Conclusion

Writing in an uncertain age of revolution, historical novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries struggled with both the meaning of history and the shape of the future. Even following Scott’s creation of a tradition of transformation in the Waverley Novels, the motif of breakage and the apparent triumph of commerce remained disquieting. Although Thomas Carlyle argues that a healthy approach to the past is possible, in ...

The Noose Hidden Under Flowers: Marriage and Law in Saint Ronan’s Well

This chapter explores issues of the law on marriage in novels by Sir Walter Scott, focusing on Saint Ronan's Well. In a number of ways, Scott's novels can be viewed as offering a commentary on Scots law and society. Legal themes that emerge from them can indicate more general contemporary legal concerns. This general point has been demonstrated in Bruce Beiderwell's argument that the Waverley novels made an important contribution to general discourse about crime and punishment at a crucial period in the development of new penal strategies and of reform in the criminal law. The chapter argues that the theme of marriage is central to Saint Ronan's Well and shows that the novel offers a harsh critique of aspects of the Scots law on the constitution of marriage and, at another level, of that other union — the political one of Scotland with England.

Authorizing the Novel

Walter Scott’s historical novel achieved unprecedented success, and almost single-handedly propelled the novel as a genre into the literary field. A potent synthesis of history, romance, theory, and antiquarianism, the Waverley Novels rewrote contemporary modes of historical and national romance through a thematic of the heterogeneity of historical time. They answered to a new historical sensibility in a post-Revolutionary era of expanding readership; helped to forge a new British national identity; and were instrumental in reconfiguring literary culture for their time.

The Novelist

Macrone describes the great commercial success of Waverley, and comments on Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, and The Talisman, giving the highest praise to the last. He then discusses the controversy about the authorship of the Waverley Novels, mocking those who favoured the wrong candidates, and laments that one who earned as much money as Scott should have died in debt.