'', illustration from the 1872 edition
Gothic novel Scott was influenced by
Gothic romance, and had collaborated in 1801 with
'Monk' Lewis on
Tales of Wonder.
Historic romances Scott's career as a novelist was attended with uncertainty. The first few chapters of
Waverley were complete by roughly 1805, but the project was abandoned as a result of unfavourable criticism from a friend. Soon after, Scott was asked by the publisher John Murray to posthumously edit and complete the last chapter of an unfinished romance by
Joseph Strutt. Published in 1808 and set in 15th-century England,
Queenhoo Hall was not a success due to its archaic language and excessive display of antiquarian information. The success of Scott's Highland narrative poem
The Lady of the Lake in 1810 seems to have put it into his head to resume the narrative and have his hero Edward Waverley journey to Scotland. Although
Waverley was announced for publication at that stage, it was again laid by and not resumed until late 1813, then published in 1814. Only a thousand copies were printed, but the work was an immediate success and 3,000 more were added in two further editions the same year.
Waverley turned out to be the first of 27 novels (eight published in pairs), and by the time the sixth of them,
Rob Roy, was published, the print run for the first edition had been increased to 10,000 copies, which became the norm. Given Scott's established status as a poet and the tentative nature of
Waverleys emergence, it is not surprising that he followed a common practice in the period and published it anonymously. He continued this until his financial ruin in 1826, the novels mostly appearing as "By the Author of
Waverley" (or variants thereof) or as
Tales of My Landlord. It is not clear why he chose to do this (no fewer than eleven reasons have been suggested), especially as it was a fairly open secret, but as he himself said, with
Shylock, "such was my humour." Scott was an almost exclusively historical novelist. Only one of his 27 novels – ''Saint Ronan's Well
– has a wholly modern setting. The settings of the others range from 1794 in The Antiquary back to 1096 or 1097, the time of the First Crusade, in Count Robert of Paris. Sixteen take place in Scotland. The first nine, from Waverley
(1814) to A Legend of Montrose (1819), all have Scottish locations and 17th- or 18th-century settings. Scott was better versed in his material than anyone: he could draw on oral tradition and a wide range of written sources in his ever-expanding library (many of the books rare and some unique copies). In general it is these pre-1820 novels that have drawn the attention of modern critics – especially: Waverley
, with its presentation of the 1745 Jacobites drawn from the Highland clans as obsolete and fanatical idealists; Old Mortality
(1816) with its treatment of the 1679 Covenanters as fanatical and often ridiculous (prompting John Galt to produce a contrasting picture in his novel Ringan Gilhaize
in 1823); The Heart of Mid-Lothian
(1818) with its low-born heroine Jeanie Deans making a perilous journey to Richmond in 1737 to secure a promised royal pardon for her sister, falsely accused of infanticide; and the tragic The Bride of Lammermoor'' (1819), with its stern account of a declined aristocratic family, with Edgar Ravenswood and his fiancée as victims of the wife of an upstart lawyer in a time of political power-struggle before the
Act of Union in 1707. . In 1820, in a bold move, Scott shifted period and location for
Ivanhoe (1820) to 12th-century England. This meant he was dependent on a limited range of sources, all of them printed: he had to bring together material from different centuries and invent an artificial form of speech based on
Elizabethan and
Jacobean drama. The result is as much myth as history, but the novel remains his best-known work, the most likely to be found by the general reader. Eight of the subsequent 17 novels also have medieval settings, though most are set towards the end of the era, for which Scott had a better supply of contemporaneous sources. His familiarity with Elizabethan and 17th-century English literature, partly resulting from editorial work on pamphlets and other minor publications, meant that four of his works set in the England of that period –
Kenilworth (1821),
The Fortunes of Nigel and
Peveril of the Peak (1821), and
Woodstock (1826) – present rich pictures of their societies. The most generally esteemed of Scott's later fictions, though, are three short stories: a supernatural narrative in Scots, "Wandering Willie's Tale" in
Redgauntlet (1824), and "The Highland Widow" and "The Two Drovers" in
Chronicles of the Canongate (1827). Crucial to Scott's historical thinking is the concept that very different societies can move through the same stages as they develop, and that humanity is basically unchanging, or as he puts it in the first chapter of
Waverley that there are "passions common to men in all stages of society, and which have alike agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corslet of the fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and white dimity waistcoat of the present day." It was one of Scott's main achievements to give lively, detailed pictures of different stages of Scottish, British, and European society while making it clear that for all the differences in form, they took the same human passions as those of his own age. His readers could therefore appreciate the depiction of an unfamiliar society, while having no difficulty in relating to the characters. Scott is fascinated by striking moments of transition between stages in societies.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a discussion of Scott's early novels, found that they derive their "long-sustained
interest" from "the contest between the two great moving Principles of social Humanity – religious adherence to the Past and the Ancient, the Desire & the admiration of Permanence, on the one hand; and the Passion for increase of Knowledge, for Truth as the offspring of Reason, in short, the mighty Instincts of
Progression and
Free-agency, on the other." This is clear, for example, in
Waverley, as the hero is captivated by the romantic allure of the Jacobite cause embodied in
Bonnie Prince Charlie and his followers before accepting that the time for such enthusiasms has passed and accepting the more rational, humdrum reality of
Hanoverian Britain. Another example appears in 15th-century Europe in the yielding of the old chivalric world view of
Charles, Duke of Burgundy, to the
Machiavellian pragmatism of
Louis XI. Scott is intrigued by the way different stages of societal development can exist side by side in one country. When Waverley has his first experience of Highland ways after a raid on his Lowland host's cattle, it "seemed like a dream ... that these deeds of violence should be familiar to men's minds, and currently talked of, as falling with the common order of things, and happening daily in the immediate neighbourhood, without his having crossed the seas, and while he was yet in the otherwise well-ordered island of Great Britain." A more complex version of this comes in Scott's second novel,
Guy Mannering (1815), which "set in 1781‒2, offers no simple opposition: the Scotland represented in the novel is at once backward and advanced, traditional and modern – it is a country in varied stages of progression in which there are many social subsets, each with its own laws and customs." He did not create detailed plans for his stories, and the remarks by the figure of "the Author" in the Introductory Epistle to
The Fortunes of Nigel probably reflect his own experience: "I think there is a dæmon who seats himself on the feather of my pen when I begin to write, and leads it astray from the purpose. Characters expand under my hand; incidents are multiplied; the story lingers, while the materials increase – my regular mansion turns out a Gothic anomaly, and the work is complete long before I have attained the point I proposed." Yet the manuscripts rarely show major deletions or changes of direction, and Scott could clearly keep control of his narrative. That was important, for as soon as he had made fair progress with a novel he would start sending batches of manuscript to be copied (to preserve his anonymity), and the copies were sent to be set up in type. (As usual at the time, the compositors would supply the punctuation.) He received proofs, also in batches, and made many changes at that stage, but these were almost always local corrections and enhancements. As the number of novels grew, they were republished in small collections:
Novels and Tales (1819:
Waverley to
A Tale of Montrose);
Historical Romances (1822:
Ivanhoe to
Kenilworth);
Novels and Romances (1824 [1823]:
The Pirate to
Quentin Durward); and two series of
Tales and Romances (1827: ''St Ronan's Well
to Woodstock
; 1833: Chronicles of the Canongate
to Castle Dangerous). In his last years Scott marked up interleaved copies of these collected editions to produce a final version of what were now officially the Waverley Novels'', often called his 'Magnum Opus' or 'Magnum Edition'. Scott provided each novel with an introduction and notes and made mostly piecemeal adjustments to the text. Issued in 48 smart monthly volumes between June 1829 and May 1833 at a modest price of five shillings (60p) these were an innovative and profitable venture aimed at a wide readership: the print run was an astonishing 30,000. In a "General Preface" to the "Magnum Edition", Scott wrote that one factor prompting him to resume work on the
Waverley manuscript in 1813 had been a desire to do for Scotland what had been done in the fiction of
Maria Edgeworth, "whose Irish characters have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of Ireland, that she may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union, than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up [the
Act of Union of 1801]." Most of Scott's readers were English: with
Quentin Durward (1823) and
Woodstock (1826), for example, some 8000 of the 10,000 copies of the first edition went to London. In the Scottish novels the lower-class characters normally speak Scots, but Scott is careful not to make the Scots too dense, so that those unfamiliar with it can follow the gist without understanding every word. Some have also argued that although Scott was formally a supporter of the Union with England (and Ireland) his novels have a strong nationalist subtext for readers attuned to that wavelength. Scott's new career as a novelist in 1814 did not mean he abandoned poetry. The Waverley Novels contain much original verse, including familiar songs such as "Proud Maisie" from
The Heart of Mid-Lothian (Ch. 41) and "Look not thou on Beauty's charming" from
The Bride of Lammermoor (Ch. 3). In most of the novels Scott preceded each chapter with an epigram or "motto"; most of these are in verse, and many are of his own composition, often imitating other writers such as
Beaumont and Fletcher. ==Recovery of the Crown Jewels, baronetcy, and ceremonial pageantry==