I think it's the "Sir" that does it. When readers see the name "Sir Walter Scott" on a spine, it's almost as if a miasma of preconceptions and prejudices – aristocratic privilege, dull pomposity, archaic conservatism, royal sycophancy, meandering sentences – comes swirling up like so many dust motes blown off a book right at the back of an antiquarian bookseller's. If only his works could be published under any of his other names: "The Wizard of the North", "The Great Unknown', or – given the 200th anniversary of its publication today, "The Author of Waverley" – we might be able to see Scott's astonishing work with properly fresh eyes.
Waverley is not a precursor to the great Victorian novels (or even the mediocre Victorian novels by the likes of Bulwer-Lytton and Harrison Ainsworth) but a development from the form's 18th-century radical roots. In the same year as he published Waverley anonymously, as Walter Scott he had produced an edition of the works of Swift. The opening pages of Waverley have a kind of sly self-consciousness that echoes Sterne's Tristram Shandy more than Trollope's Orley Farm. The reader doesn't jump into the story, but jumps into a story about the story as the narrator ponders other titles and subtitles the book could have had. He parodies gothic, sentimental and fashionable tales (though the book will eventually encompass all these genres). Chapter 24 begins with the provocative question "Shall this be a long or a short chapter? This is a question in which you, gentle reader, have no vote, however much you may be interested in the consequences."
The eponymous Waverley is an English soldier who ends up supporting Charles Edward Stuart's Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 through a mixture of quixotic romanticism and personal petulance. Scott, anonymously reviewing one of his later books in The Quarterly Review called his protagonist "a very amiable and very insipid sort of young man" – in private he referred to him as a "sneaking piece of imbecility". But then Scott's habit of self-deprecation, charming though it can be, can obscure the psychological acuity and emotional realism of his work. Waverley, for example, falls in love when he plays at falling in love.
In his lifetime, Scott was compared to Shakespeare by the critics – not a judgment made too often these days. Nevertheless, it's an important comparison. German critics (and Scott began his career translating Goethe) had praised Shakespeare for his immense scope, and Scott has something similar: Waverley has space for a royal usurper and the village idiot, the local laird and the middle-class soldier, the fanatic and the pragmatist, the outlaw and the establishment. Virginia Woolf would later claim he was "perhaps the last novelist to practice the great, the Shakespearean art, of making people reveal themselves in speech".
Jane Austen said that Scott had "no business writing novels – especially good ones". Francis Jeffrey, the most influential critic of the day, captures both the thrill and the frustration of reading Scott when he reviewed Waverley in The Edinburgh Review:
"It is wonderful what genius and adherence to nature will do in spite of all disadvantages. Here is a thing obviously very hastily, and, in many places, very unskilfully written — composed, one half of it, in a dialect unintelligible to four-fifths of the reading population of the country – relating to a period too recent to be romantic, and too far gone by to be familiar — and published, moreover, in a quarter of the island where materials and talents for novel-writing have been supposed to be equally wanting; and yet, by the mere force and truth and vivacity of its colouring, already casting the whole tribe of ordinary novels into the shade, and taking its place rather with the most popular of our modern poems, than with the rubbish of provincial romances. The secret of this success, we take it, is merely that the author is a person of genius".
Waverley is a strangely liminal novel. Scott's intent was avowedly Unionist – he compared his work to Maria Edgeworth's, in introducing English readers to non-English characters, history and customs, cementing the Union by mutual understanding. Yet, part of the success of Waverley was to stress Scottish difference: Scotland is a place that changes Waverley. It celebrates as it satirises. In many of Scott's novels, the closing wedding unites political opponents (which might explain his appeal to Marxist critics: dialectical materialism via the bedroom). In Scott, history is not just something in which the characters live; it is something that acts upon their lives. He sets in motion a way of thinking about what the novel can do that will influence Dumas, Fenimore Cooper, Manzoni, Tolstoy and countless others.
And what was Scott doing as his novelistic debut was selling out across the country? He had vamooshed up to Shetland on a sailing trip with Robert Louis Stevenson's grandfather. On Sumburgh Head, he reminisced in his journal of that expedition, he thought "it would be a fine situation to compose an ode to the genius of Sumburgh Head, or an Elegy upon a Cormorant, or to have written and spoken madness of any kind in prose or poetry. But I gave vent to my excited feelings in a more simple way, and sitting gentle down on the steep green slope which led to the beach, I e'en slid down a few hundred feet, and found the exercise quite an adequate vent to my enthusiasm, I recommend this exercise (time and place suiting) to all my brother scribblers, and I have no doubt it will spare much effusion of Christian ink".
On this anniversary, just read the first chapter of Waverley. That will dispel some of the myths about Scott, and it might just begin a long and fruitful bookish relationship (there's certainly plenty more where it came from: we'll be having Scott bicentenaries every year until 2032).
