WALTER SCOTT - Relationship between the historical novel and the national identity

WALTER SCOTT - Relationship between the historical novel and the national identity

One of the most important features of Walter Scott is that he was an English-language author with a Scottish heart.

He was born in Edinburgh but he spent most of his childhood in the countryside next to the Scottish border because of his wealth problems: during this period he started to study the history of Scotland, especially the Jacobite uprising of 1745.

Scott's novel Waverley is set just during this period reporting the problem of the indipendence of the Scotland's kingdom. In the Postscript  to the novel he said:

<< There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone such a complete change as this kingdom of Scotland".

The gradual infiltration of ideas and wealth from the south and the measures of London's governement changed the Scotland's patterns of life; in his novel aimed at recreating the past ways of live through the celebration of the glorious past of his country and expressing the regret for the loss of the old values of heroism and loyality.

The new literary form called historical novel expressed this feeling: it was a combination of fictional and historical events aimed not to exploit the remoteness of the past but to show its closeness to the present. The past for Scott was seen as an inevitably leading to the present, not superior to the past.

The historical context is very important to understand this thought: the Napoleonic wars, for the first time, awakened national feelings through the european people. Some philosophers and writers, like Scott, felt this spirit like a recollection of the past to escape from the new values of the world, dominated only by economic laws.

Scott's aim was not to create a national consciousness: this was a feature of another great historical novelist, the italian writer Alessandro Manzoni.