Walter Scott and the Historical Novel

This chapter explores Walter Scott and the historical novel. Scott made the novel a modern epic form by making it national, and he made it national by making it historical. In doing so, he endowed the novel with the aura of philosophical dignity attached to history, the most prestigious of the Enlightenment human sciences, especially in Scotland. The historical novel became the ‘classical’ form of the novel as such throughout the nineteenth century, retaining popularity and prestige well after the major Victorian novelists had absorbed Scott's techniques for a historicism trained on modern conditions. The combination of history and Bildungsroman inaugurated in Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814) would provide a model for aspiring national literatures across Continental Europe, its imperial frontiers, and its colonial satellites, well into the next century.