Waverley and the Problem of History

Tuesday 8th September 2026

Summary of the Talk:

Sutherland began with the curious dating of Waverley. The novel's subtitle refers to “’Tis Sixty Years Since”, while the opening chapter places the narrator in 1805, exactly sixty years after the Jacobite rising of 1745.

This is interesting because the novel was not actually published until 1814, by which point the events of 1745–46 were almost seventy years in the past. Sutherland suggested that the apparent discrepancy, possibly resulting from Scott returning to a manuscript abandoned for several years, nevertheless draws attention to a central problem of the historical novel:

From what moment do we understand history?

The past looks different depending upon the historical moment from which it is viewed. Scott's novel repeatedly moves between 1745, 1805 and 1814, making the reader conscious that history is not simply a fixed sequence of events but something interpreted from the present.

Waverley as a historical tourist

A central argument was that Edward Waverley is deliberately an inadequate guide to history.

Waverley enters the Highlands as an outsider. He is fascinated by Highland culture, clothing, songs and customs, but experiences much of it almost as a romantic spectacle. The particularly striking example is his first appearance in Highland dress, when he looks at himself in a mirror.

Sutherland contrasted this romantic self-image with the reality surrounding him. Waverley can be enjoying the picturesque Highland world while, almost immediately afterwards, encountering the ruins produced by the Hanoverian government's suppression of the Jacobite rising.

His personal adventure therefore risks turning a historical catastrophe into a romantic experience.

This is why the narrator's repeated description of Waverley as “our hero” can be read ironically. Waverley is repeatedly carried along by events — sometimes literally. He becomes ill, injures himself and is physically transported from place to place. Yet he largely escapes the consequences that fall upon others.

The individual versus the many

Sutherland connected Scott's historical fiction with the enormous upheavals of the period between the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

Drawing particularly on Georg Lukács's influential study The Historical Novel, she argued that this period produced a new consciousness of history as a mass experience. Revolution, war, displacement, changing national boundaries and refugee movements made historical change something experienced by whole populations rather than merely by rulers and generals.

This creates a tension within the historical novel.

Literature naturally tends to reduce the many to the one: we experience enormous historical events through the life of an individual protagonist. But that can obscure the experiences of the thousands of people who do not become the hero of the story.

In Waverley, this problem is particularly acute. Waverley survives and ultimately possesses a comfortable life, while the Highland society he has encountered is being dispossessed.

Sutherland's striking formulation was essentially that Waverley's possession is made possible by the dispossession of others.

The Highland Clearances

The discussion then moved from the Jacobite defeat to its longer-term consequences.

Sutherland drew particular attention to Thomas Douglas, 5th Earl of Selkirk, and his Observations on the Present State of the Highlands of Scotland (1805).

Selkirk was an important figure because, unlike the purely romantic observer, he had actually travelled extensively through the Highlands and attempted to understand Highland society. He was also increasingly concerned about the consequences of Highland Clearances and the displacement of communities to make way for sheep farming.

His observations provide a very different perspective from the romanticised Highland world presented in Waverley.

This creates an important tension at the end of Scott's novel. Scott tells us that Scotland has undergone an extraordinary transformation since 1745, including the destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs, the disappearance of Jacobitism and the growth of wealth and commerce.

But Selkirk's work reminds us that these changes had real human consequences.

Progress and dispossession

One of the strongest themes of the lecture was the ambiguity of the word “progress”.

Scott's novels frequently present historical development as a movement from one social condition to another. But Sutherland argued that Scott's representation of progress is full of contradictions.

The destruction of the old Highland social order could be described as modernisation, economic improvement and the movement of Scotland towards the modern state. Yet it also meant the destruction of communities, traditions, relationships with land and ways of life.

The lecture connected this with the emerging discipline of political economy and the use of statistics. Populations could be reduced to numbers and described as “overpopulation”, while the individual human consequences disappeared from view.

Sutherland made the particularly memorable point that numbers can neutralise people, rendering something substantial into something apparently abstract.

The importance of reading against the grain

The lecture ultimately argued that Waverley should not simply be read as a straightforward celebration of the transition from Jacobitism to modern Scotland.

Scott provides readers with enough material to question his own apparent conclusions.

His use of printed sources, oral traditions, songs, antiquarian material and historical references creates a novel containing multiple voices and competing versions of the past. The reader therefore has an opportunity to read the novel “against its grain” — to notice the people and consequences that the main narrative tends to push aside.

This becomes particularly important when reading the novel today.

What might have appeared in the nineteenth century as inevitable historical progress can look very different from the perspective of the twenty-first century.

Selkirk and the consequences of history

A particularly interesting part of the lecture concerned Selkirk's later activities.

His attempt to relocate Highland settlers to Red River in Canada resulted in conflict with the Métis population already living there. Thus even an individual who had become increasingly sympathetic to displaced Highlanders could become involved in another form of colonial displacement.

The point was that history never simply ends.

One act of displacement can create another historical conflict. The people treated as remnants of the past may themselves become agents of a new history.

Scott, Mantel and the historical novel

Sutherland briefly contrasted Scott with Hilary Mantel.

Mantel's Wolf Hall gives extraordinary psychological depth to the historical figure Thomas Cromwell, allowing readers to experience history from inside an individual consciousness.

Scott takes almost the opposite approach with Waverley. His protagonist is deliberately less psychologically substantial. Waverley is opaque, passive and frequently acted upon by circumstances.

Sutherland suggested that this is not necessarily a weakness. Rather, Scott's approach forces us to question the assumption that one person's experience can adequately represent historical experience.

Waverley is a flawed mediator of the past — and the reader is encouraged to recognise that.

The final challenge

The lecture concluded with a reconsideration of what Waverley means to a modern reader.

Scott's novel may have helped create the romantic image of the Highlands that subsequently became central to Scottish cultural identity. Yet the same novel contains material that allows us to question that romanticisation.

The painting of Waverley and Fergus Mac-Ivor in Highland dress, hanging in the restored Baron Bradwardine's home, becomes a symbol of this problem: historical suffering has been transformed into an attractive image and souvenir.

The challenge for the modern reader is therefore not simply to reject Scott, but to read him more critically and more completely.

Sutherland's final point was particularly strong:

What is presented as the solution may turn out to have been the problem.

The discussion afterwards

The questions following the lecture produced several interesting points.

Edinburgh's “philosophical historians”

There was discussion of the influence of eighteenth-century Scottish “philosophical history”, particularly the idea that societies progressed through identifiable stages.

Within this model, Highland society was commonly regarded as being at an earlier stage of development than Lowland Scotland. The implication was that the Highlands would inevitably become more like the Lowlands.

Selkirk became increasingly uncomfortable with the consequences of this way of thinking because he actually went into the Highlands and witnessed what was happening to its people.

Sutherland suggested that Selkirk became increasingly sensitive to the human consequences of the theory of progress, whereas she was less convinced that Scott did so to the same degree.

Did Scott actually know the Highlands?

A particularly useful question concerned Scott's firsthand knowledge.

Sutherland pointed out that Scott had extensive knowledge of Jacobite history and had heard stories from people connected with the Jacobite past. His father had been a writer to the signet and had Jacobite clients, and Scott was exposed to their stories from childhood.

Scott therefore wasn't simply inventing a romantic Highlands from nothing.

There was also a reminder that Scott may have had direct experience of the Highlands much earlier than is sometimes assumed. He reportedly claimed to have been involved in serving an eviction summons on tenants at Invernahavon, probably during the first year of his legal apprenticeship, around 1786.

His later travels, including his lighthouse voyage, provided further firsthand experience.

James Grant and the later afterlife of Scott

Another question raised the possible influence of Waverley on Scott's second cousin James Grant, particularly Grant's later writing about Highland soldiers and military experience.

This opened an interesting possibility: Scott's romantic historical fiction may have influenced later generations of Scottish writers, who subsequently produced much more realistic accounts of Highland military experience.

Sutherland did not attempt to resolve this, but suggested it would merit further discussion.

Points worth mentioning:

1. The “60 years” isn't merely an error

This is probably the most interesting starting point.

The discrepancy between 1745 → 1805 → 1814 becomes a way of thinking about the entire novel. Rather than simply correcting Scott's dating, Sutherland turns the error into evidence that the historical meaning of an event changes according to when we look back at it.

2. Waverley is deliberately a poor historical guide

This is a very useful way of rethinking the novel.

Waverley is not simply Scott's representative of modernity. He is a tourist who repeatedly misunderstands what he is seeing. His romantic Highland experience is occurring alongside the destruction of the society he finds so fascinating.

That makes the reader's position more complicated too.

3. “His possession is their dispossession”

This is arguably the central idea of the lecture.

Waverley's happy ending depends upon the transformation of the society around him. His comfortable future is made possible by the defeat and displacement of the people whose world he has temporarily entered.

That gives the supposedly reassuring ending a much darker dimension.

4. The Clearances become part of the meaning of Waverley

The lecture pushes the reader beyond the Jacobite military defeat itself.

The important question becomes: What happened after 1746?

The destruction of Jacobitism, the weakening of Highland chiefs, economic transformation, sheep farming, emigration and the Clearances become part of the continuing history generated by the events of the novel.

5. Selkirk provides an alternative way of seeing the Highlands

This was particularly valuable.

Scott and Selkirk shared a romantic interest in the Highlands, but Selkirk actually investigated Highland society and became increasingly concerned about what “progress” meant for its inhabitants.

His Observations therefore provides a fascinating document to read alongside Waverley.

6. The lecture is really about how we read Scott now

Although ostensibly about Waverley, the lecture is also about Scott's afterlife.

Sutherland isn't simply asking what Scott believed in 1814. She is asking what happens when we, with our own historical knowledge, read Scott.

In 1814, the transformation of the Highlands could be presented as progress. In 2026, we know much more about the consequences of that transformation.

That doesn't mean simply condemning Scott. It means recognising the contradictions already present within his work.