Annual Dinner, Friday, March 2^nd..2007

The ninety-eighth Annual Dinner was held in the Balmoral Hotel, Princes Street, Edinburgh, when Sheriff Isobel Anne Poole presided over a somewhat disappointing number of members and guests. All the members of the Top Table were introduced by the chairman who then invited Dairmid Gunn to say grace. Thereafter dinner was served and following on a short interval the remainder of the evening was devoted to the customary toasts and replies. The main toast was proposed by the President, Professor Ian Campbell and the following is a transcript of his address.

The University of Edinburgh has in its English department a chair of Scottish and Victorian Literature – an unusual combination, but one which gives its holder the inestimable pleasure of teaching the novels from two of the great periods during which that form flourished – the Age of Victoria, and the Age of Scott. And tonight, of honouring the memory of one of the greatest, while bringing to bear some of the comments of one of his contemporaries, and one who followed by a short generation.

In our own century what literary names stand higher than those of Byron, Tennyson, Scott, Dickens, Macaulay, and Carlyle? And I think I may say that none of those great men neglected the pecuniary result of their labours. Now and then a man may arise among us who in any calling, whether it be law, in physic, in religious teaching, in art, or literature, may be in his professional enthusiasm utterly disregard money. All will honour his enthusiasm, and if he be wifeless and childless, his disregard of the great object of men’s work will be blameless. But it is a mistake to suppose that a man is a better man because he despises money. Few do so, and those few in doing so suffer a defect. TA106[1]

That is Anthony Trollope, whose novels (like Scott’s) have enjoyed some revival thanks to television and film, but whose Autobiography (from whom that quotation came) is surprisingly and disappointingly little known – it was written late in life, consideringly, and looked back on a rate of production (like Scott’s) which almost defies belief. There creeps in from time to time a disappointingly immodest note, but it is the voice of someone whose place is assured, whose words will not appear till after his death, and whose output has won him considerable fame and riches without (as he sees it) compromise of principle.

I think that many have done so; so many that we English novelists may boast as a class that such has been the general result of our work. Looking back to the past generation, I may say with certainty that such was the operation of the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Walter Scott. Coming down to my own times, I find such to have been the teaching of Thackeray, of Dickens, and of George Eliot. Speaking, as I shall speak to any who may read these words, with the absence of self personality which the dead may claim, I will boast that such has been the result of my own writing. Can any one by search through the works of the six great novelists I have named, find a scene, a passage, or a word that would teach a girl to be immodest, or a man to be dishonest? TA 222-3

It is salutary to compare Trollope’s estimate with the implied estimate of Ruskin’s parents, most careful of their son’s spirit and development, who found reading Scott aloud round the family fireplace a most suitable entertainment – and showed themselves keen critics when (late in his output) they sorrowfully gave up in mid-novel and put it aside. [2]

The series of the Waverley novels, then drawing towards its close, was still the chief source of delight in all households caring for literature; and I can no more recollect the time when I did not know them than when I did not know the Bible; but I have still a vivid remembrance of my father’s intense expressions of sorrow mixed with scorn, as he threw down Count Robert of Paris, after reading three or four pages; and knew that the life of Scott was ended; the scorn being a very complex and bitter feeling in him – partly, indeed, of the book itself, but chiefly of the wretches who were tormenting and selling the wrecked intellect, and not a little, deep down, of the subtle dishonesty which had essentially caused the ruin. My father never could forgive Scott his concealment of the Ballantyne partnership.[3]

Edmund Gosse, in Father and Son (1907), looked back on his parents’ early reading – “for each there had been no poet later than Byron, and neither had read a romance since, in childhood, they had dipped into the Waverley Novels as they appeared in succession”. Sternly committed to a religious life, they simply bypassed fiction in their adult years: his mother, he noted, early showed her strength of character by refusing to read “the chivalrous tales in verse of Sir Walter Scott, obstinately alleging that they were not ‘true’”.[4] How different Scott himself:

When I find myself doing ill or like to come to a still stand in writing I take up some slight book, a novel or the like, and usually have not read far ere my difficulties are removed and I am ready to write again. There must be two current[s] of ideas going on in my mind at the same time, or perhaps the slighter occupation serves like a woman’s wheel or stocking to ballast the mind as it were by preventing the thoughts from wandering and so give the deeper current the power to flow undisturbed. I always laugh when I hear people say do one thing at once. I have done a dozen things at once all my life.[5]

Trollope, talking about the change in novel-reading in his lifetime, is speaking as a professional, a complete professional, someone whose work was thoroughly well done and whose Autobiography betrays a keen nose for a bargain: he knew he was good, he knew he wrote to good effect, and he certainly did not despise the money his pen brought him to lift him from a childhood of bitter poverty and misery. Like Dickens, he had written himself out of that early misery: like Dickens, he saw nothing wrong in enjoying the fruit of his work.

It had at this time become my custom, -- and it still is my custom, though of late I have become a little lenient to myself,-- to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went. . . . This division of time allowed me to produce over ten pages of an ordinary novel volume a day, and if kept up through ten months, would have given as its results three novels of three volumes each in the year;-- the precise amount which so greatly acerbated the publisher in Paternoster Row, and which must at any rate be felt to be quite as much as the novel-readers of the world can want from the hands of one man. TA 272-3

Well, yes. But what if the hands of one man should turn to more than fiction? To biography, to history, to reviewing – to the serried volumes of the Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, by means of which he strove to clear himself from the financial catastrophe of 1826? We are going to use one of the sharpest minds of the early nineteenth century in Scotland – Carlyle and his essay “Sir Walter Scott” – to turn on another sharp mind who gave his name to an age, but this very fecundity, the professionalism which allowed the production of almost unbelievable volume at a respectable level of writing, drew from Carlyle at first a very mixed response. In London in 1831, a struggling writer still trying to make his way (and sell Sartor Resartus at a time when Reform legislation and rioting made every publisher wary of the most saleable materials, quite apart from as radically modernist a work as Sartor) Carlyle confided to his journal some pretty acid thoughts on his distinguished countryman who was passing through the metropolis.

Walter Scott left Town yesterday on his way to Naples. He is to proceed from Plymouth on a Frigate, which the Government have given him a place in. Much run after here (it seems); but he is old and sick and cannot enjoy it: has had two shocks of Palsy, and seems altogether in a precarious way. To me he is and always has been an object of very minor interest for many years; the Novel-wright of his time, its favourite child, and therefore an almost worthless one. Yet is there something in his deep recognition of the worth of the Past, perhaps better than anything he has expressed about it; into which I do not yet fully see.—Have never spoken with him (tho’ I might sometimes, without great effort); and now probably never shall.[6]

Now, this is remarkable from a keen critic whose early letters from his student days amply record the excitement of reading the Waverley novels as they appeared, speculating about their authorship, acknowledging (as his Reminiscences make clear) the fuss that Scott’s fiction made about Scottish history and Scottish topography which young literary men like Carlyle and Edward Irving could hardly avoid. Why this grudging praise from a Carlyle in his mid-30s, a career still to make (and The French Revolution still six years away)? Possibly there is envy, more possibly the re-alignment of taste, friendship and ambition which a prolonged exposure to a bubbling London was bringing about in the mind of a Scottish writer who had lived through the Age of Scott in Edinburgh, and witnessed its slow run-down in the later 1820s, the remorseless fall in quality of Scott’s output, the levelling-out of quality in the reviews for which Edinburgh was still famous, the loss of famous individuals – Hogg, Galt, Lockhart – to the lure of London. The Carlyles were to follow in 1834, settling in Chelsea and returning to Scotland afterwards only for holidays and family visits. Possibly here is a reason for the dismissive tone of “an object of very minor interest for many years”. Possibly, too, we note the telling word “wright” in “Novel-wright” with its suggestion of mechanical production, excessive output, replacement of genius by mass-production. Perhaps Carlyle, for all the strength his writing already showed, underestimated Scott’s flexibility as well as his professionalism: as Ioan Williams notes, “Scott is perhaps the last important critic of the novel who succeeds in maintaining a balance between the older approach and the new. Applying the realistic criterion not as a constant, but as one criterion among several, he was able to adapt his criticism to the romance as well as to the novel, to apply the standards of eighteenth-century genre criticism to work like that of Mrs. Radcliffe and at the same time to appreciate the value of novels like Frankenstein or The Omen.” [7] For those who know the pain with which Carlyle laboured to produce every sentence he published, there may even be a whisper of envy of someone who like Scott appeared to write to order, and at speed. Any visitor to the Carlyle House in Chelsea who ascends to the attic study will be struck by the sight of his writing desk, and over it the photograph of the Sage himself writing at his desk, littered with papers, his head buried in his hands with frustration. A glance at his many drafts, his nightmare proofs, his messy manuscripts would bring a pang of sympathy for his printer and his publisher, if not those close to him while he laboured at his major historical books.

But envy hardly explains Carlyle’s grudging praise for the Laird of Abbotsford. The private jottings of his journal carry a much stronger hint.

Sir W. Scott is the great Restaurateur of Europe: he might have been numbered among their Conscript Fathers; he has chosen the worser part, and is only a huge Publicanus. What is his novel, any of them? A bout of champagne, claret, port or even ale drinking. Are we wiser, better, holier, stronger? No: we have been – amused. O Sir Walter, thou knowest too well, that Virtus laudatur et alget.[8]

Yes, virtue may leave the author to starve after the praise has evaporated – but this is an astonishingly grudging estimate. Yet it prepares us for the full-length essay he wrote ostensibly as a review of Lockhart’s life (though in fact before the seventh and much-delayed volume was published). While we will come back to Trollope, it is worth looking ahead to the Scott essay which Carlyle composed after his move to London, his own future relatively secure, Scott himself dead and the Edinburgh he bestrode like a colossus rapidly fading into mid-century tepidity. In the fashion of the time, Carlyle’s essay on Scott is many things as well as a review of Lockhart – a compendium of quotation as a taster, a sounding-board for the reviewer on things in general, and the chance to make large statements with enough wordage from the editor to justify them and follow them up.

Whether Sir Walter Scott was a great man, is still a question with some; but there can be no question with any one that he was a most noted and even notable man. In this generation there was no literary man with such a popularity in any country; there have only been a few with such; taking-in all generations and all countries. Nay, it is further to be admitted that Sir Walter Scott’s popularity was of a select sort rather; not a popularity of the populace. His admirers were at one time almost all the intelligent of civilised countries; and to the last included, and still include, a great portion of that sort. CS 27[9]

The essay very soon reins in this preliminary impression of semi-uncritical praise.

It is good to understand, for one thing, that no popularity, and open-mouthed wonder of all the world, continued even for a long series of years, can make a man great. . . One knows not what idea worthy of the name of great, what purpose, instinct or tendency, that could be called great, Scott ever was inspired with. His life was worldly; his ambitions were worldly. There is nothing spiritual in him; all is economical, material, of the earth earthy. A love of the picturesque, of beautiful, vigorous and graceful things; a genuine love, yet not more than genuine that has dwelt in hundreds of men named minor poets; this is the highest quality to be discerned in him. CS 40-3[10]

Typically of his method in writing his substantial essays, Carlyle makes a clear distinction between Scott the man and Scott the artist. “ Yet on the other hand, the surliest critic must allow that Scott was a genuine man, which itself is a great matter. No affectation, fantasticality or distortion dwelt in him; no shadow of cant. Now withal, was he not a right brave and strong man, according to his kind?” CS 46 A strong man, yes, a genuine man yes: but a great man? The answer, to Carlyle, lies not in Scott’s life which was public property, but in his art. While the essay ends with a lamentation for the loss of Scott the man (and Carlyle had lived through the lustre of Edinburgh in the age of Scott – see his “Christopher North” chapter in the Reminiscences for ample proof of this -- it withholds the kind of praise which would raise Scott to the status of “great”. What Carlyle is bidding farewell to is Scott the man and what he stood for: “No sounder piece of British manhood was put together in that eighteenth century of Time. Alas, his fine Scotch face, with its shaggy honest, sagacity and goodness, when we saw it latterly on the Edinburgh streets, was all worn with care, and joy all fled from it; -- Ploughed deep with labour and sorrow. We shall never forget it; we shall never see it again. Adieu, Sir Walter, pride of all Scotchmen, take our proud and sad farewell”. CS 114 But having made this concession, Carlyle the critic turns back to the work itself, product of the novel-wright whose Waverley Novels are described thus: “there is a free flow of narrative, of incident and sentiment; an easy masterlike coherence throughout, as if it were the fine dash of master’s hand, ‘round as the O of Giotto’. It is the perfection of extemporaneous writing.” CS 96 If the labours of the Edinburgh edition of the Waverley Novels had done nothing else, they would massively disprove that last sentence. Extemporaneous, no. But Carlyle’s real challenge is to the intellectual content of the novels.

Your Shakespeare fashions his characters from the heart outwards; your Scott fashions them from the skin inwards, never getting near the heart of them! . . . Something very perfect in its kind might have come from Scott; nor was it a low kind; nay, who knows how high, with studious self-concentration, he might have gone; what wealth Nature had implanted in him, which his circumstances, most unkind while seeming to be the kindest, had never impelled him to unfold! . . . There is little to be sought or found in the Waverley Novels. Not profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for edification, for building up or elevating, in any shape! The sick heart will find no healing here, the darkly-struggling heart no guidance: the Heroic that is in all men no divine awakening voice. . . CS 97-9

Trollope would seem to see Scott’s influence differently – not perhaps in a search for the Heroic, but working in common with other writers whose novels have exerted an influence for good – a far different thing from being merely the restaurateur of Europe.

I could well remember that, in my own young days, they had not taken that undisputed possession of drawing-rooms which they now hold. Fifty years ago, when George IV was king, they were not indeed treated as Lydia had been forced to treat them in the preceding reign, when, on the approach of elders, Peregrine Pickle was hidden beneath the bolster, and Lord Ainsworth put away under the sofa. But the families in which an unrestricted permission was given for the reading of novels were very few, and from many they were altogether banished. The high poetic genius and correct morality of Walter Scott had not altogether succeeded in making men and women understand that lessons which were good in poetry could not be bad in prose. I remember that in those days an embargo lay upon novel-reading, as a pursuit, which was to the novelist a much heavier tax than that want of full appreciation of which I now complain.

There is, we all know, no such embargo now. May we not say that young people of an age to read have got too much power into their own hands to endure any very complete embargo? Novels are read right and left, above stairs and below, in town house and in country parsonages, by old countesses and by farmers’ daughters, by old lawyers and by young students. TA219

Recalling Trollope’s list of great “English” novelists already quoted, and allowing Sir Walter to stray for the moment into that company, it is worth recalling Trollope’s ending to that paragraph. “Speaking, as I shall speak to any who may read these words, with the absence of self personality which the dead may claim, I will boast that such has been the result of my own writing. Can any one by search through the works of the six great novelists I have named, find a scene, a passage, or a word that would teach a girl to be immodest, or a man to be dishonest? “ TA 223 This is a much higher claim than Carlyle’s grudging praise to Scott that he amused his readers. Yet it arises, curiously, from a conviction both men shared of Scott’s extreme mastery of his craft of story-telling. Here is Trollope again:

There is nothing so easy as the creation and accumulation of fearful incidents after this fashion. If such creation an accumulation be the beginning and end of the novelist’s work , -- and novels have been written that seem to have been without other attractions, -- nothing can be more dull or more useless. But not on that account are we averse to tragedy in prose fiction. As in poetry, so in prose, he who can deal adequately with tragic elements is a greater artist and reaches a higher aim that the writer whose efforts never carry him above the mild walks of everyday life. The Bride of Lammermoor is a tragedy throughout, in spite of its comic elements. The life of Lady Castlewood, of whom I have spoken before, is a tragedy. Rochester’s wretched thraldom to his mad wife in Jane Eyre, is a tragedy. But these stories charm us not simply because they are tragic, but because we feel that men and women with flesh and blood, creatures with whom we [229] can sympathise, are struggling amidst their woes. It all lies in that. No novel is anything, for purposes either of comedy or tragedy, unless the reader can sympathise with the characters whose names he finds upon the page. Let an author so tell his tale as to touch his reader’s heart and draw his tears, and he has, so far, done his work well. Truth let there be, -- truth of description, truth of character, human truth as to men and women. If there be such truth, I do not know that novel can be too sensational. TA 228-9

Having established the criterion of “truth” (and credited Scott with achieving it), Trollope goes on to discuss plot.

The plots of Tom Jones and of Ivanhoe are almost perfect, and they are probably the most popular novels of the schools of the last and of this century; but to me the delicacy of Amelia, and the rugged strength of Burley and Meg Merrilies, say more for the power of those great novelists than the gift of construction shown in the two works I have named. A novel should give a picture of common life enlivened by humour and sweetened by pathos. To make that picture worthy of attention, the canvas should be crowded with real portraits, not of individuals known to the world or to the author, but of created personages impregnated with traits of character which are known. To my thinking, the plot is but the vehicle for all this; and when you have the vehicle without its passengers, a story of mystery in which the agents never spring to life, you have but a wooden show. There must, however, be a story. TA 126

We are not far here from agreement between Trollope and Carlyle: mastery of plot Scott showed in abundance. “In joyous picturesqueness and fellow-feeling, freedom of eye and heart; or to say it in a word, in general healthiness of mind, these Novels prove Scott to have been among the foremost writers” CS 96 But even in agreement, Carlyle’s phraseology shows where ultimately he will differ in his judgement from Trollope: Scott is writing from healthy vigour, always (in Carlyle’s eye)on the surface, “writing impromptu novels to buy farms with” CS 109 “Surely since Shakespeare’s time there has been no greater speaker so unconscious of an aim in speaking as Sir Walter Scott”. CS 70.

Time perhaps to remind ourselves of the dates when both critics wrote of Scott: Carlyle knew him as a kenspeckle figure in Edinburgh in the 1820s, saw the wreck of Sir Walter embark for Europe in 1831, and finished the essay in December 1837. ’I have been “sharp” on Scott, but “mannerly”; condemnatory, commiseratory, not irreverent.’[11] With Victoria freshly crowned and the nineteenth century still finding its form, Carlyle’s Scott looks back on the defining talent of his own early years, his nation’s defining talent since the death of Burns, an extraordinary flowering of poetry, then fiction in Carlyle’s early lifetime. But he had moved on since then, and his stance for observing Scott too: the student who read the Waverley novels, who walked Princes Street in the heyday of the Age of Scott (again, the “Christopher North” chapter of the Reminiscences gives us the best glimpse of this Carlyle), had given way to the struggling man of letters in Chelsea, the historian who had completed the French Revolution (the first volume of it twice over, after John Stuart Mill had disastrously borrowed it and it had perished in the fire). The Reform bills of 1831 and 1832 had transformed the political landscape of both England and Scotland: by 1837 the Carlyles were living in inexpensive gentility in Chelsea, not in Craigenputtoch and the wilds of Dumfries-shire. Immediately ahead lay Heroes and Hero-Worship, Chartism, Past and Present – serious work in which Carlyle addressed the growing problems of an industrial society changing too fast to understand itself. The Scott years were left behind, vanished like the Edinburgh Carlyle had known as a student.

In my student days the chosen Promenade of Edinburgh was Princes Street; from the East end of it, to and fro, westward as far as Frederick Street, or farther if you wished to be less jostled, and have the pavement more to yourself: there, on a bright afternoon, in its highest bloom probably about 4-5 P.M., all that was brightest in Edinburgh seemed to have stept out to enjoy, in the fresh pure air, the finest city-prospect in the world and the sight of one another, and was gaily streaming this way and that. From Castle Street or even the extreme west there was a visible increase of bright population, which thickened regularly eastward, and in the sections near the Register Office or extreme east, had become fairly a lively crowd, dense as it could find stepping-ground, - never needed to be denser, or to become a crush, so many side-streets offering you free issue all along, and the possibility of returning by a circuit, instead of abruptly on your steps. The crowd was lively enough, brilliant, many-coloured, many-voiced, clever-looking (beautiful and graceful young womankind a conspicuous element): crowd altogether elegant, polite, and at its ease though on parade; something as if of unconsciously rhythmic in the movements of it, as if of harmonious in the sound of its cheerful voices, bass and treble, fringed with the light laughters; a quite pretty kind of natural concert and rhythmus of march; into which, if at leisure, and carefully enough dressed (as some of us seldom were) you might introduce yourself, and flow for a turn or two with the general flood. It was finely convenient to a stranger in Edinburgh, intent to employ his eyes in instructive recreation; and see, or hope to see, so much of what was brightest and most distinguished in the place, on those easy terms. As for me I never could afford to promenade or linger there; and only a few times, happened to float leisurely thro’, on my way elsewhither. Which perhaps makes it look all the brighter now in far-off memory, being so rare as, in one sense, it surely is to me! Nothing of the same kind now remains in Edinburgh; already in 1832, you in vain sought and inquired Where the general promenade, then, was? The general promenade was, and continues, nowhere - as so many infinitely nobler things already do! [12]

David Masson, who has written the fullest account of this period of Carlyle’s life, added a long section on the bad luck which prevented Carlyle and Scott meeting and working together at this time – Goethe having tried to engineer a meeting through sending a letter for Carlyle to deliver, though somehow the meeting never took place. Yet Masson records one tantalising might-have-been, as tantalising at the famous encounter between Burns and a youthful Walter Scott in Sciennes, which he heard about only many years later from David Aitken.

“Carlyle and Mr. Aitken, who had been walking in Princes Street, turned aside for a call at Mr. Tait’s. While they were there and talking with Mr. Tait, Scott came in – well known to both by sight. ‘Mr. Tait, have you got a copy of Horace at hand? I want to make a quotation,’ were Scott’s words on entering. The book having been brought,-- a handsome quarto, Dr. Aitken remembered,-- Scott sat down with it in his lap, and began to turn over the leaves, Carlyle and Mr. Aitken standing a little way off meanwhile, and Carlyle continuing his talk with Mr. Tait. Soon, as if attracted by the voice or by something said, Scott began to look up, the volume still resting in his lap. Several times he raised his eyes in the same fashion from the book to the two strangers, or to the one who was talking. The expression, as Dr Aitken interpreted it in recollection was as if he were saying to himself: ‘He is a kenspeckle-looking chiel that; I wonder who he is.’ – the date of this encounter I do not know. . .”[13]

It was from memories of that forgotten Edinburgh and the consciousness that it had gone, with the personalities that made it great and the political considerations which made it for a decade or more a true Northern Athens, that Carlyle’s later essay Scott was written, ostensibly a review of Lockhart’s still-unfinished biography, but more (as I have tried to present it here) a clearing-out of Carlyle’s earlier attitudes, a distancing of himself from that earlier Carlyle of the 1820s, a repositioning of himself in London coping with the exhaustion of the months following The French Revolution, trying to focus on the difficulties of here and now, rather than the depiction of the past for pleasure – or the buying of farms.

Trollope, on the other hand, was writing in the 1880s, and the Autobiography was published in 1883, the year after his death. Of course, Victoria was still on the throne, and would be for almost two decades: but Trollope was looking back, not forwards, and summing up a long and almost unbelievably productive lifetime of professional writing. He can be forgiven a certain self-satisfaction: unlike Carlyle in 1837 his career was behind him, and his place in literary circles assured. What he does, like Carlyle, is look back to Scott as a writer in an age beyond touch, almost beyond imagination: to a Scott who wrote copiously and profitably, and to a high degree of professionalism. Where the critics part company in is in their estimate of what Scott did with the gifts each clearly saw he was born with: to Carlyle, the great restaurateur obviously wasted those prodigious gifts to entertain, and while Carlyle laid that prejudice aside to acknowledge Scott’s courage, his personal integrity, his attractive character which allowed him to assume so well the leading role as writer of his country in his time, the Victorian in Carlyle in 1837 could not lay aside high seriousness and in the end the verdict was of a career wasted. Fifty years on, Trollope took a larger view: lacking Carlyle’s vivid insight into the early years of Scott’s career in wartime Scotland and postwar Edinburgh, he saw Scott in the context of the other successful novelists of the early decades of his century, a supreme professional whose novels contributed to the widening-out of fiction to a universal pleasure to be enjoyed by everyone. The infamous 1960 trial of D.H.Lawrence and Penguin books was still many years ahead, with its ominous question from the prosecuting counsel to the jury, is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read? To Trollope, Scott was one of the authors who had already bypassed the question:

Looking back to the past generation, I may say with certainty that such was the operation of the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Walter Scott. Coming down to my own times, I find such to have been the teaching of Thackeray, of Dickens, and of George Eliot. Speaking, as I shall speak to any who may read these words, with the absence of self personality which the dead may claim, I will boast that such has been the result of my own writing. Can any one by search through the works of the six great novelists I have named, find a scene, a passage, or a word that would teach a girl to be immodest, or a man to be dishonest? TA 233

Carlyle, had he had the opportunity, would probably have agreed: but he would have gone on to question the result of such open access fiction, and the use Scott might have put his enormous talents to. The viewpoints are a world apart, or more accurately half a century apart. What comes through, and survives all the disagreement, is the respect for the huge talent that lay behind the Waverley Novels, and behind that again the colossal output which was the common thread which bound the stories of Scott, Carlyle and Trollope, heroes all.

The chairman thanked the president for his toast and then proposed the customary formal toast to the City of Edinburgh; regretfully the Lord Provost was unable to be with us on this occasion.

---

[1] Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography ed.P.D.Edwards (Oxford, World’s Classics, 1980). Hereafter referred to after quotations as TA. In his lifetime too Carlyle witnessed a revolution in public attitudes to fiction which, in his Ecclefechan childhood, had been completely proscribed: arriving at Edinburgh University, Carlyle flung himself into this new territory. For more details see “Irving, Carlyle and the Stage”, Studies in Scottish Literature VIII, 3 (January, 1971), 166-73 and “Carlyle and the University of Edinburgh” in Four Centuries: Edinburgh University Life 1583-1983 ed. G. Donaldson (Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 53-70.

[2] “I had Walter Scott’s novels and the Iliad . . . for constant reading when I was a child.. . .

The series of the Waverley novels, then drawing towards its close, was still the chief source of delight in all households caring for literature”.. See http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/sawyer/1.html

[3] Ruskin, Praeterita ed. Kenneth Clark (Oxford, Oxford University Poress, 1978 paperback ed), 30.

[4] Edmund Gosse, Father and Son ed. Michael Newton (Oxford, the World’s Classics, 2004), 7, 14.

[5] The Journal of Sir Walter Scott ed. W.E.K.Anderson (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1972), 391.

[6] Two Note Books of Thomas Carlyle ed. C.E.Norton (New York, Grolier Club, 1898), 214-5.

[7] Ed Ioan Williams, Sit Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction (London, Routledge, 1968), 10-11.

[8] Two Note Books 71.

[9] Carlyle’s Essay on Sir Walter Scott ed. Arnold Smith (London, Dent, 1925), hereafter identified as CS.

[10] Compare Wordsworth to R P Gillies, 25 April 1815, quoted from Scott: The Critical Heritage ed. John O Hayden (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 86. “…These [Scott] novels are likely to be much overrated on their first appearance, and will afterwards be as much undervalued”

[11] Quoted by Arnold Smith, introducing Carlyle’s Essay on Scott 5.

[12] Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences ed.K.J.Fielding and Ian Campbell (Oxford, World’s Classics, 1997), 411-2.

[13] David Masson, Edinburgh Sketches and Memories (Edinburgh and London, A & C Black, 1892) 342-352; this anecdote on 352.