Editing Walter Scott (section)

==The novelist==
[[File:Walter Scott Legend of Montrose Illustration.jpg|thumb|upright|''[[A Legend of Montrose]]'', illustration from the 1872 edition]]
{{Further|Historical romance|Romance (literary fiction)}}

===Gothic novel===
Scott was influenced by [[Gothic romance]], and had collaborated in 1801 with [[Matthew Lewis (writer)|'Monk' Lewis]] on ''Tales of Wonder''.<ref name="The Bloomsbury Guide p. 885">''The Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature'', ed. Marion Wynne Davis. New York: Prentice Hall, 1990, p.&nbsp;885.</ref><ref>See also, Robert Letellier, ''Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Novel''. Lewiston, New York:Mellen Press, 1995.</ref>

===Historic romances===
Scott's career as a novelist was attended with uncertainty. The first few chapters of ''Waverley'' were complete by roughly 1805, but the project was abandoned as a result of unfavourable criticism from a friend. Soon after, Scott was asked by the publisher John Murray to posthumously edit and complete the last chapter of an unfinished romance by [[Joseph Strutt (engraver and antiquary)|Joseph Strutt]]. Published in 1808 and set in 15th-century England, ''[[Queenhoo Hall]]'' was not a success due to its archaic language and excessive display of antiquarian information.<ref>Walter Scott, 1889. ''Waverley Novels Centenary Edition Vol. I'', "General Preface, 1829." Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black.</ref> The success of Scott's Highland narrative poem ''The Lady of the Lake'' in 1810 seems to have put it into his head to resume the narrative and have his hero Edward Waverley journey to Scotland. Although ''Waverley'' was announced for publication at that stage, it was again laid by and not resumed until late 1813, then published in 1814.<ref>Walter Scott, 2007. ''Waverley'', ed. P. D. Garside. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 367‒383. {{ISBN|0748605673}}</ref> Only a thousand copies were printed, but the work was an immediate success and 3,000 more were added in two further editions the same year. ''Waverley'' turned out to be the first of 27 novels (eight published in pairs), and by the time the sixth of them, ''Rob Roy'', was published, the print run for the first edition had been increased to 10,000 copies, which became the norm.

Given Scott's established status as a poet and the tentative nature of ''Waverley''{{'}}s emergence, it is not surprising that he followed a common practice in the period and published it anonymously. He continued this until his financial ruin in 1826, the novels mostly appearing as "By the Author of ''Waverley''" (or variants thereof) or as ''Tales of My Landlord''. It is not clear why he chose to do this (no fewer than eleven reasons have been suggested),<ref>{{Cite journal |url=https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol10/iss4/3/ |author=Cooney, Seamus |title=Scott's Anonymity—Its Motive and Consequences |journal=Studies in Scottish Literature |volume=10 |year=1973 |pages=207‒19}}</ref> especially as it was a fairly open secret, but as he himself said, with [[Shylock]], "such was my humour."<ref>Walter Scott, 2012. "General Preface" in ''Introductions and Notes from The Magnum Opus: Waverley to A Legend of the Wars of Montrose'', ed. J. H. Alexander, P. D. Garside and [[Claire Lamont]]. Edinburgh University Press. p. 15. {{ISBN|0748605908}}</ref>
[[File:Sir Walter Scott, Bart. of Abbotsford from "The Scottish Bar Fifty Years Ago".PNG|thumb|left|Sir Walter Scott by [[Robert Scott Moncrieff]]]]
[[File:Bally-burgh Ness = Pointe de Bally-burgh.jpg|thumb|Depicts Edie Ochiletree guiding Sir Arthur and Isabella Wardour through the storm from Chapter 7 of The Antiquary]]
Scott was an almost exclusively historical novelist. Only one of his 27 novels – ''Saint Ronan's Well'' – has a wholly modern setting. The settings of the others range from 1794 in ''[[The Antiquary]]'' back to 1096 or 1097, the time of the [[First Crusade]], in ''[[Count Robert of Paris]]''. Sixteen take place in Scotland. The first nine, from ''Waverley'' (1814) to ''[[A Legend of Montrose]]'' (1819), all have Scottish locations and 17th- or 18th-century settings. Scott was better versed in his material than anyone: he could draw on oral tradition and a wide range of written sources in his ever-expanding library (many of the books rare and some unique copies).<ref>{{Cite journal |author=Levy, Lindsay |title="Long life to thy fame and peace to thy soul": Walter Scott's Collection of Robert Burns's Books and Manuscripts |journal=Scottish Archives |volume=16 |year=2010 |pages=32‒40 (34)}}</ref><ref>Lindsay Levy, 2012. "Was Sir Walter Scott a Bibliomaniac?", in ''From Compositors to Collectors: Essays on Book-Trade History'', ed. John Hinks and Matthew Day. New Castle, Delaware. pp. 309‒321. {{ISBN|9780712358729}}</ref> In general it is these pre-1820 novels that have drawn the attention of modern critics – especially: ''Waverley'', with its presentation of the [[Jacobite rising of 1745|1745 Jacobites]] drawn from the Highland clans as obsolete and fanatical idealists; ''Old Mortality'' (1816) with its treatment of the 1679 Covenanters as fanatical and often ridiculous (prompting [[John Galt (novelist)|John Galt]] to produce a contrasting picture in his novel ''Ringan Gilhaize'' in 1823); ''The Heart of Mid-Lothian'' (1818) with its low-born heroine Jeanie Deans making a perilous journey to Richmond in 1737 to secure a promised royal pardon for her sister, falsely accused of infanticide; and the tragic ''The Bride of Lammermoor'' (1819), with its stern account of a declined aristocratic family, with Edgar Ravenswood and his fiancée as victims of the wife of an upstart lawyer in a time of political power-struggle before the [[Acts of Union 1707|Act of Union]] in 1707.
[[File:Charles Robert Leslie - Sir Walter Scott - Ravenswood and Lucy at the Mermaiden's Well - Bride of Lammermoor.jpg|thumb|"Edgar and Lucie at Mermaiden's well" by Charles Robert Leslie (1886), after Sir Walter Scott's ''Bride of Lammermoor''. Lucie is wearing a [[full plaid]].]]

In 1820, in a bold move, Scott shifted period and location for ''Ivanhoe'' (1820) to 12th-century England. This meant he was dependent on a limited range of sources, all of them printed: he had to bring together material from different centuries and invent an artificial form of speech based on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. The result is as much myth as history, but the novel remains his best-known work, the most likely to be found by the general reader. Eight of the subsequent 17 novels also have medieval settings, though most are set towards the end of the era, for which Scott had a better supply of contemporaneous sources. His familiarity with Elizabethan and 17th-century English literature, partly resulting from editorial work on pamphlets and other minor publications, meant that four of his works set in the England of that period – ''[[Kenilworth (novel)|Kenilworth]]'' (1821), ''[[The Fortunes of Nigel]]'' and ''[[Peveril of the Peak]]'' (1821), and ''[[Woodstock (novel)|Woodstock]]'' (1826) – present rich pictures of their societies. The most generally esteemed of Scott's later fictions, though, are three short stories: a supernatural narrative in Scots, "Wandering Willie's Tale" in ''[[Redgauntlet]]'' (1824), and "The Highland Widow" and "The Two Drovers" in ''[[Chronicles of the Canongate]]'' (1827).

Crucial to Scott's historical thinking is the concept that very different societies can move through the same stages as they develop, and that humanity is basically unchanging, or as he puts it in the first chapter of ''Waverley'' that there are "passions common to men in all stages of society, and which have alike agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corslet of the fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and white dimity waistcoat of the present day." It was one of Scott's main achievements to give lively, detailed pictures of different stages of Scottish, British, and European society while making it clear that for all the differences in form, they took the same human passions as those of his own age.<ref>Graham McMaster, 1981. ''Scott and Society''. Cambridge University Press. Ch. 2 "Scott and the Enlightenment". {{ISBN|9780521237697}}</ref> His readers could therefore appreciate the depiction of an unfamiliar society, while having no difficulty in relating to the characters.

Scott is fascinated by striking moments of transition between stages in societies. [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]], in a discussion of Scott's early novels, found that they derive their "long-sustained ''interest''" from "the contest between the two great moving Principles of social Humanity – religious adherence to the Past and the Ancient, the Desire & the admiration of Permanence, on the one hand; and the Passion for increase of Knowledge, for Truth as the offspring of Reason, in short, the mighty Instincts of ''Progression'' and ''Free-agency'', on the other."<ref>''Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge'', ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford, 1956‒71), 5.34‒35: Coleridge to [[Thomas Allsop]], 8 April 1820.</ref> This is clear, for example, in ''Waverley'', as the hero is captivated by the romantic allure of the Jacobite cause embodied in [[Bonnie Prince Charlie]] and his followers before accepting that the time for such enthusiasms has passed and accepting the more rational, humdrum reality of [[House of Hanover|Hanoverian]] Britain. Another example appears in 15th-century Europe in the yielding of the old chivalric world view of [[Charles the Bold|Charles, Duke of Burgundy]] to the [[Niccolò Machiavelli|Machiavellian]] pragmatism of [[Louis XI of France|Louis XI]]. Scott is intrigued by the way different stages of societal development can exist side by side in one country. When Waverley has his first experience of Highland ways after a raid on his Lowland host's cattle, it "seemed like a dream&nbsp;... that these deeds of violence should be familiar to men's minds, and currently talked of, as falling with the common order of things, and happening daily in the immediate neighbourhood, without his having crossed the seas, and while he was yet in the otherwise well-ordered island of Great Britain."<ref>Walter Scott, 2007. ''Waverley'', ed. P. D. Garside. Edinburgh University Press. Ch. 16, p. 78. {{ISBN|0748605673}}</ref> A more complex version of this comes in Scott's second novel, ''[[Guy Mannering]]'' (1815), which "set in 1781‒2, offers no simple opposition: the Scotland represented in the novel is at once backward and advanced, traditional and modern – it is a country in varied stages of progression in which there are many social subsets, each with its own laws and customs."<ref name=hewitt/>

Scott's process of composition can be traced through the manuscripts (mostly preserved), the more fragmentary sets of proofs, his correspondence, and publisher's records.<ref>For an overview of the process see the revised "General Introduction" to the [[Edinburgh edition of the Waverley novels]] by David Hewitt, first published in 1997 in the ''Guy Mannering'' volume.</ref> He did not create detailed plans for his stories, and the remarks by the figure of "the Author" in the Introductory Epistle to ''The Fortunes of Nigel'' probably reflect his own experience: "I think there is a dæmon who seats himself on the feather of my pen when I begin to write, and leads it astray from the purpose. Characters expand under my hand; incidents are multiplied; the story lingers, while the materials increase – my regular mansion turns out a Gothic anomaly, and the work is complete long before I have attained the point I proposed." Yet the manuscripts rarely show major deletions or changes of direction, and Scott could clearly keep control of his narrative. That was important, for as soon as he had made fair progress with a novel he would start sending batches of manuscript to be copied (to preserve his anonymity), and the copies were sent to be set up in type. (As usual at the time, the compositors would supply the punctuation.) He received proofs, also in batches, and made many changes at that stage, but these were almost always local corrections and enhancements.
[[File:Waverly Tully-Veolan.jpg|alt=Vignette depiction of Tully-Veolan Castle, home of the Bradwardines in Waverley (reputedly based on Craighall Castle, Perthshire). 1832.|thumb|Steel engraving by C. Heath after a drawing by P. De Wint of a scene relating to Scott's novel ''Waverley'', 1832. The University of Edinburgh Collections.]]
As the number of novels grew, they were republished in small collections: ''Novels and Tales'' (1819: ''Waverley'' to ''A Tale of Montrose''); ''Historical Romances'' (1822: ''Ivanhoe'' to ''Kenilworth''); ''Novels and Romances'' (1824 [1823]: ''[[The Pirate (novel)|The Pirate]]'' to ''[[Quentin Durward]]''); and two series of ''Tales and Romances'' (1827: ''St Ronan's Well'' to ''Woodstock''; 1833: ''Chronicles of the Canongate'' to ''[[Castle Dangerous]]''). In his last years Scott marked up interleaved copies of these collected editions to produce a final version of what were now officially the ''Waverley Novels'', often called his 'Magnum Opus' or 'Magnum Edition'. Scott provided each novel with an introduction and notes and made mostly piecemeal adjustments to the text. Issued in 48 smart monthly volumes between June 1829 and May 1833 at a modest price of five shillings (60p) these were an innovative and profitable venture aimed at a wide readership: the print run was an astonishing 30,000.<ref>Jane Millgate, 1987. ''Scott's Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History''. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 21 and 125 note 51. {{ISBN|0852245416}}</ref>

In a "General Preface" to the "Magnum Edition", Scott wrote that one factor prompting him to resume work on the ''Waverley'' manuscript in 1813 had been a desire to do for Scotland what had been done in the fiction of [[Maria Edgeworth]], "whose Irish characters have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of Ireland, that she may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union, than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up [the [[Acts of Union 1801|Act of Union]] of 1801]."<ref>Walter Scott, 2012. "General Preface" in ''Introductions and Notes from The Magnum Opus: Waverley to A Legend of the Wars of Montrose'', ed. J. H. Alexander, P. D. Garside and Claire Lamont. Edinburgh University Press. p. 12. {{ISBN|0748605908}}</ref> Most of Scott's readers were English: with ''Quentin Durward'' (1823) and ''Woodstock'' (1826), for example, some 8000 of the 10,000 copies of the first edition went to London.<ref>Walter Scott, ''Quentin Durward'', ed. J. H. Alexander and G. A. M. Wood (Edinburgh, 2001), 408; Walter Scott, ''Woodstock'', ed. Tony Inglis (Edinburgh, 2009) 445.</ref> In the Scottish novels the lower-class characters normally speak Scots, but Scott is careful not to make the Scots too dense, so that those unfamiliar with it can follow the gist without understanding every word. Some have also argued that although Scott was formally a supporter of the Union with England (and Ireland) his novels have a strong nationalist subtext for readers attuned to that wavelength.<ref>Paul Scott, ''Walter Scott and Scotland'' (Edinburgh, 1981); Julian Meldon D'Arcy, ''Subversive Scott'' (Reykjavik, 2005).</ref>

Scott's new career as a novelist in 1814 did not mean he abandoned poetry. The Waverley Novels contain much original verse, including familiar songs such as "Proud Maisie" from ''The Heart of Mid-Lothian'' (Ch. 41) and "Look not thou on Beauty's charming" from ''The Bride of Lammermoor'' (Ch. 3). In most of the novels Scott preceded each chapter with an epigram or "motto"; most of these are in verse, and many are of his own composition, often imitating other writers such as [[Beaumont and Fletcher]].