Theme: walter scott is the founder of historical novels content

Financial Success

The economic success of his works enabled Scott to enter the printing business of his school friend James Ballantyne in 1805, and later to found a publishing house with the Ballantyne brothers, each as a silent partner. There his works were printed and occasionally published. A lavish, hospitable and generous lifestyle, but above all the expansion and furnishing of Abbotsford swallowed up vast sums of money and led to Scott’s need for more and more money, despite the considerable sales figures of his books. He demanded and received considerable advances from his current publisher Archibald Constable and also used the printing works of which he was a co-owner to borrow money and make large profits.
Scott could have largely freed himself from this situation through bankruptcy proceedings with subsequent discharge of residual debt (Abbotsford already belonged to his son Walter at this time). Scott’s sense of status as a gentleman (bankruptcy would have been a ‘commercial’ solution) and his sense of honour (debts must be paid) stood in the way of this. So he decided, with the consent of the creditors, to make a Trust Deed, a deed based on an out-of-court settlement, whereby his remaining and future assets were placed under the control of the creditors and he undertook to pay off the debts. Scott faithfully observed this. If he had been a very productive writer before, he now wrote non-stop, ruining his health in the process. At his death, the debt was largely paid off; a few years later, it was completely paid off by the sale of his remaining work rights.
In his final years, Scott’s health was failing, and on 29 October 1831, in a vain search for improvement, he set off on a voyage to Malta and Naples on board HMS Barham, a frigate put at his disposal by the Admiralty.
CHAPTER II. The emergence of the historical novel
1.1.List of references
As Georg Lukács argues convincingly in The Historical Novel, this genre emerges with Scott at this time. There had been novels with historical themes in the 17th and 18th centuries, but their characters and plots were taken from the time of the authors, who did not yet grasp their own epoch as historical. Scott’s novels introduce a new sense of history to the English realist novel tradition.
While Scott neither creates psychologically profound individuals nor reaches the level of the emerging bourgeois novel, he vividly embodies for the first time historical-social types. His main characters’ conflicts give artistic expression to social crises. The task of the protagonists is to find neutral ground on which the opponents can coexist. The main characters are usually tied to both camps. Pointing out a middle path is typical of Scott’s novels, and this is how his political conservatism is expressed.
For Scott, outstanding historical figures are representatives of a movement that encompasses large sections of the people. This passionate character unites various sides of this movement and embodies the aspirations of the people. Through Scott’s plot, readers understand how the crisis arose, how the division of the nation came about. It is against this background that the historical hero appears. The broad panorama of social struggles illuminates, as Lukács writes, how a particular time produces an heroic person, whose task it becomes to solve historically specific problems. These leaders, directly linked to the people, often overshadow the main characters. Historical authenticity is achieved through condensed dramatic events and the collision of opposites.
By interweaving personal fates of people with historical upheavals, Scott’s narrative is never abstract. Ruptures run between generations, between friends and affect them deeply in their personal lives. Scott’s great strength lies in the credible narration of human relationships in the context of their historical age.
C lass struggles in feudal times – Ivanhoe
With Ivanhoe, Scott reaches far back into history. The novel is set around 1194, when the Norman Richard the Lionheart, King of England, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, returns to England from his various adventures in the Crusades and from prisons in Austria and Germany. The Anglo-Saxon Ivanhoe, loyal knight in Richard’s army, also appears in England in disguise.
The central historical conflict of the novel is between the Anglo-Saxons of England and the Norman conquerors. The people are largely Anglo-Saxon, the feudal upper class are Norman. Parts of the Anglo-Saxon nobility, deprived of political and material power, still retain some aristocratic privileges and form the ideological and political centre of Anglo-Saxon national resistance to the Normans. Yet Scott shows how parts of the Anglo-Saxon nobility sink into apathy, while others await the opportunity to reach a compromise with the more moderate sections of the Norman nobility, which Richard the Lionheart represents.When Ivanhoe, the title character and also a supporter of this compromise, disappears from the novel’s plot for some time and is overshadowed by secondary characters, this formal structure illuminates the historical-political reference to an absent compromise. The characters who overshadow Ivanhoe include his father, the Anglo-Saxon nobleman Cedric, unflinchingly insisting on anti-Norman positions, who even disinherits Ivanhoe because of his allegiance to Richard’s army, as well as his serfs, Gurth and Wamba.
Above all, however, this includes the leader of the armed resistance against Norman rule, the legendary Robin Hood. The true heroism with which the historical antagonisms are contested comes, with few exceptions, from “below”.
The folk figures are depicted with great vitality and nuance, while the antagonists tend to be stereotypes with little development. But neither does Ivanhoe change. Isaac the Jew is also stereotyped, although the same cannot be said of his daughter Rebecca, who captures the reader’s heart. Letters to Scott complained that Ivanhoe does not marry Rebecca at the end, but the comparatively pale Anglo-Saxon Rowenta. The author rejected such an ending as historically indefensible.
Scott proves himself here once again to be a defender of the middle road. The future belongs to Ivanhoe, knight in the service of the moderate Norman Richard the Lionheart and son of the anti-Norman Anglo-Saxon Cedric. His marriage to Rowenta points to this middle ground.
Scott, in depicting historical conflict in the lives of the people, shows the energies ignited in the people by such crises. Consciously or unconsciously, as Georg Lukács notes, the experience of the French Revolution is in the background.
The defeat of clan-based society – Rob Roy
Published in 1817, this novel is, along with Ivanhoe, among Scott’s most famous. Written in 1816, practically 100 years after the events it describes – the first Jacobite uprising of 1715 – the aim of the Jacobite uprisings was to restore the Catholic Stuart dynasty and Scottish independence. At the same time, Scott sketches the Gaelic-speaking Highland Scots as still living in clans, especially in the character of Rob Roy MacGregor. In this character, Scott creates a genuine folk hero with a passionate humanity that lends heroic traits to this clan society. Rob Roy is nevertheless an individualised character, initially in disguise, a constant presence and also a benchmark of heroism in this novel. Not only is he a centre of passion in the novel, his language is deeply poetic. In this way the reader experiences the failure of the rising and the defeat of clan society as a tragic event.
Typically for Scott, Rob Roy is not the novel’s main character. That is the narrator Frank Osbaldistone, son of a London merchant who refuses to join his father’s successful business and is sent to live with his uncle in Northumberland, on the border with Scotland. Instead of him, cousin Rashleigh enters the business. When the latter steals money and disappears with it to Scotland, Frank follows him and so meets MacGregor.
This English narrator takes the neutral place, the common ground – Osbaldistone’s family lives on the Scottish border. At the end of the plot he marries his Catholic cousin, Diana Vernon, who is closely associated with the Jacobins, thereby achieving the union between Presbyterians and Catholics envisaged by Scott. Vernon is a confident woman as is the indomitable Helen MacGregor. Both are highly intelligent people who are in complete command of their scenes.
It is also important that Scott writes his extensive dialogue scenes in Scots dialect. This establishes a bond between characters and Scottish readers. Before him Robert Burns had also written in the vernacular. To this day, this dialect establishes identification with ordinary Scots, as underlined by the two Scottish Man Booker prize winners (James Kelman and Douglas Stuart). Scott even ventures into Gaelic, translating these short expressions for the reader. Scott’s numerous annotations are culturally and historically enlightening.
Class and ethnic conflict – The Heart of Midlothian
The novel following Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, is set over 20 years later, in 1736/37. Midlothian is an historic county with Edinburgh as its capital; the Heart of Midlothian, however, is its prison. The novel opens with the Porteous riots. Porteous, Captain of the City Watch ordered his men to bloodily suppress a riot during a public execution in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh in April 1736. He was lynched by the angry crowd for killing innocent civilians.
As Arnold Kettle has noted, Scott unfolds a large social spectrum here, ranging from the urban underworld to the Queen. At the centre is Jeanie Deans, from a rural, puritan background who speaks in Lowland Scots. This young peasant woman is perhaps Scott’s greatest female character. Her unmarried sister Effie is accused of infanticide. Merely keeping a pregnancy secret was punishable by death under Scottish law at the time. Forced to conceal the birth to protect her father, Effie insists that she has not harmed the new-born. Despite great empathy for her sister’s fate, Jeanie’s puritan conscience forbids her to commit perjury that could save her sister. This is simply historically true and not modernised. Effie is sentenced to death and the penniless Jeanie sets off for London to seek a pardon from the Queen.
The trial is the central event, revealing clashing values and worlds, the conflict between David Dean’s old rural world and the world of the modern money centred city. Jeanie’s struggle to save her sister reveals her deep humanity and courage. It shows that in crisis situations a heroism can burst forth in ordinary people that is not visible in everyday life and of which people themselves are often not even aware. She proves what strength and heroism there is in the people when the situation calls for it, as it happens time and again in history. Scott brings history to life with such a portrayal of human resilience in a specific historical situation.
Scott’s hallmark is depicting personal experience as part of history. Readers encounter an outraged people in the Porteous Riots. Scott conveys the genuine conflict between the people and the guards, as well as the bitter hostility of the Scots towards the English state. The events clearly involve more than seduction and rescue.
The second half of the novel is less successful, as Scott depicts the world not from the peasants’ point of view, but from that of the romanticised landowner, precluding realism. Parallel to the central conflict between city and country runs that between Scotland and England. Scott’s Edinburgh is not a random setting, but a Scottish city in a concrete historical situation.
Scott’s characters are never outside their time. He reflects the complex relationship between personal and social forces in a person’s life. With his portrayal of historically specific circumstances and the vitality of his ordinary people, Scott prepares the ground for Dickens. Dickens, who came from the impoverished petty bourgeoisie, would a little later make the ordinary people of London the heroes and heroines of his novels.
Sir Walter Scott is one of the greatest novelists of the world literature. He is popularly known as historical novelist. Most of his novels are historical in the sense that they deal with historical events and characters. It is he who showed his interest in the past and developed an almost a new genre, the historical novel. For this reason he is called as the father of historical novel. In this field his contribution is memorable and notable.
Before Scott few novelists tried to write historical fiction. None of these writers possessed any feeling for historical realism. It is Scott who combined the elements of real life with elements of wonder from old romance. His first novel Waverley deals with the ancient Scottish manners. Guy Mannering and the Antiquary also deal with the past. Old Morality presents the picture of the trouble times of Charles II. It is a historical monument of the finest pictures of the past, its men, its ideas and manners. In Ivanhoe the real picture of the Middle Ages appears. In all these novels we find the essence of realism.
Scott wrote near about thirty novels. In these novels he presented the past history of Scotland, France and England. But all these novels have history only as a background. His treatment of history is not entirely accurate. He often takes liberties with facts and alters them. He blends facts and fiction and history and romance in a wonderful unity. Not only this but we find Gothic elements in his novels. As we know that historical novel had its origin in the Gothic Romance. But in giving it a new orientation Scott did not remove its original traits. That is why in his novels we get ghost, legend, omen, disaster, wonder and dream.
Sir Walter Scott's novels cover a wide range of action. They are concerned with public interests. Due to this in his novels the element of love is generally pale and feeble. The history of one thousand years finds expression in Scott's novels. In Count Robert of Paris the 11th century has been presented. Twelfth century finds its expression in The Talisman and Ivanhoe. In Castle Dangerous we get the 14th century and in Fair Maid of Perth the 15th century. The Monastery and Kenilworth deal with the 16th century and Old Morality with the 17th century. The 18th and the 19th centuries also find their expression in his novels. All the characters of the past start into life again. No other novelist in England approaches Scott in the scope of his narrative.
Scott was the first novelist to recreate the past. He did not make history a record of dry facts. He made it a suitable stage on which men and women played their roles. He could draw his characters directly from the history of particular phases. They are living characters. They are both types and individuals. They are fine pieces of imaginative recreation. We find a large number of characters in his novels. But it is astonishing that Scott never suffers from repetition.
It has been pointed out above that Scott created historical realism. To do it he employed proper language. To create an illusion of the past he used a rhythmic and archaic language. In his use of the Scottish vernacular Scott is exceedingly natural and vivacious. Those who showed their interest in the historical novel became Scott's followers.
Thus Sir Walter Scott is a great writer of historical novels. He is rightly called the father of historical novels. As a historical novelist he is higher than any other novelist.