The Novel as Prison: Scott's "The Heart of Midlothian"

Abstract

heart of is the almost affectionate nickname given to Edinburgh's Tolbooth prison by the functionaries of the law in Walter Scott's novel with that title. But the setting and subject matter of Scott's tale seem to have very little to do with the place or meaning of incarceration. After the early and dramatic storming of the Tolbooth during the Porteous riot, the narrative gives scant attention to the topicality of its title. The idea of the prison is nevertheless at the heart of The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and most insistently so in those parts of the novel seemingly removed from the stone walls and barred windows of the Tolbooth. It is a newly formulated sense of the penal institution, and the discipline it is designed to inculcate in its inmates, that makes Scott's novel tick. In Imagining the Penitentiary, John Bender argues that in the eighteenth century novelistic ideas of realism informed the emerging idea and physical design of the modern penitentiary; taking Scott's The Heart of Midlothian as a foundational work, I will consider in this essay some of the ways the idea of the prison influenced and informed the disciplinary practices and narrative design of the nineteenth-century novel. The idea that the design of a novel is directly related to an architectural construction is the opening conceit of Scott's novel, and it turns on a pun. Jedediah Cleishbotham, one of Scott's fictional personae and the supposed editor of the Tales of My Landlord series (of which The Heart of Midlothian is the last installment) writes in his preface: