THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

might be attempted for my own country, of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for
Ireland — something which might introduce her natives to those of her sister kingdom in a more favourable light
than they had been placed hitherto’. What Scott managed to achieve for Scotland was a far broader popular
understanding of the distinctive nature of Scottish history and culture, its divisions and contradictions as much as its
vitality. If he can at times be accused of having sanitized much in the Scottish tradition of dissent from English norms
of government and civilization, he did manage to explore and to explain swathes of northern history ignored by
English cultural imperialists and Scottish social progressives alike. In choosing to eschew the Scots dialect, both as a
poet and as a novelist, he rendered his work acceptable to a wide audience likely to be alienated by a merely parochial
self assurance. By varying, examining, and imagining vital aspects of national history he also managed to present an
analysis of a historical process at work. In drawing on, and adapting for the purposes of prose fiction, something of
the method perfected by Shakespeare in his two Henry IV plays, and by intermixing politics
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and comedy with the fictional and the historical, Scott also shaped aspects of Scottish nationhood to suit his own
Unionist and basically Tory ends. He both invented tradition and used it, and if he can be blamed on the one hand
with exploiting an overtly romantic view of Scotland’s past, he must also be allowed to have moved the British novel
towards a new seriousness and a new critical respect. In developing the form beyond the fantastic excesses of the
Gothic and beyond the embryonic shape moulded by Maria Edgeworth, Scott effectively created the nineteenthcentury
historical novel. His creation, fostered by the universal popularity of his work, was to have vast influence over
European and American literature.
When he published Waverley anonymously in 1814 Scott already possessed a high reputation as the best-selling
new poet of his age. Drawing on private research, on his considerable learning, and on memories of his youth spent in
the Scottish Borders, he had published the influential collection of ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3).
The Minstrelsy, which went through five editions by 1812, interspersed previously uncollected folk-poetry with verse
by the editor himself. Scott may have rigorously over-edited some of the original pieces, but his collection was a
triumph of enterprise matched in importance only by Bishop Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). His
antiquarian enthusiasms marked his entire career as a writer and collector, but his early translations of Goethe and of
German ballads, and an attachment to the history of the Borders, served to stimulate a narrative poetry of his own.
The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) recounts the story of a family feud in the sixteenth century, replete with sorcery,
alchemy, and metaphysical intervention. Scott’s energetic, rushing metre, his varying line-length and wandering
stress within the lines, and his highly effective introduction of shorter lyrics or songs into the narrative also mark
three further long and involved verse tales: Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810),
and Rokeby (1813). These poems achieved an immediate celebrity and retained the high esteem of succeeding
Victorian generations, even, despite their length, being learnt by heart. Their glamour has now faded and, despite
occasional patches of still vivid colour, the passage of time has exposed them as threadbare in terms of their subjects
and their style.
Scott’s novels, an epoch-making phenomenon in their own time, retain more of their original impact on readers
despite a relative decline in their critical and popular esteem. His initial, highly successful, impulse to concern himself
with Scottish affairs, and yet always to include the observation and experience of a pragmatic outsider (often an
Englishman), links his first nine novels together. The shape and theme of Waverley, which is concerned with the
gradual, often unwitting, involvement of a commonsensical English gentleman in the Jacobite rising of 1745 and his
exposure to the thrilling but alien culture of the Highland clans, are subtly repeated, with significant variation, in Guy
Mannering (1815), Old Mortality (1816), and Rob Roy (1817). It is cleverly reversed in The Heart of Midlothian
(1818), a tale set in Edinburgh in the period of anti-government
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Porteous riots of 1736, by the device of Jeanie Deans’s epic walk to London to plead for her sister’s life and by the
contrast drawn between the somewhat narrow puritanism of Jeanie and the sophisticated but worldly nature of the
Hanoverian court. In all these novels Scott exposes his protagonists to conflicting ways of seeing, thinking, and
acting; his Scotland is variously divided by factions-by Jacobites and Unionists, Covenanters and Episcopalians,
Highland clansmen and urban Lowlanders-and in each he suggests an evolutionary clash of opposites, the gradual
convergence of which opens up a progressive future. The fissures of Scottish history are allowed to point the way to a
present in which Scotland’s fortunes are inexorably bound up with those of liberal, duller, more homogeneous, shopkeeping
England. The dialectic established by the narrative offers some kind of movement away from a mere
nostalgia for the past and for past manners or factions. As Scott stresses in chapter 72 of Waverley, no European
nation had changed so much between 1715 and 1815: ‘The effects of the insurrection of 1745 ... commenced this