The "Waverley" Phenomenon and Material Imagination

The Waverley Phenomenon and Material Imagination

One, and arguably the most distinctive, feature of Scott explored in nineteenth-century valuation was the repertoire of historical images and character portraits established in the Waverley canon. Scott, as I suspect most of us know already, was an effusive storyteller. His belief in the creative continuity between life, literature, and art began with a career in poetry and ballad writing, where, paying special attention to descriptive imagery in his work, the author won the favor of the reading public in Britain for his energetic and highly-colored representations of historical life and subject-matter. The impetus of his early writing, Scott once explained in a historical note from 1819, was the “conjuring of images through words.” Reminiscing on the process by which by which his literary productions came to fruition, the author explained how “weary with ransacking [my own] barren and bounded imagination [ . . . ] I [ . . .] looked out for some general subject in the huge and boundless field of history [ . . .] bedizened it with coloring [ . . .] ornamented it [ . . .] and invested it with such shade of character as would best [ . . .] present [ . . .] to the reading public a lively and fictitious picture.” In time, this poetic tradition transitioned into a novelistic enterprise. From the din of bagpipes, the history of castle architecture, great halls, wood-beamed taverns and rocky glens, to costumes, countenance, art, objects, furniture, even hair style, a finely-drawn world of historical individuals, stories, and spheres loomed large in the Waverley Novels and catapulted Scott’s distinction in the literary firmament as a pictorial writer. One can venture to guess that this is the prevailing viewpoint taken in T. Wolnoth and J. Hawkesworth’s engraving of the author from 1826. In this work, a lavish gothic border with ivy and escutcheons depicting scenes from the poetry of Scott ornament his half-portrait. It extrapolates from the claim made by literary critic and Whig reformist, Lord Francis Jeffrey, that the Minstrel of the North was the most brilliant literary portraitist of his age, one who’s “animated [and] engaging exposition [. . .] of the manners and state of past society” presented to readers the same “truth and vivacity of coloring” as paint to canvas. 

This pictorialism, compounded by the sheer exhaustiveness of Scott’s literary imagination, gave rise to more concrete visions of historical spheres and subject-matter in Britain. Scott wrote a staggering 27 novels in 18 years – not mention 9 metrical romances, 5 editions of collected balladry, and over a 50 book projects in history and prose fiction. With topics ranging chronologically from ancient Byzantium all the way to modern European history his literary outpouring offered artists and craftsmen a wealth of original material. The engraving A Dream of the Waverley Novels illustrates the pictorial repertory associated with this body of works. Here we see historical characters, period clothing, and landscape – each taken from a unique chapter in the literary corpus of Scott – coalesce in the space of a single page. Looking at the composition, the expression “Great Scott” certainly comes to mind, but what I find intriguing about this print is the letterpress which accompanies it. The writer posits that “having read the admirable stories [ . . .] to the many volumes of Scott’s novels [ . . .] the viewer will have no difficulty in identifying all the characters or figures represented.” He continues, “we shall leave the reader to their unassisted contemplation [ . . .] for all that concerns the subjects and incidents [ . . .] associated with the Author of Waverley are long to be remembered and [therefore] recognizable even at a glance.”

Recognizable even at glace: this is, of course, merely one take on Scott. But it elucidates the component to his literary celebrity which nineteenth-century readers and reviewers of Scott and the Waverley Novels enthused over and expatiated on in their critical valuation of the author, many times over. According to historian Thomas Carlyle the “singular vividness” with which Scott wrote about the historical past ranked him among the chief wonders of the western world. His force and clarity of description, Carlyle argued, dazzled readers where previous modes of historiographical expression and novel-writing in the English literary tradition failed. In his Memorials of 1856 Lord Henry Cockburn similarly described the appeal of Scott as a “graphic force and universal sensation.” Extolling his ability to bring history out of obscurity and into popular consciousness through writing English essayist and literary critic William Hazlitt labelled the author the Amanuensis of History. In a retrospective essay on the Author of Waverley published in 1825 he asserted: “this author has only to describe [ . . .] and everywhere [his material] speak[s], breathe[s], and lives[s] again [ . . .] Whatever [. . .] he transfers to the pages of his fiction we [ . . .] see, hear, and feel [ . . .] with untired interest.” It’s worth noting that while Carlyle, Cockburn, and Hazlitt were referencing the extraordinary impact that Scott’s writing had on the nineteenth-century reading public, implicit to its mass cultural response were the varieties of artistic adaptation, image-making, and media consumption derived from it. This is exactly what is shown in the image before you. Taken from the same issue of the Illustrated London News on the Twelfth of August 1871, this illustration showcases an exhibition of portraits and material artefacts associated with Scott and the Waverley Novels, which featured as a point attraction in the National Festival in Celebration of the Centenary of the Birth of Sir Walter Scott at the Royal Academy in Edinburgh.

Evidence for the vigor and vitality Scott bestowed to the subjects and subject-matter of his fiction can be seen in other illustrative works from the Scott Centenary too. This is one of my personal favorites, an oil painting by Victorian genre artist Charles Hunt. Entitled Ivanhoe, the image, like the previous engravings shown, signals Scott’s capacity to bring history and its visual and material aspects into view.  Ivanhoe, one of the most critically acclaimed of the Waverley Novels in Scott’s day, is shown here as a children’s game, thus reviving the contention of one nineteenth-century literary critic for the Christian Observer who, in 1832, asserted that “the images and recollections [drawn up] in the Waverley Novels are now indispensable pieces of furniture [ . . .] in every corner of every home in the British empire.” Hunt would certainly seem to underscore this point in his use of child actors. Common to the painterly depiction of Victorian middle-class life, the ease with which these rosy-cheeked figures play out a scene from one of the Waverley Novels clues us into the nineteenth-century familiarity with Scott. Importantly, Hunt associates Ivanhoe with a domestic interior, thus showcasing the extent to which the book and many of the Waverley Novels saturated public and private consciousness as well as the visual and material complexion of things in everyday life. At centre we see two boys re-enact the famed tournament scene from the novel. Ivanhoe, a youth dressed in old infantry uniform and feathered helmet, sits staunchly astride a makeshift steed, while his adversary, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, a sweet-faced boy with unkempt hair and painted moustache topples backward off an upturned chair.

Moving beyond the literary associations depicted in this particular figural arrangement, we might also consider the significance of the discarded book pictured in the lower foreground of the painting Ivanhoe and the two reading boys, located at right. In possession of what we can assume are two small, feasibly abridged, juvenile, or perhaps even castoff adult versions of the novel Ivanhoe, these figures reference the currency of Scott within the mass-cultural circuit of print in the nineteenth-century in Britain. As Richard J. Hill has shown, the repertoire of historical images and character portraits established in the Waverley canon was eagerly taken up within the commercial movements of this industry. As early as the late 1810s and early 1820s the poetry and novels of Scott began to appear in collected, tranched-down, and illustrated editions. This placed Scott in the hands of an ever-widening literary audience, middling to monarchical. 

This leads into another point of discussion, separate but related to the pictorialism of Scott’s writing. Further to the nineteenth-century valuation of Scott was a keen public interest in getting to know the visual and material foundations upon which Waverley Novels were authored. Who was the man behind such “rich and varied [. . .] graphical productions,” questioned London Magazine in a review of the Pirate in 1822. To what “external imagery or machinery” did their author-creator turn to place his “effective compilation of material” so vividly before the eyes? We might recall that, prior to 1827, all of the fictional works of Scott, aside from his metrical romances, were simply known as the fictional works of the Author of Waverley. The question of Scott’s authorship, and, by extension, the origins of the Waverley Novels, thus played a role in cementing his celebrity. To the reading public, the Author of Waverley wasn’t just a literary worthy. He was the Great Unknown, a kind of romantic virtuoso and creative well-spring hidden from the world at large, but tantalizingly, ever-increasingly on the verge of public discovery. The images and newspaper clippings shown here represent the currency of this thread across nineteenth-century discourse. In particular, the satirical print located at center pokes fun at the rampant interest in the figure of the Great Unknown. In this print, a caricatured version of the Author of Waverley does battle over the biographical rights of Napoleon Bonaparte with the Duke of Wellington, the victorious commander of the British-led Allied army at Waterloo. His juxtaposition with two of the most famed and inquired after personalities of the day in Britain here thus conveys his status as a cultural mainstay. Further to the right, in a frontispiece engraving for the 1825 publication Illustrations of the Author of Waverley: Being Notices and Anecdotes of Character, Scenes, and Incidents Described in His Work we see a similarly comic but incisive take on the anonymity of the author. Located beneath the half portrait of a partially concealed figure of the Great Unknown a Latin inscription by Tacitus reads “that which is unseen, shines the brighter.” Aware of the promotional value of anonymity, Scott played in to the public interest in his figure, where, using a stratagem of carefully constructed displays of material self-fashioning and public performance, he advertised his link to the Waverley Novels and, at the same, obfuscated it in myriad ways. This excited the curiosity and interest of nineteenth-century readers in Britain and, in time, became a prominent point of focus in the media ecology which pictorialized his legacy.

To visit Abbotsford, therefore, was to gain access to the world Scott recreated through literature. The home became a popular tourist destination in Britain and a literary landmark well before Scott admitted authorship of the Waverley Novels in 1827. People found their way via coach and paddle steamer, but increasingly, through the mediation of books, illustration, and travel literature they visited Abbotsford virtually, through variant forms of printed media. This is what is shown in the collection of early nineteenth-century travel publications pictured at left, and, to the right, a series of stereoscopic images made and marketed by Scottish photographer George Washington Wilson. Moving left to right, we see photographic images of the Abbotsford entrance hall, the study of Scott, the Abbotsford Library, and the Armory. 

In time, the signification of Abbotsford became synonymous with the national historical inflection of Scott and the Waverley Novels too. This became key to the author’s reception in the 1820s onward as his literary life and practice were gradually and, at length, more intricately bound to the industry of Scottish cultural heritage. Early in his literary career Scott popularized the regional landscape and historical settings of Scotland with his narrative poems such as Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and Lady of the Lake (1810). With other early written works such as Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border and The Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland he revitalized Scottish antiquarianism as well as the fading oral traditions of Scottish folklore and balladry. The graphic style of writing which typified the literary output of Scott not only glamorized real-life localities and communities across Scotland, but also charged them with enough human drama and visual appeal as to contribute to a major growth in the practice of Scottish landscape art, fashion, and literary tourism. Moreover, following his recovery of the Scottish Regalia and high profile role in the visit of George IV to Scotland in 1822, these activities all but confirmed popular suspicion in Britain that Scott was in fact the Author of Waverley. His physical and cerebral existence at Abbotsford house mirrored the delineative aspects of Scottish life, language, events, characters, and scenery in the Waverley Novels, making him, in the words of Edinburgh publisher and politician Adam Black a patrimonial figure of cultural Scottishness. 

William Home Lizars captures this sense of the nation-forming authority figure in Scott in his decorative etching from 1840, entitled Abbotsford. Here we see pastoral images of Melrose and Dryburgh Abbey – two purportedly unmissable destinations in what Scott called the classic ground of his native homeland – linked in an elaborate pictorial tryptic with Abbotsford house, thus indicating the import of Scott as part of a network of cultural and scopic productions reifying Scottish cultural heritage. Correspondingly, in an 1849 oil painting created by Scottish artist Thomas Faed, an imaginary gathering of Scottish luminaries – from James Hogg, Sir David Wilkie, Adam Ferguson, John Wilson, Henry Mackenzie, and Lord Byron – cluster around the seated figure of the Author Waverley in the centre of the library at Abbottsford house. These figures of literary, historical, and artistic repute appear to confer with the patriarch of Scottish national sentiment, providing a graphic equivalent to the description of John Gibson Lockhart, who, writing in 1837, asserted “whoever had Scottish blood in him, gentle or simple, felt it move more rapidly through his veins when [ . . .] in the presence of Scott.” Abbotsford became the place to pay tribute to this national historical phenomenon, and, importantly, partake in the process of national historical protection and perpetuation Scott championed there through literature.

A scan of the art and objectscape of Abbotsford, however brief, reveals a national ethos imbricated in the network of literary and historical associations there. This was by Scott’s design, but over the years it became an integral component to the nineteenth-century construction of his legacy.  Images and illustrations of the Scottish collection of art and architecture, personalia, books, and curios at Abbotsford pervaded a variety of artistic genres throughout visual and material culture.  The exterior of the house, for instance, appealed to nineteenth-century viewers as a recycling of Scottish heritage items from the Roman occupation in the first century A.D., to the Middle Ages, Reformation, and early modern era. A two-story crenelated gateway and portcullis modelled defensive architecture of the Scottish Border, while notched gable ends, bartizans, clustered chimneys, and whinstone replicated identifiable features of Fyvie, Lauriston, Buchanan, Dunrobin, and Linlithgow castle. Other visible nods to Scottish history included gargoyles and spolia salvaged from recently demolished architectural landmarks in the Border vicinity. Detailed consideration of this material is provided in a series of illustrated wood engravings, produced by the London firm of English printmaker William Dickes. In the image shown at left we see an 1842 illustration of the door of the old Tolbooth of Edinburgh, which adorned a second-story story wall of the eastern facing façade of Abbotsford. This display drew the attention of many, not only for its peculiar placement on the outer reaches of the home, but also for the parallels it bore to the historical content of Scott’s seventh novel The Heart of Midlothian (1818). In another illustration from 1842, shown at right, we see a garden well Scott built out of salvaged bits and pieces from the ruins of Melrose Abbey. The resonance of this work to nineteenth-century viewers lay in its connection to the setting of Scott’s 1805 narrative poem, Lay of the Last Minstrel. 

Meanwhile, the interior of Abbotsford house functioned as a purpose-built space for national historical exhibition too. During Scott’s lifetime, this famously object-laden terrain was pegged by nineteenth-century visitors, both real and virtual, as a museum for living in. In the entrance hall, for instance, Scott installed wood paneling from Dunfermline Abbey, marble floor tiles from the Hebrides, animal skulls, mounts, and pelts from the Scottish Highlands, and a grand fireplace modelled after the Abbots Seat of Melrose Abbey. This was joined by coats of arms and shields celebrating eminent Scottish Border clans, and from floor to ceiling, a riot of antiquarian curiosities including a cast of the skull of Robert the Bruce, medieval torture implements, weaponry, and two semi-circular wood presses made out of the fragments of the pulpit of famed Scottish minister and dissenter Ebenezer Erskine. Other public rooms at Abbotsford house such as the armory, library, and drawing room were similarly themed and structured. Scottish history looked out from its walls, observed one nineteenth-century literary tourist, enveloping the modern visitor and providing a means for engaging with the national historical past, not unlike the historical materiality which instilled the Waverley Novels.

It was by this logic that by 1832 Abbotsford attained an institutional footing in Britain comparable to what we now might call a national historical monument or repository. Enclosed within one space, outside of time, and away from susceptibility to neglect, mismanagement, or ruin, the built environment of the home, in nineteenth-century estimation, offered easy access and cultural longevity to the storied remains of Scottish national history. Synonymous with the literary life and practice of the Author of Waverley, it elicited a discourse about the “proud immortality” Scott conferred to art and material artefacts there through the process of fiction writing. In fact, many nineteenth-century literary devotees and visitors to Abbotsford came with the express purpose of donating Scottish heritage items to Scott and the Abbotsford collection – the hope being that, in addition to seeing the place where the Waverley Novels were planned and penned, they could facilitate in its project. The highland broadsword pictured at the top of the slide shown here was given to Scott by the Celtic Society of Edinburgh in 1826. This was joined by an ornately carved chair given to Scott in 1822 by Scottish antiquarian Joseph Train. The provenance of the piece, according to Train, was linked to the scene of the arrest of William Wallace in Robroyston in 1305. Similarly, one Gabriel Alexander sent to Scott a pair of seventeenth-century thumbscrews associated with the Scottish National Covenant. His reasoning behind such a bizarre and grisly gift, he explained in a letter to Scott in 1819, was the author’s status “best and most legitimate custodier [ . . .] of all that is national.” So important was this conception of the body of art and antiquities at Abbotsford, that when Scott faced bankruptcy in 1826, his creditors decided to allow him to keep the house and its collection within a private trust where revenue was acquired from the proceeds of his writing. Abbotsford and the national historical legacy of Scott were, from then on, inextricably linked in the public eye. The author’s home not only symbolized the success its creator had achieved through writing, but also, the service he performed there, collecting, communicating, and safeguarding Scottish cultural heritage for perpetuity.

In the years following 1832, this desire to pay homage to the literary life and practice of Scott at Abbotsford fell into decline. Illustrative work and material adaptations of the author’s home remained a steady industry in Britain well into the twentieth century, but the practice of making the physical trek to Abbotsford house, touring its halls, and leaving some mark of readerly admiration there for its author-inhabitant retain and care for lessened. This was due to the fact that Scott was dead and the auratic pull which originally instilled the nineteenth-century experience and understanding of the house and grounds there was gone. To commemorate Scott and, in turn, latch on to the cultural capital of his writing through gift-giving, it was determined that a more durable, more publicly accessible testament to collective pride in the author was needed. Not 10 days of after Scott’s death, on the 5th of October 1832, a gathering of roughly 100 intimates, colleagues, friends, and admirers of the author assembled in the hall of the Royal Institution in Edinburgh and formed a formal committee for “the erection of some lasting monument of gratitude and imperishable esteem . . . for one of Scotland’s most honoured sons.”

In closing, it’s this embodiment of the visual and material imagination which comprised and fed into the cultural phenomenon that was Scott, which, I think, makes the Scott Monument such a compelling testimonial and appropriate place to end my lecture this evening. Sitting at the center of the Monument, under its towering canopy of literary and historical detail is the maud shroud figure of Walter Scott. His statue is twice life-life size and carved in white Carrara marble. Despite the colossal frame and costly material with which this statue towers over the common spectator, there is an element of warmth and approachability to the figure of Scott in this particular representation that is unmistakable. The author, who historian Thomas Carlyle once dubbed King of the Romantics sits in an easy, upright posture, comfortably tucked under his Border tartan with one of his trademark canine companions underfoot. With a closed book in hand, it’s not clear whether Scott has just taken his seat or is momentarily interrupted. One way or the other, he looks up from his reading material, a contemplative expression spread across his face. Looking out over the Edinburgh expanse, and, more broadly, the national and historical terrain before him, the seated Author of Waverley reminds us that it is here, amongst the storied vistas and prospects of the Scottish backcloth – a continuum of historical materiality, old world relics, and living songs – where he is most at home. Taking into consideration the varieties of art, image-making, and media consumption looked at this evening, overlaid with this sweeping prospect, we arrive at a version of Scott not unlike the one with which this lecture began. We see an author who’s creative outpouring defies disciplinary barriers. As the letterpress for the 1871 engraving A Dream of the Waverley Novels suggests, we see a “prodigy of fertility” who leaves in his wake a whole world of romantic incarnations, brilliant, borderless, and great.