Sir Walter Scott's Waverley at 200 is not yet old

Very many readers assume his books are dusty relics, but there are still plenty of reasons to read him

I think it's the "Sir" that does it. When readers see the name "Sir Walter Scott" on a spine, it's almost as if a miasma of preconceptions and prejudices aristocratic privilege, dull pomposity, archaic conservatism, royal sycophancy, meandering sentences comes swirling up like so many dust motes blown off a book right at the back of an antiquarian bookseller's. If only his works could be published under any of his other names: "The Wizard of the North", "The Great Unknown', or given the 200th anniversary of its publication today, "The Author of Waverley" we might be able to see Scott's astonishing work with properly fresh eyes.

Waverley is not a precursor to the great Victorian novels (or even the mediocre Victorian novels by the likes of Bulwer-Lytton and Harrison Ainsworth) but a development from the form's 18th-century radical roots. In the same year as he published Waverley anonymously, as Walter Scott he had produced an edition of the works of Swift. The opening pages of Waverley have a kind of sly self-consciousness that echoes Sterne's Tristram Shandy more than Trollope's Orley Farm. The reader doesn't jump into the story, but jumps into a story about the story as the narrator ponders other titles and subtitles the book could have had. He parodies gothic, sentimental and fashionable tales (though the book will eventually encompass all these genres). Chapter 24 begins with the provocative question "Shall this be a long or a short chapter? This is a question in which you, gentle reader, have no vote, however much you may be interested in the consequences."

"It is wonderful what genius and adherence to nature will do in spite of all disadvantages. Here is a thing obviously very hastily, and, in many places, very unskilfully written composed, one half of it, in a dialect unintelligible to four-fifths of the reading population of the country relating to a period too recent to be romantic, and too far gone by to be familiar and published, moreover, in a quarter of the island where materials and talents for novel-writing have been supposed to be equally wanting; and yet, by the mere force and truth and vivacity of its colouring, already casting the whole tribe of ordinary novels into the shade, and taking its place rather with the most popular of our modern poems, than with the rubbish of provincial romances. The secret of this success, we take it, is merely that the author is a person of genius".

Continue reading...