Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

the gold, the armour and blazonry, the cross and the sword of chivalry, vanished the heroism and
the splendour, the great crimes and the great virtues, of the Middle Ages.’ 60
Thus, with an account of history as the product of art, if not itself a work of art then
certainly a story, even in these latter days still a ‘narration’, the authors prepare the space
‘between all extremes’, a ‘combination of veracity and exaggeration’ where from time to time a
great figure, ‘a solitary shooting star’, may appear. 61 This star is of course Charles Edward Stuart
and the narrative space created for him would seem to be pretty exactly that which is occupied
by Scott’s historical novels. Here, however, in a looking-glass version of Waverley, we are
required to believe that this territory in fact lies within the realms of truth, that the ‘improbable’
is in fact the most ‘credible’ part of the story.
After the Preface the reader is tipped, in the first chapter of Volume One, straight into the
world of antiquarian forgery. The epigraph to the first chapter, ‘Glasgerion was a king’s own
son’ is ascribed to an ‘Old Ballad’. It was almost certainly the Sobieski Stuarts’ own invention,
but then so were many of Scott’s similarly ascribed quotations. The action then begins, in the
winter of 1831, in ‘Puffinwell’s auction-rooms’ where a sale of dubious and optimistically
attributed if not downright faked paintings is taking place. ‘There is great pleasure in being
cheated at an auction,’ the narrator remarks, ‘and I immediately turned in.’ 62 As the sale goes on
one painting, apparently no better than the rest, attracts considerable interest and fetches ninety
guineas. It is bought by an old man, Dr Beaton, an antiquary, a Scot and a Jacobite. ‘If you talk
of tartan and the prince’ the narrator is informed, ‘he will tell you as many old stories as would
furnish half a dozen series of tales to the author of Waverley.’ 63 Beaton’s tales and the
mysterious picture, floating as they do, explicitly, out of a world of Scott’s fiction and Soho
forgery, open the way for the main story.
In the second part the narrative is propelled by similar forces. In a scene set in a broker’s
shop in Wardour Street the narrator buys back the ‘Black Kist of Glen-Dulochan’, an heirloom of
60 Sobieski, Tales of the Century, p. viii.
61 Sobieski, Tales of the Century, p. ix.
62 Sobieski, Tales of the Century, p. 1.
63 Sobieski, Tales of the Century, p. 10.
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