Walter Scott : Sheriff and Outlaw The Ninth International Conference on Walter Scott Laramie , Wyoming , 2011

Alexander, J. H. The Shirra in the Dock: The Magnum Case In the Magnum, Scott openly confesses to mistakes, defends himself against actual or potential charges, exhibits discomfort on occasion, and is in various ways economical with the truth. The first part of the paper will look at his evident unease with the Magnum as a bookmaking project containing a fair amount of 'buckram'. It will also consider his responses to charges against his practices as a novelist, concentrating on the extent to which romance licence can justify the modification of historical records for the purposes of fiction, especially where historical characters are concerned. The second part of the paper will consider textual procedures where Scott may be open to accusations of bad practice. Quotations from sources have many variants from the originals. Sometimes these are clearly egregious errors, whether in the texts or the accompanying references. But often things are more complicated. There is external evidence that Scott expected old spellings to be modernised. Some changes are made to align quotations with the surrounding Magnum text. Others are apparently intended as stylistic enhancements, or to make things easier for Scott's readers, or (occasionally) as bowdlerisations. The paper will outline the editorial policy adopted by the Edinburgh Edition team in response to these complexities. Anderson, Aantje Breaking the Boundaries of the German Novel: Walter Scott and his German Fans The incredible impact of Scott on German readers in the years up to 1850 extends beyond his novels to his ballads and the Minstrelsy anthologies, and is intimately linked to the European phenomenon of Scotophilia, which connected Scott's popularity to the enthusiasm about Macpherson and his “fake” epic Ossian. But beyond this contribution to the expansion of European cultural “frontiers” to include Scotland, it is Scott’s idea of the historical novel that not only attracted German readers, who gobbled them up hungrily, but also challenged and even revolutionized German ideas about the novel and its ‘national’ social purpose. The German ‘pattern’ for the novel, the Bildungsroman, with Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister as the prime example and overweening model, focused on the development of one individual and made the larger society, in which this development took place, recede into the background. The idea of foregrounding “the big picture” of society at large, with the novel’s hero playing the characteristically passive on-looker role so many readers have thought of as rather unexciting in Scott, was thus radically innovative and exciting in the German context. And the emphasis on narrating segments of the broad historical development of a whole nation—of Scotland, of England—in Scott’s novels and his prefaces hit a nerve with the German literary critics and novelists of the post-Wilhelm Meister as well. Here was a new frontier that German writers explored in conjunction with their own rather complicated search for a national identity in the nineteenth century. Scott with an active interest in literary and cultural nation-building was thus a model not only aesthetically but also politically to German writers of the revolutionary Young Germany and their politically conservative opponents. This paper will use as the most prominent and representative example of German Scott-ophilia the writings of the conservative German critic Julian Schmidt and his friend, the novelist Gustav Freytag, to trace the intricate links between the political investment in nationalism and the interest in the form and purpose of the novel that German critics and novelists forged, based on their fascination with Scott. Both drew on Scott prominently to create a prescription for and practice of a new German “national novel” that went beyond the hitherto narrowly defined borders of German fiction. Aragon, Cecilia Staging the Impossible: Joanna Baillie, the Gothic, and the Theater of Cruelty Baker, Sam Walter Scott: Smuggler and Excise Man When we think of organized crime in Scott, we usually think of the cattle rustling that features in his border tales from Waverley onward, or more generally, of the thievery and banditry of which Rob Roy is the most famous perpetrator in his fiction, but far from the only one. These are terrestrial crimes. Yet in the wake of the tour of the northern lighthouses Scott took with Robert Louis Stevenson's engineer grandfather in 1814, the Author of Waverley turned away from the land border with England that his first novel had crossed and recrossed, and instead wrote a romance of seaside departures and arrivals: Guy Mannering. And when he brought the sea into view in that novel, Scott brought smuggling into focus as a main criminal occupation of the Scots. By the time of The Heart of Midlothian, Scott was ready to bring out the full metaphysical implications of smuggling as a way of life. In that masterpiece, Scott features the practice of smuggling, using it as a way to hide in plain sight symbolic meditations on absence and presence, legitimacy and secrecy--as a means to smuggle, as it were, a political theology of smuggling into his fiction. The famously problematic final volume of the work reveals its true depths when we realize that Effie Deans is smuggled into the Highland Arcadia where she awaits her husband George Staunton, and that he dies because of the failures of the same corrupt state apparatus that made possible his original dalliance with crime. Moralizing on this irony of his own creation, Scott taxes his readers' pleasures in transgression by monopolizing their attention and directing it to the laws he articulates. From Guy Mannering to The Heart of Midlothian, Scott’s narratives of Scotland, smuggling, and the sea strive to show how Britannia’s power over the waves shaped everyday economic and political life on shore, and make of smuggling a moral leitmotif that suggests how the historical process tracked by the novel might be understood to continue on into the moment of the novel’s reception and beyond. Baker, Tim A Scott-Haunted World: ‘Phantasmagoria’ and James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack At the close of A Legend of the Wars of Montrose, Scott refers to himself as ‘a phantom [and] shadow’. This is arguably a reference to his 1818 Blackwood’s story ‘Phantasmagoria’, where authorship is presented as fundamentally phantasmic: Simon Shadow, the narrator, can speak only of his own disappearance. Scott’s role as phantom, in the sense of a destabilizing force posited by Julian Wolfreys, can be seen in light of James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006). Here Scott is presented simultaneously as a figure locked in the past and as the source, in terms of structure and theme, for all that follows. For Robertson, Scott as unknown and unknowable author is the basis of an entire worldview; indeed, the novel can be read as the story of a young man who goes mad from reading too many Waverley novels. By relating the intertextual allusions in Robertson’s novel to Scott’s own work, this paper will highlight the self-haunting elements of Scott’s writing and his disruptive presence in the literature that follows. Scott emerges as a figure not only outside the law, but outside textuality itself. Barnaby, Paul The Young Person’s Sir Walter: Scott and the Child Reader, 1871-1932 In his influential History of English Literature (1853), William Spalding exempted Scott from ‘the sentence which banishes most works of prose fiction from the libraries of the young’: the Waverly Novels not only provided an efficient introduction to the study of history but expressed ‘broad and manly and practical views’, animated by ‘sentiments which are cheerful and correct if not very elevated or solemn’. This paper will chart Scott’s presence in the ‘libraries of the young’ in the form of adaptations, abridgements, paraphrases, anthologies of suitable extracts, and juvenile biographies. Although Cadell published selections of Readings for the Young from the Works of Sir Walter Scott as early as 1848, this paper will concentrate on the period between the centenaries of Scott’s birth (1871) and death (1932), drawing on the wealth of relevant material in Edinburgh University Library’s Corson Collection. It will also touch upon related phenomena such as Kinderspiels (cantatas for children) derived from Scott, tableaux vivants, and child’s pageants. It will examine the qualities in Scott’s work emphasized by adapters (‘healthiness’, ‘soundness’, ‘cleanness’) and show how Scott himself, in the absence of entirely suitable protagonists, is presented as the hero of his own works. Barry, Sean Patrick Scott’s Hired Guns: Rethinking “Mercenary Feeling” in A Legend of Montrose. Walter Scott famously resented suggestions that he wrote merely for profit. When Byron accused him of writing “for hire” in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), Scott disavowed “mercenary [...] feelings” in a well-known letter to the younger poet. Thereafter, Scott often deprecated mercenary motives when he wrote about professional authorship. But Scott also attributes the actions of mercenaries in his poetry and fiction to motives that are emotional rather than purely fiscal. Thus, The Lady of the Lake (1810) describes James V’s mercenaries as, “Adventurers [...] who roved, / To live by battle which they loved.” Recalling the “Jolly Beggar” (and anticipating “So we’ll go no more a-roving”), Scott’s rhyme connects faithless wandering with the impassioned pursuit of professional satisfaction. This essay considers the relationship between feeling, profession, and fidelity in Scott’s writing by turning to A Legend of the Wars of Montrose (1819). In the mercenary who dominates that novel, Dugald Dalgetty, Scott unites the forward-looking, peripatetic heroism that characterizes his young protagonists with the verbose, digressive humor he more often allotted to marginal, middle-aged characters and narrative personae. Whereas recent criticism has read Dalgetty primarily as the embodiment of immorality, this paper argues that Scott uses him to juxtapose the myriad partisan attitudes that motivate the novel’s other characters and a soldier’s passionate, pedantic attachment to warfare and to narrating his exploits. Berton, Jean The Outlaw and the High Sheriff, in Walter Scott’s Dramatic Piece, Auchindrane. In his “Ayrshire tragedy”, Walter Scott stages Scotland’s emblematic outlaw serving his own selfish profits at the expense of Scotland’s benefits. Some fifteen years after Waverley, Scott has evolved away from the Jacobite, whose aim was not personal greed but political contest, to the decadent baron, or laird, whose depravity is far more dangerous to the country. Walter Scott seems to have written this single-plot dramatic piece not so much to epitomize all the tragic narratives he had developed as a novelist, as to present the case of the Scottish tragedy (a notion that remains to be defined) — indeed, this play sounds like a basic study case for students of Scottish drama. For between the remorseless murderous laird and the looming Justiciar representing the law of the King, the kind-hearted young hero, fails to escape from his fate. In this play, Scott has drastically reduced the number of minor characters, turned into types, so that the symbolism attached to them should be clearly and immediately visible — essentially, the hero’s Scottish sweetheart who married his rival while he was away from home, and his English faithful and generous friend. This presentation is aiming at showing how the exhausted master of historical novels is staging Scottish blindness over her own predicament. Auchindrane, or an Ayrshire tragedy encapsulates all the many points drawing, when pieced together, the tragic situation of the Scotland of his times. Indeed, in this neatly balanced dramatic play, Walter Scott seems to manage to sum up his pessimistic vision of Scotland’s present and future — passion as embodied by the devious Baron, Auchindrane, unjustly outlawing honest, genial, and clear-sighted Quentin, breaks up before reason personified in the King’s Lieutenant, or High Sheriff, the Earl of Dunbar. Buchanan, David Social Artifacts and Transnational Networks: a case study of Walter Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian The domestic and international print history of The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818) in the nineteenth century provides an opportunity to investigate the diverse production and experience of Walter Scott’s prose narratives in Britain, Europe, and North America. The downmarket dissemination of the Waverley Novels is an important aspect of the social, political, and economic history of publishing, reading, and popular culture in Britain; early collections and the Magnum Opus, publishers such as Robert Cadell and Adam and Charles Black reduced size and price to expand local markets. At the same time, formal and thematic adaptation for chapbooks, melodrama, sheet music, and opera allowed for a more rhizomatic communication circuit that incorporated readers and viewers from all walks of life. As communication networks extended across Europe and to America, the story of Jeanie Deans participated in a modern print history that coincided with the exploration of new frontiers throughout the western world. Buck, Michael and Peter Garside Securing the Borders of the Picturesque: A Cottage Proposed on Tweedside in 1811 by Walter Scott and William Stark, Architect This study seeks to tell the story of Walter Scott’s 1811 plans for a “proposed cottage on Tweedside.” Using, among other sources, five letters between Walter Scott and William Stark, his architect (including one newly-discovered letter, as well as a MorganFales transcript of a Walter Scott “Memoranda About A Proposed Cottage On Tweedside”) this study traces the first plans that Scott had in 1811 for a residence on his new property by the Tweed. With discussions on the “picturesque” from Uvedale Price, Henry Repton, and Richard Payne Knight no doubt echoing in his mind, Scott negotiates with William Stark about various design issues: how close to the river the Cottage should be built; uses for the existing “small farmhouse” versus functions of the proposed “Cottage,” and the possibility of a “crescent design” for conjoining offices to the Cottage. This study, as well, will attempt to contextualize Scott’s values regarding property in 1811, which seem to put him squarely in the middle of debate over the “Picturesque,” prompting strong disagreement over the use of land for “Picturesque landscaped gardens or parks...for aesthetic rather than productive [for food] purposes” (The Politics of the Picturesque, 243). Burgess, Miranda Arresting Walter Scott: The Antiquary This paper reads together three key scenes in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary—(1) the interrupted motions of Jonathan Oldbuck and William Lovel by fly, ferry, and post-chaise; (2) Lovel’s rescue of Sir Arthur Wardour and his daughter from tide and cliff-face, and his accompanying experience of “temporary and giddy sickness”; and (3) the desultory motions of Davie Mailsetter through Fairport on the back of an “unwilling pony.” It argues that these scenes function, simultaneously, metaphorically and formally: as enactments, and at the same time as remedial interruptions, of the conditions and exigencies of narrative, reading, and the distribution of print as understood in Romantic-period criticism of the novel and emerging mass readerships. The paper situates the concerns of Romantic-period criticism in the context of what, in the larger project to which the paper belongs, I call “transport”: the increasingly systematic and speedy transnational movement of books and associated fears about the mobility of feelings amongst readers as they are moved by these books. At least from Wordsworth’s (1800) worries about the “savage torpor” of inert but pliant readers all too easily acted on by “the rapid communication of intelligence,” Romantic-period commentators on reading and print worried equally about the speed of print’s transmission to its readers and the speed with which it hurried its readers along. They concentrated on such issues as readers’ capacity for being “carried captive” (as Jane Austen put it), their minds turned “into one channel. . . by a potent and rapid influence” (as Gilbert Austin had it.) In contrast to these anxieties, I argue that Scott’s novel form arrests its readers precisely as it figurally represents the interruptions and entrapments of its protagonists and the news. It requires the reader’s labor to move forward, to follow the plotline of The Antiquary. Reading The Antiquary recapitulates the efforts of Lovel to discern “human voices” from “noise” on the cliff-face, and of Lovel and Wardour to complete their hampered journey. As a result, I suggest, the experience of reading this novel produces boredom to the same extent that, and at the same time as, it produces readerly engagement. The self-consciousness inherent in boredom emerges against the backdrop of metaphoric hurry—hurry that, had it been recapitulated on the level of narrative form, would have resulted in a temporary loss of self that parallels Lovel’s “half swoon” as he is “tossed in empty space” on the cliff-face, “like an idle and unsubstantial feather, with a motion that agitated the brain.” I argue that the relationship between self-conscious selves and “transport” is the content or substance of Romantic narrative form, and the scene of its competition with a poetics centered on figuration. Cabajsky, Andrea The Afterlife of Kenilworth in Victorian Quebec: Plagiarism, Sir Walter Scott, and the French-Canadian Historical Novel In this paper, I locate Le Manoir mystérieux (1880), Frédéric Houde’s Frenchlanguage plagiarism of Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth (1821), in the context of larger debates about Scott’s place in the development of literary culture and criticism in Canada. This paper responds to the conference theme of “outlaw” acts and “broken boundaries” in relation to Scott in the following two ways: first, it proposes that Houde’s plagiarism of Scott is the product of interconnected material and sociopolitical factors, that include poorly defined international copyright laws, and which allowed plagiarisms and piracies of Scott and other writers to flourish in Canada in the nineteenth century; second, it argues that the scholarly reaction to Houde’s plagiarism, in the twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-first, bears witness to changing critical responses to Scott’s place in the early development of the Canadian novel. My argument derives from a larger essay I have submitted to the literary journal, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, which connects Scott’s changing reception in Quebec to the increasing disciplinarization of Canadian and Quebec Studies, and to the commercialization of Canadian literature. My conference paper will focus on the connections between institutional definitions of authorship and literary value, and the critical reception of Scott, as they converge in debates about the literary historical repercussions of Houde’s