  (In the original edition of The Bride of Lammermoor, published in 1819, Scott set the action around the time of the Glorious Revolution.)  “The Highland Widow” and “The Two Drovers,” stories from Chronicles of the Canongate, portray Scottish characters struggling to reconcile their beliefs and customs with their nation’s union with England; the third and longest tale, “The Surgeon’s Daughter,” revolves around characters’ attempts to find fortune in India in the late-1700s.

Scott’s eighteenth-century résumé expands if you follow the lead of many scholars and broaden the timeline to include the Restoration.  Old Mortality concerns the Killing Time of the late 1600s, when Scottish Covenanters clashed with the government of Charles II; The Pirate is set in the Scottish islands of 1689 (and contains countless references to John Dryden and Restoration theater); and the Popish Plot is a major plot device in Peveril of the Peak.  These settings and events afforded Scott opportunities to explore his favorite themes, including the contentious and often violent transition from one set of laws and traditions to another, whether it be the last gasps of Highland feudalism in Waverley or efforts to reform the Northern Isles in The Pirate.

Although I have been emphasizing Scott’s interest in eighteenth-century subject matter, his interest in the period extends beyond that.  He was informed by eighteenth-century thinkers, particularly Edmund Burke and Adam Smith, and devoted much of his career to the study of eighteenth-century poets and novelists.  He published editions of John Dryden and Jonathan Swift, for which he also wrote biographies; and he was involved in an early attempt to canonize the British novel, contributing biographies of Daniel Defoe, Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Horace Walpole, and others to Ballantyne’s Novelists’ Library.

I don’t expect Walter Scott’s novels to be re-imagined to include kilt-wearing vampires any time soon.  But I am confident that readers interested in the eighteenth century would be drawn to Scott’s representations and interpretations of what he recognized as a tumultuous and exuberant age.

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Notes

[1]   My point about Scott’s lack of an audience pertains to general readers; among scholars, he has been enjoying a revival for some time.  Edinburgh University Press recently completed its new scholarly editions of the novels and has begun work on editions of the poems.  This is in addition to the many scholarly books and articles about Scott’s work that have been published in the last two decades.

[2]  Approaches to Teaching Scott’s Waverley Novels, 19.