Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Hence (1814). Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Hence was written by Walter Scott. Scott (1771-1832) has fallen considerably in stature since the nineteenth century. Seldom read today, Scott was phenomenally popular during his lifetime and was acclaimed as a poet, novelist, and critic of brilliance. Waverley is the first of Scott’s Waverley sequence of historical novels. Waverley is significant in literary history, but it is more familiar to modern readers than it is actually read. This is as it should be.

Waverley is about the maturation and education of Edward Waverley, the son of a noble English family in the year 1745. Edward is raised by both his father and his uncle. Both love Edward, but the pair are otherwise estranged because to politics: Edward’s father is loyal to the king, and Edward’s uncle is a Jacobite. Once Edward is old enough his father gets him a commission in the army. Edward goes north with the army to Scotland. While there he visits an old family friend, Sir Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine, and befriends Sir Bradwardine’s daughter Rose. Edward is also taken with the Baron’s servant, Davie Gellatley, and his stories about the wild Highlanders. While Edward is staying with the Baron they are visited by one of the men in the service of Fergus Mac Ivor Vich Ian Vohr, one of the great clan chiefs. Curious about the Highlanders, Edard travels north to meet Fergus. After a brief interlude with a notorious bandit, Edward meets Fergus and Fergus’ sister, Flora Mac Ivor. Edward falls in love with Flora, but Flora turns him down; she has only one goal in life, to see Bonnie Prince Charlie on the throne of England, and she feels that Edward deserves complete love from a wife rather than acquiescence and tolerance, which is all she will be able to give a husband until Prince Charlie becomes king. While with the Mac Ivors Edward is relieved of his command in the army by his Colonel because of Edward’s association with traitors (i.e., the Mac Ivors). Angered at this disgrace, Edward tries to go home but is caught and arrested. He is freed by some Highlanders who help him return north and join with the Mac Ivors. Edward enlists with the forces of Prince Charles, who Edward meets and befriends. They march south and defeat an English army in battle, but a later advance to the South ends badly. The Highlanders lose and Prince Charles eventually orders a retreat. At the battle of Culloden many of the Highlanders are killed, and Edward is separated from his friends. He leaves the battlefield and returns to Scotland and thence to England. Edward’s name is eventually cleared, thanks in large part to the largesse of an English colonel whose life Edward had saved, and Edward marries Rose, who he decides is preferable to Flora. Fergus is executed as a traitor, the Jacobite cause is ended, Flora packs herself off to a Catholic convent, and Edward and Rooe live happily ever after.

Waverley was one of the first best-selling novels and made Scott a phenomenon, to the point where his contemporaries and successors in the historical novel genre were inevitably compared with him and competed with him. Waverley is a historically important novel; it essentially created the modern historical novel (see: The Historical Romance). Before Waverley Gothic novels were the vogue, and while they made use of historical trappings their settings or details were not accurate. Waverley changed that, so that the reader came to expect novels to have a specific, identifiable time and place. Scott also exchanged the generic character types and idealized situations of the prose romance for more realistic (if still idealized) characters and settings, and included some (though not many) homely details, of the kind his predecessors never included in their novels. Scott included dialect and regional variations in speech to a far greater degree than previous novelists had. Scott included protagonists who, like Edward, were ordinary people, not heroes out of romances. Via Waverley and the twenty-seven novels in the Waverley series Scott transformed the prose novel from the preserve of women, as it was seen at the time, into a masculine one, and in doing so gave the prose novel a respectability it had not previously possessed. Before Scott prose romances were written in large part by women for women. Scott, via Waverley and the Waverley novels, changed that. However,

The father of the realist historical novel is often said to be Walter Scott; and it was certainly Scott, with his pop-idol-like fame throughout Europe and America, who played a major role in establishing the novel as a genuinely ‘serious’ literary genre. He won for the form a new prestige and authority, so that now, the critics could console themselves, it was no longer just a genre for fantasizing females. His novel Waverley attracted the kind of celebrity that even today’s literary superstars would envy.

Yet behind Waverley – the work of an author who pokes fun at the excesses of Gothic, sentimental, chivalric and female fiction – lies an obscure novel by an Anglo-Irish Gothic author, Charles Maturin’s The Milesian Chief. Behind it more generally lies a hinterland of women writers, so-called national tales, romances, folk material and nationalist antiquarian research from which the reputable Sir Walter derived rather more than he was always prepared to acknowledge. In this sense, the canonical had its roots in the non-canonical, as is often the case. Irish women like Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), Maria Edgeworth and others were intensively involved in fiction about national and cultural identity, and its complex relations to gender, in a way which gives the lie to the prejudice that while the expansively ‘masculine’ Sir Walter wrote novels about the public world, female writers were all as domestically restricted as a Jane Austen.¹

Waverley is not horrible. The nearly unintelligible dialect which ruined Rob Roy is much more tolerable here. After the first, long and uninvolving, section, in which the Waverley family and Edward’s childhood and education are given entirely too much space and attention, the novel slightly picks up the pace, so that the reader at last meets some partially interesting characters and sees the plot begin to move forward. The portrayal of the Scottish culture and language and customs is certainly convincing, even if the amount of detail too often overwhelms what little momentum the novel has. There are moments of bracing harshness, as with the fate of Flora and Edward’s father Richard. And as a sentimental, romanticized look into an interesting historical period, Waverley could be worse.

But it certainly could be a lot better. As historical fiction Waverley is important, but it is only marginally interesting now. Mark Twain put it harshly but well in one of his letters:

Are there in Sir Walter's novels passages done in good English-- which is neither slovenly or involved?

2. Are there passages whose English is not poor and thin and commonplace, but is of a quality above that?

3. Are there passages which burn with real fire--not punk, fox fire, make believe?

5. Has he personages whose acts and talk correspond with their characters as described by him?

7. Has he funny characters that are funny, and humorous passages that are humorous?

8. Does he ever chain the reader's interest, and make him reluctant to lay the book down?

9. Are there pages where he ceases from posing, ceases from admiring the placid flood and flow of his own dilutions, ceases from being artificial, and is for a time, long or short, recognizably sincere and in earnest?

10. Did he know how to write English, and didn't do it because he didn't want to?

11. Did he use the right word only when he couldn't think of another one, or did he run so much to wrong because he didn't know the right one when he saw it?

12. Can you read him? and keep your respect for him? Of course a person could in his day--an era of sentimentality and sloppy romantics--but land! can a body do it today?

Brander, I lie here dying, slowly dying, under the blight of Sir Walter. I have read the first volume of Rob Roy, and as far as chapter XIX of Guy Mannering, and I can no longer hold my head up nor take my nourishment. Lord, it's all so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy; and such wax figures and skeletons and spectres. Interest? Why, it is impossible to feel an interest in these bloodless shams, these milk and water humbugs. And oh, the poverty of the invention! Not poverty in inventing situations, but poverty in furnishing reasons for them. Sir Walter usually gives himself away when he arranges for a Situation elaborates, and elaborates, and elaborates, till if you live to get to it you don't believe in it when it happens.

I can't find the rest of Rob Roy, I can't stand any more Mannering...I do not know just what to do, but I will reflect, and not quit this great study rashly. He was great, in his day, and to his proper audience; and so was God in Jewish times, for that matter, but why should either of them rank high now? And do they? honest, now, do they? Dam'd if I believe it.²

Twain was letting his own spleen flow a bit, as usual, but also as usual he scores some direct hits. The vast forests of verbiage which Scott poured into Waverley do not add to the reader’s enjoyment of the novel. Scott is not a particularly good stylist, and the old-fashioned narrative style is a massive drag on the novel’s pace and the modern reader’s interest. Despite the immense length of the novel, colorful and memorable descriptions, whether of scenery or clothing or battles, are lacking. The dialogue is almost obscenely formal and long-winded and the humor is lumbering and faux-jocular. The people and culture of Scotland are too sentimentalized; the dirt and fear and poverty of that time and place are missing, and the reader too often gets the feeling that life as a poor Scot was a lark. While the awful dialect of Rob Roy is missing, there are more than enough difficult or obscure words, either Scottish or English, to require the modern reader to have a dictionary ready while reading Waverley. (Few modern readers are likely to know, without consulting the Oxford English Dictionary, what “beevor” or “pibroch” or “land louper” mean). The novel builds up to the battles, but Scott describes the battles too quickly and anti-climactically. When Fergus and Waverley quarrel their argument feels forced and unnatural, as if Scott decided that there needed to be conflict between them and manufactured some. And while Flora seems to have been intended as the ideal woman, and many critics have taken her as such, her treatment of Edward is so cold and unfeeling that she is ultimately unlikable. Rose may be childlike and naive, but she is much more appealing than Flora.

Edward Waverley himself is an uncompelling hero. Scott describes him as “warm in his feelings, wild and romantic in his ideas,” but the reader sees little of that. (Scott has a real problem with telling versus showing). He is rather colorless, in fact, and much more acted upon than an actor in Waverley. He draws his sword in battle but kills no one and fights (briefly) only one man, otherwise seeming to float, unaffected, through the battles. He joins the Mac Ivors not by choice but because circumstances put him in that direction. Flora is accurate in her description of him as a domestic man, best suited for a domestic life. Edward is well-suited for the indolent life of a wealthy member of the gentry. But as the protagonist of Waverley he lacks a heroic personality and much sign of an adventuresome spirit. He is an over-educated dreamer and loner at the beginning of the novel, and while he has grown up by story’s end he has not become particularly interesting.

Only Scott completists and those acutely interested in reading the roots of the Historical Romance genre need read Waverley.

Print: Walter Scott, Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Hence. London: Vintage Classics, 2016.

¹ Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 95-96.

² Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters, volume 2 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917), 737-738.