Postscript: Old Sir Walter

Abstract

Anyone familiar with the history of gentlemanly representation will understand what then happened to Scott. In becoming an authority on what makes men gentlemen, like countless writers before him, Scott quickly acquired the status of the gentleman. With the publication of his first two novels, Waverley and Guy Mannering, Scott, already a celebrated poet, thus emerged as “the author of Waverley,” a so-called historical raconteur with an eye for the vanished rituals and manners of British cultures. The Waverley novels, as they came to be known, were quickly identified with both the anthropology of the Scottish Enlightenment and the broader canon of knowledge that Locke, Chesterfield and others had made central to the gentleman’s education. As Ina Ferris documents in her study of Scott’s reception, Scott’s earliest reviewers described his fiction in language also used to assess travel narratives, political tracts and historical works. Where Austen was sporadically celebrated throughout the nineteenth century for her portraits of individual women in private life, Scott was widely admired for his depictions of exemplary gentlemen immersed in the affairs of the world. Contrasting the two writers, the Victorian critic Richard Holt Hutton applauded Scott’s “large instructiveness” that expressed itself not in domestic tales of “mere individuals” but in panoramic stories that revealed “individuals as they are affected by the public strifes and social divisions of the age” (104, 101).KeywordsBritish CultureMale CriticFemale DesirePolitical TractMere IndividualThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.