II. REVIEW for http://www.amazon.com

* * * * * (Five Stars):

This Review's Title: WAVERLEY: THE FIRST HISTORICAL NOVEL, THE FIRST POLITICAL NOVEL.
November 8, 2006




Sir Walter Scott began WAVERLEY, his first novel, in 1805. Years later, after his move to his dream home Abbotsford near the border with England, he found his manuscript while rummaging in a fishing tackle box. He then brought the world's first historical novel to a conclusion in 1814. 

Abe Lincoln read Walter Scott. His children entertained their mother re-enacting scenes from the WAVERLEY series of novels. I wonder therefore if Lincoln's "Four score and seven years ago..." does not echo WAVERLEY's sub-title, " 'Tis Sixty Years Since." WAVERLEY is narrated as from 1805, the year it was begun, and for both it and the Gettysburg Address, a reader inevitably starts calculating backwards. What date are we talking about? Ah,1745 for young Edward Waverley. We know (as he does not) what turmoil he is letting himself in for when he rides into the Highlands -- the last hurrah of the legitimate Stuart dynasty. And 1776 for Abe Lincoln meant the Declaration of Independence. In 1745 "auld" Scotland almost disappeared in defeat. In 1776 Hanoverian Britain began its retreat from North America.

Scott tells us in i.1 (p. 5) that in 1745 our ancestors expressed their anger directly, by taking up arms. But in 1805/1814 his generation was more indirect, taking enemies to court.

This very great novel should be read for sheer entertainment, for its characters, for the omnipresent black bears of the Baron of Bradwardine and for its love story. But I suggest that we read it as well as history and geography. Are we up for the sounds of broad Scots language? For a smidgen of Highland Gaelic (which Scott barely knew)? To learn about doch and dorroch and the stirrup-cup? Through hundreds of details of what Scotsmen ate, how they dressed, how beautiful were their mountains and waters near Perth, Walter Scott brought Scotland to life in England and throughout Europe and in the USA.

WAVERLEY makes us take Scotland, the real Scotland of history, seriously. We see its educated Catholic Highlanders sending their children to study in France and Italy. Bonnie Prince Charlie lost only one battle of several, but it was enough to secure Hanoverians their throne. We sense that the transition, however awful, was inevitable from fiercely independent Scotland to an uncomfortable, demoted "North Britain" within a prospering, peaceful United Kingdom of middle-class shopkeepers. Walter Scott makes us ask what if anything  history has to teach us.

Not only is WAVERLEY the first historical novel. It is also the first political novel. We see dimly how a generally dismal set of rulers, the Stuart dynasty, could continue to win men's loyalty to a lost cause. In a later novel, also about Prince Charlie 20 years later, we read of a Scottish family named REDGAUNTLET whose fate was always to be on the losing side. What makes subjects or citizens alike glory in losing for political principle?

Mark Twain wrote as if all Walter Scott cared about were kings and dynasties, knights, beautiful high-born ladies and lost inheritances. But day after day in court in Edinburgh Scott heard argued cases of little people with religious and inherited passions and prejudices, not to mention superstitions. He remembered them all, along with the tales he heard as a boy and the ballads he researched for seven consecutive summers as a  young adult. These little people live again in WAVERLEY and in Scott's 26 other novels as well.

-OOO-

Black Mountain
November 08, 2006
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III. for epinons.com   see  http://www.epinions.com/content_403203001988

Reviewer's Rating of Sir Walter Scott, WAVERLEY * * * * *   FIVE STARS

TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: "Charlie Is My Darling." Why the Scots Idolize their Bonnie Prince.
Sep 14 '07

Pros Showcases the failed 1745 rising which drove oppressed Scots to America. Military might crushes dreams. Cons A slow start giving background. Some Broad lowland Scots dialect. Ending is happy too quickly. The Bottom Line All serious fans of historical novels will read and relish WAVERLEY, which launched that fleet. Understand why the English regarded Scots as savages crying out for cultural genocide. Weep. Laugh.

Full Review

Sir Walter Scott's first novel, WAVERLEY (1814), was also the world's first historical novel. WAVERLEY was, in addition, the first political novel. To a scholar nothing more need be said. He has to read WAVERLEY, simply because it was the first of its literary genre. How many epinions readers of this review read Sir Walter Scott in school? If they did, it was probably IVANHOE, not WAVERLEY. Why should a reader in 2007 root around in the attic for Granddad's calf-bound edition of Scott's first novel? Why? Because WAVERLEY is a joy to read. It is funny, profound, provocative, political, historical, analytical and with many tips by its author on the craft of writing as he perceives it. Some real history anchoring the novel: on July 23, 1745 Charles Edward Stuart, "Bonnie Prince Charlie," and seven companions landed on a small western island of Scotland. He was 24 years old and on Scottish soil for the first time. Empowered by his father King James, "the Old Pretender," Charles Edward raised the royal standard to put the Stuarts back on the throne of the United Kingdom. Highlanders and lowlanders rallied to him. He and his Jacobite cause lost in less than a year. But King George was so frightened of Charles Edward's armed entry into England that he had packed his bags and was ready to retire to Hanover. The victors quickly abolished the long outdated feudal privileges of Highland clan chiefs as well as the parallel but weaker rights of the great Lowland land owners. Retainers were no longer obliged to take up arms at the behest of their chiefs. Old Scotland was finished, for better or for worse. But Walter Scott wanted the old ways to be known and remembered. He therefore wrote WAVERLEY. As a boy and young man Walter Scott (1771 -1832) drank in the history and customs of the Scotland that was no more. He met talkative veterans of the great rising of 1745 - 1746. He heard tales of the earlier pro-Stuart rising of 1715. He determined to bring that time back to life in his novels and poems. Old Scotland was violent, cruel, oppressive but also loyal, chivalrous, hospitable and colorful. Walter Scott in WAVERLEY recreated for his readers the dress, manners, eating habits, religious passions and politics of a time "Sixty Years Since," WAVERLEY's subtitle (the story being conceived as written in 1805). I have read this novel three times in the past 18 months, each time with more pleasure and admiration. Anyone wanting to make a film version of the novel will not lack for descriptions of the messy ways wealthy men took snuff, dressed for battle and attended to their wigs. In Edinburgh at the Prince's brief little court, the ladies argued whether English, Highland Gaelic or Italian were best suited for poetry. What happens to an ordinary person, a detached, dreamy political non-entity, when he is swept up into the coming maelstrom? In the summer of 1745 Young Edward Waverley, utterly unrealistic, romantic, poet, sketcher, rode his horse from an easy, pampered life in England first into the lowlands and later the highlands of Scotland . He was on a holiday from a bought position as a British captain of a troop of soldiers stationed in Scotland. His pro-Government father and pro-Stuart uncle thought a taste of military life would toughen Edward as well as let him do justice to his family's rich tradition of service to King and Country. Victimized by a chain of thefts, tricks and impositions by others, Waverley is censured, resigns his commission and is carried prisoner to Edinburgh. There Prince Charles Edward personally wins the scion of an influential English Jacobite over to the Stuart cause. Edward lightheartedly joins the forces of the Bonnie Prince. With them Edward, dressed as a highland clansman, advances in winter deep into England. He is separated from his Scottish comrades. During the Prince's surprise early victory at Prestonpans, near Edinburgh, Edward had taken prisoner and saved the life of an English Colonel Talbot, who turns out to be a friend of Edward's father. Talbot is also a great friend of both King George and his younger brother, the Duke of Cumberland, who gave the Prince his only -- but decisive -- defeat at Culloden. Through strenuous personal intervention, the Colonel wins a pardon for the alleged deserter Edward. Afterwards young Waverely is reinstated in his civil rights. After the novel's slow start, Edward is first loved by a noble Lowland woman, Rose, while he is smitten by her best friend, the Highlander Flora Mac-Ivor. Flora and her brother Fergus had been orphaned and raised in Rome in the Catholic court-in-exile of Prince Charles Edward's mother. Clan Chief Fergus is a fiery Achilles, a key leader of the rebellion. His motives are mixed. They include both ferocious loyalty to a centuries old Stuart dynasty and personal ambition for power. But Flora is a single-minded even more passionate devotee of the Stuarts. She makes it clear to young Waverley (she is two years his senior) that there is no room for carnal passion in her life until King James is securely on his ancestral throne. In the end Flora, about to join a convent in Paris, blames herself for involving her brother in a losing crusade for a cause which, although clearly right, was impossible to achieve, given the forces arrayed against it and the failure of large numbers of Englishmen to rise in support. As for Edward Waverley: experience makes him grow up quickly. War is not for him. Moreover, he accepts that "the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced" (First Edition, Book III, Ch. 13). Walter Scott wove real incidents from the 1715 and 1745 anti-Hanoverian risings in Scotland into the tapestry of his novel. Fergus MacIvor had his original. So did others. A great comic-heroic success is the Baron of Bradwardine, Rose's father. He asserts his feudal right, after an early victory of Charles Edward (and that Prince only lost once), to loosen the laces of the Prince's shoes. He rejoices in the huge number of sculptured bears adorning his manor of Tully-Veolan. The good baron bores everyone with his long-winded discourses on Roman history and Scottish heraldry but wins all hearts for his gallantry, kindness to his retainers, for his loyalty to his King, love of his daughter and empathy with Edward Waverley. Some contemporary Britons criticized Walter Scott for making Bonnie Prince Charlie more attractive than he really was. Be that as it may, the prince is shown as far more tired, arrogant and flawed and less physically attractive in Scott's novel REDGAUNTLET. In that tale Charles Edward, disguised as a priest, comes to northwest England two decades after his defeat at Culloden to agitate fecklessly for another rising. But men and women alike loved and gave their lives willingly for the young Bonnie Prince. Scott makes us see why. Prince Charlie might have been an American politician, humbly asking for help rather than asserting the divine right of Stuart Kings. He inspired scores of popular airs. According to Jerome Mitchell's THE WALTER SCOTT OPERAS Scott's WAVERLEY inspired at least one opera. That was Franz Friedrich von Holstein's 1876 DIE HOCHLAENDER ("The Highlanders"). As a boy, Holstein had absorbed the world of Walter Scott when his grandfather real aloud to him from all the WAVERLEY novels. Holstein even embedded the old Scottish folk song "Charlie is My Darling" as a motif within the opera. -OOO- Recommended: Yes