Walter Scott and Charles Lamb are two authors whose prose experiments respond incisively to the politics of character and characterisation in reform-era literature and culture. By 1820, Scott was ‘widely identified as “the Great Unknown”, “the author of Waverley”’, and although it was not until 1827 that financial pressures forced him to reveal his identity, an August 1814 review of Waverley had already supposed that Scott had written it. Anyone who has read the introductory sections to, say, Old Mortality (1816) can safely conclude with Duncan that ‘Scott's prose resists the dynamics of transparency and identification we have come to associate with nineteenth-century realism’. The 1830 Magnum Opus edition of Old Mortality opens with an introduction to the to the Tales of My Landlord series (Old Mortality being the second novel of the First Series of Tales), narrated by Jedediah Cleishbotham, parish clerk of Gandercleugh. Cleishbotham informs us that he has collected and edited certain tales written by a local schoolmaster, Peter Pattieson. This initial introduction by Cleishbotham is followed by the introduction to Old Morality written by Scott for the 1830 edition. After that we have a sort of third introduction, which is actually chapter 1, in which Pattieson tells readers how he once met Robert Paterson, aka Old Mortality, and ‘“embod[ied] into one compressed narrative many of the anecdotes which I had the advantage of deriving from Old Mortality”’. Meanwhile, according to the general framework of Tales, Old Mortality and the other novels in each series belong somehow to the ‘Landlord’ of Wallace Inn in Gandercleugh. After Pattieson's account of having met Paterson (whose names seem to blend into one another) in ‘chapter one’, the story of Old Mortality proper begins. This use of fictional compilers/editors to tell stories was obviously not new with Scott. It was part of ‘a long and illustrious novelistic tradition’ dating from Cervantes and including authors as diverse as Swift, Walpole, Mackenzie and Goethe.