observed, that enabled Scott to adopt the historian’s stance of impartial
arbiter, summoning back to life all the forces of historical transformation.
These novels embodied nothing less than “the contest between two great
moving principles of social humanity: religious adherence to the past and
the ancient, the desire and the admiration of permanence, on the one
hand, and the passion for increase of knowledge, for truth ... in short, the
mighty instincts of progression and free agency, on the other.” As Harriet
Martineau noted, this dispassionate assumption of the standpoint of Clio
had a paradoxical result, for it turned Scott, the romantic Tory, nostalgic
for the past, into a new kind of modern liberal, ready to advance the
progressive causes of his own day.
He has exposed priestcraft and fanaticism, he has effectively satirized eccentric-
ities, unamiablenesses, and follies; he has irresistibly recommended benignity in
the survey of life, and indicated the glory of a higher benevolence; and finally, he
has advocated the rights of women with a force all the greater for his being unaware
of the import and tendency of what he was saying.
86
If Scott was unaware of the ways in which he was inadvertently advanc-
ing the rights of women, he was thoroughly conscious of having created a
new kind of capacious, hegemonic, centrist liberalism, a progress narra-
tive that could transcend divisions of religion, ideology, class, and nation-
ality, and in which even a Tory like himself could feel at ease. By granting
nostalgia to a defeated foe, a minority faith, or a conquered nation, it was
possible to master the past and move on in a mutually acceptable manner.
Both sides could then enter the brave new world of industrial capitalism
and the modern multi-na tional (imperial) state witho ut losing touch with
those ghostly ancestral voices which intoned the virtues and the values of a
nobler, bygone age.
Scott’s “establishment of literary authority,” as the critic Ina Ferris has
termed it, was greatly amplified by the enduring popularity of his books.
Each of the five novels that he published in the aftermath of Waverley sold
between 6,000 and 15,000 copies within its first year. Moreover, since
many of these volumes were purchased by lending libraries, it is safe to
infer that Scott’s initial readers numbered in the tens of thousands, with
perhaps hundreds of thousands or more worldwide. Through transla-
tions, popular plays, versifications, and opera s, the stories were trans-
mitted to an even wider aud ience, albeit in dilute d form. Moreover,
86
S. T. Coleridge, letter to Thomas Allsop, 1820, and “A Question of History” (attributed
to G. P. R. James in Fraser’s Magazine, 1847), both reprinted in Hayden (ed.), Critical
Heritage, 178–81 and 382–93 respectively, quotes on 180, 386 respectively. Harriet
Martineau, “Scott as Moral Hero,” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine (1833), reprinted in
Hayden (ed.), Critical Heritage, 340–4, quote on 340.
The reception of Scott’s British Unionist romance 51