A Divided Inheritance: Scott's Antiquarian Novel and the British Nation

Abstract

A Divided Inheritance: Scott’s Antiquarian Novel and the British Nation Yoon Sun Lee To criticize the historical novel, it appears, is to historicize it. Long before Georg Lukács accounted for the actual rise of the historical novel in terms of the dialectical transformation of the notion of historical experience that took place between 1789 and 1814, Thomas Carlyle, in his review of Walter Scott’s career, felt compelled to subject post-revolutionary Britain to a withering though inconclusive scrutiny. 1 Was Scott’s historical novel, he asked, the generic expression of “an age fallen languid, destitute of faith and terrified at skepticism? Or . . . an age all in peaceable triumphant motion?” 2 More recent criticism, while remaining cognizant of the increased political stakes attached to the invention of national history in the post-revolutionary era, has chosen to focus on the generic components of the historical novel’s distinctive heteroglossia and on the relative status of different generic discourses in the literary marketplace of Scott’s time. Seeking to reconstruct the literary conditions of Scott’s commercial popularity, Ina Ferris, Michael Gamer and others have descried in his texts complex refigurings of generic conventions and associations. 3 Yet even such valuable historicizations have a tendency to view the marketplace for literary phenomena in abstraction from the other discourses and other marketplaces that figured in the construction of both the historical novel and the popular British nationalism it expressed. In order to apprehend Scott’s ideological and commercial timeliness, this essay examines the links between his choice of literary form and his participation in the culture of antiquarianism. While ultimately focusing on Scott’s self-reflexive and self-parodic third novel, The Antiquary (1816), I argue for the recognition of the antiquarian episteme as a crucial determinant of the historical novel’s political ambivalence and as the most effective means of understanding how this genre’s popularity sprang from its equivocally literary nature. The genesis of Scott’s historical novels in antiquarian research has long been acknowledged: the author of the Waverley Novels himself remarks in the preface to Ivanhoe that he [End Page 537] had merely “availed himself . . . of the antiquarian stores which lay scattered around him,” ready to be animated by a self-effacing creativity. 4 Ina Ferris has noted Scott’s reliance on “unofficial historical memory and record . . . marginal kinds of writing and print, like the letter, tracts, pamphlets and private memoirs”—the characteristic media of antiquarian history. 5 Characteristic also of antiquarianism, Ferris remarks, was the attitude of self-conscious deference to official history: Scott’s fiction presents itself as a supplement, positioned “in the interstices left by official . . . standard narrative history.” 6 Yet Scott’s antiquarianism needs to be reconceptualized as more than an innocuous source of historical data or an occasion for rhetorical self-effacement. This antiquarianism does more than provide decorative embellishments and a legitimating framework of historical erudition; as a mode of producing knowledge, its conventions and constructions ground the practices and stances of Scott’s historical novel. As Katie Trumpener has recently noted, the Waverley Novels “foreground[ed] the retroactive, antiquarian production of historical knowledge out of a myriad of experiences, records, and possible reconstructions.” 7 But in addition to the impoverishment of historical experience that Trumpener remarks, adopting the antiquarian stance served to question the notion of historical agency: a default that aligned Scott’s historical novel less with political conservatism than with a skepticism about the nature of the British nation distinctly unwelcome in the social context of this form’s genesis. Attributing the historical novel’s political ambiguity to its sublation of the antiquarian episteme, this essay first seeks to correct the unreflective alignment of antiquarianism with political conservatism in the British context. Nontotalizing and untheoretical, empirical and inductive in its approach, the antiquarian mode of producing historical knowledge, particularly in the twenty years that preceded the appearance of Waverley, offered a strong contrast with another historical discourse that saw itself as crucial to the formation of a British national sensibility: the patriotic historicism that reached its height during the French invasion scare of 1803–4, the historical setting of The Antiquary. It was not exactly the empiricist...