Walter Scott was open to the concept of caricature’s potential for accuracy, particularly for documenting the varied textures of historical reality. In his novels and other writings, Scott explores caricatúra’s possible associations with particularity, accuracy and actual reference, as opposed to distortion, oversimplification and misrepresentation.

To begin this chapter, I contextualise Scott’s individual concept of caricature in his knowledge of ritratti carichi and his admiration for John Kay’s ‘caricatures’ of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, analysing passages in The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Rob Roy. I argue that Scott looked to Kay’s caricature prints as a model for comically and satirically rendered non-protagonists to populate a compendious historical realism. In the second part of the chapter, I look at how compendious realism attracted accusations of ‘caricature’ for its perceived artificiality and heterogeneity – drawing on caricatúra’s meanings of effort and contrast – and how Scott anticipated and responded to those accusations. I consider the connection Scott makes between caricature and the picturesque in Guy Mannering and Rob Roy, which offer justifications for ‘caricature’ as an effect of artificial combinations that cater to readers’ mixed tastes with a synthetic compendious realism. I describe how, in the later part of his novel-writing career, Scott imagined that romance-readers were becoming bored and sceptical of characterisations that luxuriated in peculiarity and contrast. I analyse his efforts – in an 1821 essay on Tobias Smollett for the Novelist’s Library and in a selection of Magnum Opus editions – to explain these characters’ historical accuracy and to come to terms with their literary obsolescence. Caleb Balderstone (The Bride of Lammermoor) and Sir Piercie Shafton (The Monastery) exemplify the problem of the ‘historically explained caricature’ whose literary value is especially dependent on readers’ understanding of a specific historical context.

While some of Scott’s historically peculiar characters were criticised for being superficially different ‘temporary characters’, in other cases he develops figures of romanticised ‘deep peculiarity’ extending through historical time periods. In the third part of the chapter, I argue that Scott romanticises dwarfism and gigantism in order to perform the factualisation of these supposedly legendary figures, with the extraordinary bodies of Sir Edward Mauley and Rob Roy MacGregor being based on accounts of real individuals. (The techniques in Scott’s grotesquing descriptions of dwarf characters – used across The Black Dwarf, Rob Roy, The Pirate, The Talisman and Peveril of the Peak – are discussed further in Chapter 6 alongside Shelley’s ‘horrid realist’ depictions of dwarf and giant characters.)

The last part of the chapter returns to the idea of the explained caricature, looking through the lens of ‘sympathy’ at Scott’s characterisations of national and ethnic minorities, where sympathy is extended to Scots and withdrawn from Jews. First, I close-read Scott’s sympathetic account of the Scots ‘body-corporate’ in The Heart of Mid-Lothian against unsympathetic representations in Rob Roy and Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Scotch Character’. Then, I look at Scott’s version of the ‘self-inflicted caricature’ in Ivanhoe’s anti-Semitic characterisation of ‘Isaac of York’ (with reference to the real person ‘Abraham of Bristol’), making comparisons with Edgeworth’s references to Abraham’s torture in her 1817 novel Harrington. On the one hand, the rhetorical strategy of explained caricature can participate in national prejudices ‘more rationally’ and ‘more sympathetically’, by identifying historical points of origin for unpleasant traits and behaviours perceived as national characteristics, and assigning those characteristics noble or pragmatic motives – which is what happens in The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Rob Roy. In Ivanhoe, on the other hand, the same rhetorical strategy is used both to intellectualise racism – rationalising it and bestowing an intellectual character on it – and to shift blame for historical anti-Semitism and persecution onto Jews. ‘Historical caricature’ is latent in Scott’s compendious realism that extensively (and self-consciously) relies on readers acquiring and being complicit in a shared understanding of history. The historical romance, its diverse characterisations concerned with how people really were, seems to generate a disturbingly accelerated process of realism being disintegrated by sceptical readers.

Kay’s Caricatures

When Scott sets the scene in the second chapter of The Heart of Mid-Lothian, he aligns his recovery of historical characters with the artist John Kay’s first-hand attention to the details that might escape dignified historiographies or flattering painted portraits. Scott embellishes the historical background to the Porteous riots with a description of Edinburgh’s city guard, a civic militia originally formed in 1513 in response to the violent unrest following the Battle of Flodden.¹ The City Guard was eventually rendered unnecessary by the passage of the 1805 Edinburgh Police Act and the formation of a new police force – but the Guard was not disbanded until 1817, when the medieval Tolbooth was demolished.² Writing in 1818, with the knowledge that the Guard would soon pass out of living memory, Scott records the peculiar appearance of the militia men who were still employed in the later decades of the eighteenth century, many of them Highlanders, with the intended purpose of keeping order on Edinburgh’s streets. Scott’s epigraph to the chapter quotes the last stanza of Robert Fergusson’s poem ‘The Daft-Days’ (1772), which praises drinking and music in Edinburgh during the twelve days between Christmas and the new year, and ends with an ominous reference to ‘that black banditti, / The City Guard’; Scott also refers to Fergusson’s ‘Hallow-Fair’ (1772), which warns of ‘this black squad’. Fergusson’s poems are particularly well qualified to evoke the City Guard, Scott notes, because they are based on the poet’s first-hand drunken encounters with the militia when they were on duty during public holidays.³

Scott imagines Fergusson’s poetic record of personal experience, together with his own childhood memories, becoming a textual accompaniment or ‘illustration’ to John Kay’s pictorial ‘caricatures’ of the City Guard:

Pictorial caricature is construed here as a uniquely evocative witness to history: it is visually particular, unflatteringly accurate and concerned with actual reference such that it can substitute for personal memories of people in all their regional and individual peculiarity.

The caricature of ritratti carichi might find a place in Nancy Armstrong’s ‘prehistory’ of visual realism,⁵ with portraits like Kay’s seen by his contemporaries as material traces able to preserve the actual living qualities of the dead, rather than paying tribute to idealised versions of the person. In this concept of caricature, accuracy and particularity are supposed to derive from the artist’s personal familiarity with his or her subject, whether through an on-the-spot encounter or continual acquaintance. Kay, supported by an annuity from Sir William Nisbet of Dirleton (who had employed Kay as a body-servant), was known to draw most of his subjects from life, opportunistically. Hugh Paton’s testimony that people rarely posed for Kay to draw them helps explain why so many of his portraits, particularly the ‘society caricatures’, show people in the street, in profile, conversing with their peers or passing by the artist’s viewpoint.⁶ Quick, on-the-spot drawings, attempting to capture the distinguishing features of individuals as seen in action, are described admiringly by Scott as ‘caricatures’. Scott owned a copy of the anonymous Scots English poem The Unwelcome Guest (1799), which praises Kay as the ‘wonderfu true visage taker’.⁷ In Redgauntlet, drawing inspiration from Lockhart’s penchant for caricaturing as a law student, Darsie Lattimer’s law school notebook is ‘“filled with caricatures of the professors and my fellow students”’.⁸ Such drawings held out the possibility of a visual representation approximating how people appeared when physically encountered in a social setting. Because they put unflattering emphasis on the distinctive features that other portraits would minimise or leave out, even the caricature portraits in deliberately disapproving single-sheet prints could be judged good likenesses – as in the Dublin Literary Gazette’s claim about the satirical prints of the Duke of Wellington produced around the time of the Roman Catholic Relief Act, mentioned in Chapter 1: ‘Those who judge of the Duke of Wellington’s countenance by the highly finished prints sold in the shops, judge erroneously; the caricatures give much more accurate resemblances, and some of them possess an exactness of similitude to the original [such that] one forgets that it is a caricature, and feels as if one were actually looking at the Duke.’⁹

Caricatúra was often used to suggest that a portrait focused too exclusively on accuracy, however, particularly when it was at the expense of the subject’s feelings. Scott’s journal entry for 1 March 1826 records how his bankrupt drawing master, George Walker,¹⁰ effaced a portrait of himself by a well-known artist:

The offensive caricatúra here is ‘faithful’, only ‘too accurate’, an ‘admirable likeness’. In Rob Roy, Scott suggests the difficulty of separating the supposedly ‘unjust’ caricature from genuine likeness, when caricatúra possesses its own perverse realism. When Frank overhears Andrew’s ‘perverted account of my temper and studies’, he admits that ‘my self-love, while revolting against it as a caricature, could not, nevertheless, refuse to recognise it as a likeness’; later in the novel, Frank relies on distinct meanings of ‘caricature’ and ‘likeness’ to protest Rashleigh’s remarks about his father: ‘“Mine was a likeness, Rashleigh; yours is a caricatura.”’¹² Accurate pictorial ‘caricatures’ – Skirving’s drawing of Walker and Kay’s portraits of the Edinburgh city guard – demonstrated for Scott the power and perverse realism of the unflattering caricatúra.

Scott owned at least one Kay print relevant to the City Guard passage in The Heart of Mid-Lothian, the 1796 etching James McKean at the Bar Edin^r (NPG D31984), where the accused McKean is guarded by two soldiers with smart uniforms, grim faces and sharp swords. He must also have seen one or more of Kay’s several prints that portray members of the City Guard as individuals, and carrying Lochaber axes. John Dhu features in at least three of these, appearing in Three Edin^r Bucks (1784) and The Old City Guard of Edinburgh (1786) as well as being the subject of Shon Dow (1784).¹³ A comparison with David Allan’s numerous prints of the City Guard clarifies why Scott would allude to Kay’s portraits, with their individualising and particularising qualities. Kay depicted many other individuals who were fixtures of Edinburgh street life in the late eighteenth century: the fops and ‘bucks’ of the volunteers, members of the aristocracy, shopkeepers, hawkers and beggars. Local ‘eccentrics’ portrayed by Kay include James Robertson of Kincraigie, continually thwarted in his ambition to be hanged as a martyr to the Stuart cause, and Jamie Duff, an ‘idiot boy’ who attended all the funeral processions that took place in the city. Many others practised traditional occupations that were becoming ‘picturesque’ in the aesthetic taste of the Romantic period, or whose advanced age made them objects of historical interest: John Steele, a Perthshire beggar; Geordie Syme, official Piper of Dalkeith; John Tait, a broom-maker; Margaret Suttie, a salt hawker; and William Wilson, ‘Mortar Willie’, a chemist’s assistant who lived to be over a hundred years old. Ancient, antiquated or parochial: these were individuals perceived to make Edinburgh more ‘interesting’, and for whose portraits Kay often adopted more detailed, individualising and realist styles than for his portraits of lawyers, ministers and academics. Whereas some of his portraits are polite ‘society caricatures’, minimally individualised and holding little interest for anyone not acquainted with their subjects, Kay’s ‘romantic’ portraits present minute details, such as the texture of a heavy cloak, or the wrinkles round the eyes, as a documented reality that substitutes for really encountering the person. Whereas the society caricatures give an overall impression of sameness, these present an array of distinctive, heterogeneous elements – various professions, classes, regions and even historical periods – all existing compendiously in a single part of Scotland.

Scott’s admiration for ‘Kay’s caricatures’ suggests a parallel with how his novels’ compendious realism uses non-protagonist characters not only to provide humour and facilitate plots, but also to immerse the reader in a wealth of minute historical differences, presenting a world of visual and aural variety where it is worth attending to the different ways people look and speak.

Anti-caricature and Compendious Realism

By offering this concept of caricature as a tool for compendious realism, Scott’s novels anticipate readers’ objections to their deliberately contrasting characters, settings, moods and language. In anti-caricature rhetoric objecting to compendious realism, ‘caricature’ denotes an unpleasant effect resulting from the artist’s or writer’s labour to synthesise in one work the disparate things that readers might expect of it. Such realism squashes things together in ways readers might find implausible or distasteful. They might like comedy to be kept separate from tragedy, or a modern Glasgow separate from a romantic Scottish Highlands, or a garrulous smuggler from a dignified lady, or Lallans from ‘pure English’. Scott works to bring these disparate things together, in the knowledge that such synthesis can be read as failure to conceal the novel’s artificiality – a belaboured ‘caricature’ that strikes the reader with too many effects and contrasts.

Scott’s concept of caricature’s realism collides with anti-caricature rhetoric in Guy Mannering (1815), where a landscape sketch exemplifies caricature’s association with conspicuous artistic labour and artificial combination, but from which emerges a remarkable likeness of reality. The novel’s central character, Henry Bertram alias Vanbeest Brown, was kidnapped by smugglers as a child, and conveyed from his native Scotland to Holland. Bertram experiences the ‘levels of the isle of Zealand’ as a flat ‘blank’ conspicuously lacking in glens and mountains. Scott had not seen this flatness for himself at the time of writing Guy Mannering, but may have read published accounts of the Walcheren campaign that include descriptions of the island. Letters from Flushing (1809) observes that while ‘there are some elevations which the people are pleased to call hills […] the island has a very near resemblance to a billiard-table; so level, that a ball rolled from one side, would pass without impediment to the other’.¹⁴ Leaving flat Holland behind, Bertram catches his friend Delaserre’s ‘Swiss fanaticism for mountains and torrents’ while retaining an ‘indelible impression’ of Scotland. Returning to Britain and travelling through Cumbria on his way to his estate in Galloway, Bertram is struck by the peculiarities of the hilly landscape. Like a good tourist of the picturesque, he tries to capture them on paper.¹⁵ When he compares his drawings with a friend’s, he realises that in trying to render the heterogeneity of a landscape characterised by contrasts, he has exaggerated it: ‘“Some drawings have I attempted, but I succeed vilely—Dudley, on the contrary, draws delightfully, with a rapid touch that seems like magic, while I labour and botch, and make this too heavy, and that too light, and produce at last a base caricature.’”¹⁶ Bertram attributes the ‘caricature’ of his drawing to lack of skill in pictorial art. The better artist cultivates restraint, compromising between peculiarity and plausibility – as a connoisseur says of Tyrell’s landscape drawing in Saint Ronan’s Well (1824), ‘“[h]ere is both force and keeping.”’¹⁷ In Bertram’s landscape, as elsewhere, caricature is visible in the effort of artificially recreating the picturesque: Hazlitt, in his essay on the Elgin Marbles, remarks that lesser artists’ representations of mountains ‘lose probability and effect by striving at too much’.¹⁸

However, in Guy Mannering, the ‘base caricature’ of northern landscape is not a complete failure. Bertram’s exaggerations have a fidelity of their own, evoking the exile’s palimpsestic view of landscape: the drawings are Cumbria viewed through a childhood memory, indelible though perhaps dreamlike and distorted, of Scotland; they are Cumbria viewed through his difficult travels through mountain ranges in Europe. The drawings are ‘a vile success’, as Bertram suggests. Their deformities implicitly created by the pressures of the past, they fail to represent Cumbria but succeed in representing something else. Whereas Dudley’s talent and training enable him to draw accurately what is in front of him, Bertram’s aesthetic sensibility is synthetic, preoccupied with what is not there, and seeing all landscapes in a compendium of memory and desire. By juxtaposing Bertram’s bad drawing with his impressions of the landscapes he has passed through, Guy Mannering quietly offers a counterpoint to grumbles about picturesque artists ‘caricaturing’ the natural world.

It was understood in the Romantic period that the picturesque tips easily into a caricature of itself.¹⁹ Writing about John Martin’s popular landscape paintings,²⁰ Hazlitt complains that ‘his mountains are piled up one upon the back of the other, like the stories of houses’, striving for sublime effects through multiplication and elevation. Thus caricatured, nature acquires a manufactured quality. ‘A landscape’, Hazlitt says, ‘is not an architectural elevation. You may build a house as high as you can lift up stones with pulleys and levers, but you cannot raise mountains into the sky merely with the pencil’.²¹ Hazlitt refers to the topographical features in Edinburgh’s Royal Park, mentioned in James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1788), to illustrate nature’s superior creative powers:

Reality tips into fantasy when an artist attempts to heighten our view of a topographical structure made by violent mechanisms which have already gone to the edge of what is materially impossible, and whose every creation is completely and original. The landscape artist should observe and copy, not improvise and fantasise. In ‘caricature’, the industrious hand of the artist is too conspicuous.

Non-protagonist characters in Scott’s novels have sometimes been seen as too miscellaneous and as conspicuous in ways that make the author’s labour visible and shake the reader’s illusion of reality. A novelist desperately in want of novelty could also be tempted into overworking familiar materials, and mixing them in unlikely new combinations. In his 1822 essay for the Quarterly Review, Nassau Senior cautions writers against ‘introducing something of overcolouring and caricature, into figures, in his endeavours to render striking, the representations of a well-known class. A painter may be tempted to put horses and cows into some studied attitude, or group them too artificially, who would not thinking of anything more than an unaffected resemblance of a hippopotamus’.²³ Senior is concerned with Scott’s comic and satirically rendered characters, disapproving the ‘fools and bores […] from Monk Barns down to the Euphuist’ (Sir Piercie Shafton) as an expedient means of mixing humour with tragedy: ‘an artificial effort after the contrasts of tragi-comedy, to have the broadest and most extravagant caricature continually dragged into studied opposition to the tragic characters and incidents’.²⁴ Picturesque landscape gardening becomes a helpful analogy both for Scott’s seemingly artificial contrasts of mood and for the diversity of the social panorama in his novels: ‘It is the old mistake’, writes Senior, ‘of the first landscape gardeners, who, in their rage to imitate nature, used to plant dead trees, and build ant-hills, close to a house’ – an allusion to William Kent, who was accused of inserting incongruous objects into his picturesque garden designs.²⁵ Senior singles out Caleb Balderstone, an important character in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), as ‘the most pertinacious, the most intrusive’ of Scott’s attempts to create comic diversions with characters.²⁶ Perhaps as a result of such criticisms, Scott himself came to wonder (according to Lockhart’s Memoirs) that with Caleb, ‘he might have sprinkled rather too much parsley over his chicken’.²⁷ When artists and writers are seen deliberately to select, combine and present miscellaneous products – rather than seeming to present what already exists contiguously in nature – they become builders, planters, cooks, caricaturists.

Such caricature talk about over-seasoned and out-of-place non-protagonist characters is already anticipated by Scott’s own gestures at the artificiality of novelistic realism in his novels. Scott is often explicit about picturesque landscapes, characters, customs and objects as supplies for a reader, viewer or consumer whose appetite simultaneously demands novelty and variety, yet also consistency. Novel-readers are like Andrew Fairservice’s lady clients, ‘“aye crying for apricocks, pears, plums, and apples […] without distinction o’ seasons”’ – wanting this and that, and all the time.²⁸ Rob Roy provides the terms for Senior’s objections to eccentric characters as the excrescences of an over-enthusiastic landscape gardener, where Andrew’s preoccupation with the delicious fruits of his horticulture ironically parallels Frank’s taste for the picturesque. Mocking his employer’s preference for untended landscape, Andrew claims that ‘“[Frank]’ll glower at an auld warld barkit aik-snag as if it were a quizmaddam in full bearing, and a naked craig wi’ a burn jawing out ower’t is unto him as a garden garnisht with flowering knots and choice pot-herbs.”’²⁹ Andrew’s juxtapositions, of a broken tree stump with a fruit tree imported from France, and a rock formation with a herb garden, supplant the picturesque nature of the ‘romanticist’ with the productive nature of the ‘realist’. Andrew’s taste has a proprietorial, as well as a pragmatic, dimension: when he visits Andrew’s cottage, Frank notices his jargonelle pear tree, nicknamed cuisse-madame in reference to the fruit’s bulge, the same prized ‘quizmaddam’ Andrew contrasts with Frank’s preferred oak tree later in the novel.³⁰ Fruits and vegetables are substituted for feminine beauty again in Andrew’s remark that when ‘“a kail-blade, or a colliflour, glances sae glegly by moonlight—it’s like a leddy in her diamonds”’.³¹ Andrew’s appreciation of the beautiful is just as partial as Frank’s: one would rather look at a crag, the other a cauliflower. When we first see Diana Vernon, she is not a lady in diamonds, but something much more exciting to Frank, a lady in masculine riding clothes. By the time of the novel’s setting, that fashion had been around for a while: Samuel Pepys wrote of ‘Ladies of Honour dressed in their riding garbs, with coats and doublets with deep skirts, just, for all the world, like mine […] which was an odde [sic] sight, and a sight did not please me.’³² The style is ‘perfectly new’ and pleasing to Frank, however, and he is struck by ‘the wild gaiety of the scene, and the romance of her singular dress and unexpected appearance’.³³ Frank wants to see what he has not seen, and what exceeds his control – novelty, romance, wildness, female masculinity – the opposite of Andrew’s well-kept garden. Thus, Rob Roy’s comedy of tastes suggests the problem that compendious realism proposes to solve: how to satisfy readers with such different preferences, without offering variety and incongruity? You cannot please everyone all the time – but put Andrew Fairservice by Die Vernon, a cabbage in moonlight by a lady in coat skirts, and you might increase your chances. Compendious realism anticipates a mixture of readers, and hopes for readers with mixed taste. Like Henry Bertram’s perversely realist ‘caricature’ of Cumbria, Scott’s compendious realism is a fixed viewpoint on a labour-intensive assemblage of people and things that might strictly belong to different layers but which appear to be present in the same place and moment.

The earliest readers of Scott’s novels were keenly interested in his highly individualised fictive characters, many of whom became household names. At the same time, early readers’ objections to Scott’s compendious realism as artificial, aesthetically inconsistent and/or empirically implausible often focus on the most comic, satirically rendered and peculiar characters in the novels. In the 1820s, Scott began to see these characters as particularly vulnerable to changing tastes. More than landscapes, these characters determined readers’ opinions of how successfully compendious realism seemed to comprehend different genres and to gratify taste. Non-protagonist characters strongly differentiated by historically specific national, religious, ethnic and professional traits also became targets for readers’ scepticism about the novels’ claims to combine the real with the romantic. The first chapter of Saint Ronan’s Well pre-emptively defends its characterisation of Meg Dods – a character, Scott’s narrator admits, ‘somewhat overcharged in the features’ – as belonging to ‘a peculiar class’ whom the narrator’s contemporaries north of the border will remember. The novel’s opening portrays Meg’s peculiarities of physique, temper and manners, introducing her catchphrase ‘and what for no?’³⁴ Scott felt the need to justify peculiar characters as accurate of particular nations, classes and historical periods. When readers rejected these historically specific characters, would they soon reject the novels altogether, refusing credit for Scott’s speculative combination of history with romance? In his review of Frankenstein, Scott imagines the novel-reader as a bank, advancing the author credulity: ‘The author opens a sort of account-current with the reader; drawing upon him, in the first place, for credit to that degree of the marvellous which he proposes to employ.’³⁵ This connection between the author’s creative liability and the author’s financial liability became personal for Scott in the depressing atmosphere of the 1820s.

In an essay written for the Novelist’s Library in 1821, and his revisions to that essay in 1827, Scott responds to the accusations of ‘caricature’ in the critical reception of Smollett’s novels, and justifies his own peculiar characters by proxy. This defence of Smollett seemed necessary because in the early nineteenth century Smollett’s place in the canon was threatened by an association with ‘caricature’. Previously, it had been generally accepted that Smollett’s depictions of sailors, based on his personal experience of working as a naval surgeon, were true to life. John Dunlop refers to this consensus in his History of Fiction (1814): ‘No one wishes to be told, for the twentieth time, that [Smollett] is distinguished for his delineation of […] naval characters.’³⁶ But taste was turning against Smollett and his sailors, and Dunlop ventures that the characters in Peregrine Pickle (1751) are ‘a little caricatured’.³⁷ An essay in The Retrospective Review contrasts Smollett’s peculiar sailors with Defoe’s naval characters, who possess an ‘air of truth and reality’, and pairs Smollett with Fielding as writers whose imaginative talents have ‘unfitted them to be the humble copyists of nature, and the faithful historians of human life’.³⁸ Later, Smollett’s comic rendition of eighteenth-century naval life was given short shrift by a new generation with experience of the professionalised nineteenth-century navy. A passage on Allan Cunningham’s novel Paul Jones (1826) in the Noctes Ambrosianae compares Cunningham not with Smollett, but with ‘the truly naval author of the Pilot’, James Fenimore Cooper.³⁹ William Glascock, who served in the Royal Navy between 1800 and 1855, describes Smollett in his essay on ‘naval novels’ as ‘not […] a painter of real life [but] a caricaturist’.⁴⁰ When The North American Review pits Scott against Smollett in a fantasy tournament of British novelists, Smollett’s defeat is down to ‘the coarse caricature of his pencil’.⁴¹ Anna Letitia Barbauld, in 1810, is an early voice of opposition to Smollett’s ‘caricatures’: she describes Commodore Trunnion, in her essay on Smollett for The British Novelists, as ‘scarcely like anything human […] the Caliban of Smollett’, and Trunnion’s wife as ‘still more overcharged’.⁴²

Reissued in 1820 and foundational to the canonisation of the English-language novel, Barbauld’s popular series was a model for Scott’s Novelist’s Library. Her treatment of Smollett put Scott on the defensive. Whereas Barbauld includes only The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) in her thirty-volume series, Scott makes room for Smollett’s entire oeuvre in the much smaller Novelist’s Library: a move that was part of the series’s ‘remasculinisation’ of the novel, with only two women among the fourteen writers represented.⁴³ The Novelist’s Library also addresses Barbauld’s critique of Smollett’s sailors as ‘caricatures’, a judgement that may well have played a part in her decision to include Humphry Clinker but not Roderick Random (1748) or Peregrine Pickle in her series. Scott’s approving remarks on Smollett’s peculiar characters could also be applied to his own. His defence of Smollett’s ‘striking’ yet ‘accurate’ characters was presented to the public in 1821, the same year as the essay for the Quarterly Review where Nassau William Senior gives his opinion that eccentric characters are blots on all the novels Scott had written since 1817; and in 1817, Francis Jeffrey had criticised some of Scott’s characters as ‘caricatures […] after the fashion of the caricatures in the novels of Smollett’.⁴⁴ While Scott acknowledges the grounds for seeing Smollett’s sailors as caricatures, he insists that their extravagance does not make them inaccurate. There are sailor characters in Peregrine Pickle, he thinks, which ‘border on caricature’ (Trunnion, Pipes and Hatchway); others in Roderick Random are ‘truth and nature itself’ (Lieutenant Bowling and Jack Rattlin).

Into the established consensus on the verisimilitude of Smollett’s sailors, Scott incorporates the idea that proximity to ‘caricature’ actually makes a character more vividly real: they are ‘striking’, ‘characteristic’ and ‘historic’, perhaps like Kay’s caricatures of the Edinburgh city guard. The peculiarities that make a character liable to be seen as a caricature, especially by later generations, can serve as a record of characteristics that might not be tasteful or even credible, but which give the reader a window on the past as a many-textured combination of distinctive elements, whose looks and manners do not conform to the dignity of Tragedy or History:

Scott concludes his essay on Smollett with a redemption of the naval ‘caricatures’ on aesthetic grounds, praising their vividness and diversity by comparison with the paintings of Rubens.⁴⁶ Leigh Hunt, in Table-Talk, would agree with Scott’s view that Smollett incorporated truth in extravagance, allowing the novelist to have been ‘a masterly observer’ as well as ‘the finest of caricaturists’: one whose ‘caricatures are always substantially true: it is only the complexional vehemence of his gusto that leads him to toss them up as he does, and tumble them on our plates’.⁴⁷ Here, Smollett’s energy, his tossing and tumbling, makes him conspicuous as a cook of characters – but, Scott and Hunt insist, strong seasoning and varied combinations do not interfere too much with the substance.

In the 1821 essay, Scott states his special admiration for Smollett’s comic character Obadiah Lismahago, the Scottish lieutenant who appears in Humphry Clinker as the Don Quixote of eighteenth-century British imperialism. Smollett explicitly presents Lismahago to the reader as a mixture and an ‘original’, pointing out his peculiar and heterogeneous traits. Physically, Lismahago is a cadaver exquis of odd body parts: a skull scalped, ‘patched and plastered’, joined to a face ‘half a yard in length, brown and shrivelled’, on top of a figure ‘very narrow’ in places and ‘very thick’ in others.⁴⁸ Other characters in the novel relish Lismahago as a ‘high flavoured dish’ whose peculiarities fascinate them,⁴⁹ and who is caught in farcical incidents. When he is forced to climb out of a window in his nightshirt, ‘long lank limbs and posteriors […] illumined by the links and torches which the servants held up’, an onlooker laughs: ‘“O, what a subject!—O, what caricatura!”’⁵⁰ Lismahago’s most continually accentuated peculiarity is his patriotism, which leads him into specious reasoning, ‘undertak[ing] to prove that poverty was a blessing to a nation; that oatmeal was preferable to wheat-flour’.⁵¹ When Scott argues that Smollett’s characterisation of Lismahago is grounded in historical reality, he holds out the possibility of an actual referent:

Scott employed this kind of authentication technique again when he revised the essay on Smollett for his Miscellaneous Prose Works. To the paragraph on Smollett’s sailors, he added a final sentence that addresses criticisms of Smollett’s characters based on ignorance of eighteenth-century naval manners:

As in his defences of Lismahago and Meg Dods, Scott refers to personal memory as the best way to authenticate characters whose peculiar appearances and ways of speaking are not recorded anywhere else.

But how to rehabilitate these characters for readers who do not possess the memory to carry themselves back sixty or more years since? Smollett, his novels riddled with historical ‘caricatures’, would need advocacy for inclusion in the canon of the English-language novel. New processes of literary canonisation took place not only in the expert judgements of men and women of letters, but also in the selling of new editions to new generations of readers. Senior might disparage Scott’s ‘fools and bores’ as unnecessary additions to narratives involving more dignified characters – but since the eccentric characters, being enjoyed by so many of the novels’ first readers, were often integral to plots and to the characterisation of the other characters, they could not possibly be excised. Perhaps it would do, rather than toning them down or abridging them, to justify them by explaining their historical accuracy. The sentence Scott added to his essay on Smollett, to defend the accuracy of his historical ‘caricatures’, belongs with the material Scott chose to include in the Magnum Opus edition of his novels between 1829 and 1833.

Defending Historical ‘Caricatures’ in the Magnum Opus

By the 1830s, there was a widespread sense that Scott’s reputation, and the immense popularity of his works, was insecure.⁵⁴ In the decade that closed with the publication of the Magnum Opus edition of his novels, and even as he was assured of the profits from Woodstock (1826) and his Life of Napoleon (1827), Scott anticipated falling out of favour. He wrote in 1826 that ‘fashion changes and I am getting old and may become unpopular’. In 1827, he comforted himself, ‘[t]he public favour may wane indeed but it has not yet faild [sic] as yet and I must not be too anxious about that possibility’.⁵⁵ Scott’s speculation on his writing as an increasingly risky investment – the apprehensive repetition of ‘it has not yet faild as yet’ – chimes with Angela Esterhammer’s description of ‘a climate of speculation that reached its peak in 1824 […] when British culture was profoundly affected by a rapid and severe boom-and-bust cycle’.⁵⁶ The 1825 crash, and the financial collapse of the publishing enterprise in which he had heavily and profitably invested, had left Scott owing over £120,000. While this immense personal financial obligation loaded him with stress and depression, he was troubled by the idea of himself as a boom-and-bust author:

Recording the trustees’ assent to the Magnum Opus edition, Scott has windmills in his head. Reminiscent of Don Quixote’s most famous adventure, the windmill spun by popular taste corresponds with his view of chivalry as a problematic intersection of fantasy and reality in Ivanhoe, and about the mixed reception of the knight Sir Piercie Shafton, a comic character in The Monastery.

Scott’s Magnum Introduction to The Monastery devotes whole pages to defending this single character, a disproportionate attention that suggests a chain of associations in Scott’s speculation on the Magnum Opus: that chivalry might resolve the contradiction between history and romance; that the ‘chivalrous’ Sir Piercie is a synecdoche for the inherent absurdities of historical romance; and that readers’ ambivalence about Sir Pierce is, therefore, cause for worry. Once taken as a ridiculous caricature of Euphuism, Sir Piercie appears to represent the unravelling of historical romance’s contract between author and reader. Scott’s emphasis in the Magnum Introduction on apologising for ‘characters formed on the extravagances of temporary fashion’⁵⁸ echoes his sense of himself in the 1820s as dependent on specific literary fashions and tastes. His novels would remain giants only as long as public favour blew in the right direction.

When Constable first suggested a new edition of the novels in March 1823, he put it to Scott that a set of authoritative notes would secure the novel’s reputation as romances about real things, for which plausible – if not actual – referents could be found:

Among the volumes of annotations already being sold, the most notable was Robert Chambers’s Illustrations of the Author of Waverley: Being Notices and Anecdotes of Real Characters, Scenes, and Incidents, Supposed to Be Described in His Works (1822), a second edition being issued in 1825. William Chambers published an invasive biography uncovering the ‘real’ identity of Scott’s character Sir Edward Mauley, The Life and Anecdotes of the Black Dwarf, or David Ritchie (1820). The public’s bankable interest in such characters meant that Scott, like other authors, was frequently in the position of needing to deny that his more peculiar or satirically rendered characters were portraits of real people. This was the case from the very beginning: the last chapter of Waverley assures the reader that its ‘Lowland Scottish gentlemen and the subordinate characters are not given as individual portraits, but are drawn from the general habits of the period.’⁶⁰ At the same time, the perceived popularity of highly individualised comic characters may partly explain the accretive and amplifying revisions Scott made, in the process of bringing new editions of Waverley and Guy Mannering to press, to the characterisations of Dominie Sampson, Paulus Pleydell, Dandie Dinmont and the Baron of Bradwardine. The Magnum adjusts these characters’ idiolects with attention to their professional vocabularies and the orthographic representation of non-standard pronunciations; and, as J. H. Alexander notes, the Magnum Introductions posit the most memorably eccentric characters as inceptive to Scott’s early novels with Scottish settings.⁶¹

Scott thus resists Nassau Senior’s view of peculiar non-protagonist characters as superfluous additions to the novel. As well as claiming that the peculiar characters are foundational to the Scottish novels, the Magnum Introductions work hard to establish the historical reality of Scott’s subordinate eccentric characters more generally. This is clearest in the Magnum Introduction to The Monastery (1820), which devotes several pages of caricature talk to apologising for Sir Piercie Shafton. Scott seems to have observed that this character was underappreciated by the novel’s first readers. The first edition of The Monastery was no commercial or critical failure, but coming on the heels of Ivanhoe, its reception was relatively disappointing.

In the Magnum Introduction, Scott focuses his defence of the novel on its most remarkable characters, not to dispute their extravagance or implausibility, but to assert their basis in reality despite extravagance and implausibility. Historical facts, he insists, include things that are peculiar, implausible, fantastic, absurd. This fictive historical ‘reality’ does not necessitate actual referents, he reminds us, taking Robert Chambers to task for mistakenly identifying The Monastery’s pseudoepigraphic narrator, Captain Clutterbuck, as a ‘Mr. O—n of Melrose’, a neighbour and friend of Scott’s. Clutterbuck is like Susan Ferrier’s Mrs Gawffaw and Mrs Macshake: individualised enough to suggest that a real person might exist, but all the more historically real for Scott’s and Ferrier’s framing them as representatives of larger populations. It is only as fictive characters that they are individualised: while they are artificially made singular within the text of the novel, they are reproducible under a particular set of historical conditions. Without knowledge of those conditions, however, readers might understand the character as the novelist’s fanciful or downright absurd invention. This applies also to supernatural characters: Scott justifies the White Lady of Avenel as not only an imitation of literary example, but also a superstition local to the novel’s historical setting in the Scottish Borders, and a figure of some historical substance. Implicitly, the White Lady is excused from the charge of artificiality both by the fact of general belief in such phenomena, and by the idea that this general belief is confined to a time and place: elsewhere, at another time, she would not exist. She is not, like some other ghostly figures in other novels of the Romantic period, an example of the ‘explained supernatural’ – but her historical and regional credentials lend her the concrete particularity of literary realism. Lockhart recalls that while readers were scornful of Sir Piercie’s ‘grotesque absurdity’, it was actually the White Lady who was criticised as the ‘primary blot’ in The Monastery, with Sir Piercie ‘loudly, though not quite so generally, condemned’.

Despite the public’s more decisive judgement against the White Lady, however, the Magnum Introduction offers a much longer justification for Sir Piercie, perhaps suggesting that Scott was substituting Sir Piercie for more engrossing problem that stretched beyond this single character. If Clutterbuck could be generally real, and the White Lady contingently real, could Sir Piercie not be like Smollett’s sailors, styled as a ‘caricature’ but real in substance? Such ‘historical caricatures’, Scott recognised, might seem especially well suited to his historical fiction, since they would seem bizarre in a novel with an imprecise or contemporary setting. Literary ‘caricatures’ might be ultra-historical when they exaggerated temporal differences over ‘timeless’ human qualities, creating a strong effect of period authenticity. A caricature might be more ‘historically real’ than a serious and subtle character – more artefactual, a thing more palpably made by history – because the caricature’s reality is more exclusive to its precise historical context. But deprive the reader’s knowledge of that context, or lose the reader’s memory of the referent, and the character might become obnoxiously unreal.

Scott appears convinced in the Magnum Introduction to the 1830 edition of The Monastery that Sir Piercie fails as a character because readers’ knowledge of Euphuism is insufficient. While the Introduction attempts to correct that, it also risks prejudicing new readers against Sir Piercie by presenting him as a weak point in the novel and implying that his eccentricities are not adequately contextualised or explained within the novel itself. Scott’s rendering of euphuistic speech was regarded as absurd by several generations of readers, many of whom would have encountered him through the Magnum Opus’s apologies for him. Moreover, in its effort to defend Sir Piercie against the charge of absurdity, the Magnum Introduction and footnotes to The Monastery accuse Euphuism itself of being absurd. Within a few decades, Scott came to be seen as chiefly responsible for widespread misunderstanding of historical Euphuism, and Sir Piercie was notoriously a caricature. George Lillie Craik’s Pictorial History of England (1841) calls Sir Piercie ‘rather a caricature than a fair sample of Euphuism’.⁶² In a lecture first given in Edinburgh in 1870, Trollope identifies Scott’s over-dressed knight as the foremost example of courtly euphuism for modern readers: ‘We know it best in the caricature of Sir Piercie Shafton, “the Euphuist.”’⁶³ The OED mentions the character in its prescriptive note on ‘loose uses’ of euphuism, apparently ‘chiefly suggested by the absurd bombast which Scott puts into the mouth of Sir Piercie Shafton (who is described as a “Euphuist”) in The Monastery; this caricature, however, bears very little resemblance to the genuine “euphuism”’.⁶⁴ No wonder that when John Dover Wilson wrote a critical biography of John Lyly, author of Euphues, in 1970, he felt that Scott had already been ‘sufficiently called to account for his caricature of Lyly […] a historical faux pas’.⁶⁵ Reactions to the character were likely influenced by Scott’s attack on Lyly, ‘a clever but conceited author’, his mental powers ‘deformed by the most unnatural affectation that ever disgraced a printed page’.⁶⁶ I will discuss two excerpts from the Magnum Introduction’s long and recursive passage inspired by Sir Piercie – characterised by continual repetition of the words extremity, peculiarity, affectation, extravagance and absurdity – which both defends and admits the limitations of the characters Scott calls ‘temporary pieces’.⁶⁷

Reckoning with the built-in obsolescence of characters whose leading features must be historically explained, Scott appeals to his reader’s supposed familiarity with Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s satirically rendered courtiers, on whose dialogue he based Sir Piercie’s. Even ‘Shakspeare himself’, Scott pleads, drew characters too fashionable to retain either their realism or their entertainment value:

As a work whose subordinate yet indispensable characters bring comedy into close proximity with tragedy, Romeo and Juliet is a good model for the problem Scott identifies: that the satirising of peculiarities closely based on the manners, costume and other ‘temporary’ signifiers of a particular historical period will inevitably, sooner or later, leave readers with intermittent gaps in their comprehension of the literary work. The very characters initially intended as light entertainment might require the densest critical apparatus to explain why they were originally funny. All this amounts to an argument against Sir Piercie, since Scott is admitting that most early nineteenth-century readers coming to The Monastery would not have the knowledge to understand a satirical rendering of Euphuism even in the works of Shakespeare.

Scott was at disadvantage here, of course: whereas Jonson, Shakespeare and Smollett had depicted the absurd fashions of their own times, Scott had taken his from times and places with which many contemporary readers were unfamiliar. They might come to Scott’s novels with some idea, from history books, of the moral characters of famous historical figures, but they were learning the minutiae of historical texture largely from the novels themselves. For The Monastery, this texture included Euphues, something very few readers would have read. It was a considerable burden for the novel to be responsible for educating its reader into understanding its jokes – and was it worth it, if the (con)temporary characters that were intended to spark recognition and spontaneous amusement were actually, for most readers, wearying homework assignments? Nor would footnotes and critical introductions do anything to mend some readers’ perceptions that Scott gave peculiar characters too many appearances and too much dialogue in his novels. In his review of Tales of My Landlord, Francis Jeffrey complains that:

Jeffrey might have recommended that Scott abridge Sir Piercie’s presence in a new edition of The Monastery, not make him a main subject of its introductory pages.

The worrying concept of a temporary ‘historical caricature’ was the counterpart of the comic type seen to stretch continuously through the ages. Scott’s ‘Essay on the Drama’ (1819), first published as a supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, quotes the antiquarian Joseph Cooper Walker’s writing on commedia dell’arte characters: descended from the types of the Roman New Comedy yet with new peculiarities belonging to the districts, towns and professions of sixteenth-century Italy, commedia characters seemed to inhabit both categories.⁷⁰ Il Dottore spoke, as Richard Andrews describes it, ‘Bolognese interlarded with Latin and outright garbled nonsense’, reflecting Bologna’s status as the university city.⁷¹ The specificity of a (con)temporary character can give audiences pleasure in their shared knowledge and narcissism of small differences. In the long eighteenth century, when Scott and other British writers made their Latin-quoting pedantic characters Scottish – Smollett’s Maclaymore in The Reprisal, Scott’s Cleishbotham in Tales of My Landlord, Peacock’s Mac Quedy in Crotchet Castle – they were playing on readers’ notions that socially obtrusive learning and specious reasoning often had Scottish accents. Smollett has his Irish character ‘Oclabber’ tell Maclaymore, ‘You’re a man of learning Honey […] I am always happy when you are spaiking, whether I’m asleep or awake’.⁷² Coleridge includes ‘presumptuous sciolism’ in his list of vices that ‘caledonianize the human face’.⁷³ Scott’s consciousness of the Scottish pedant being a temporary character, like his predecessor the Dottore, ties in with his conviction that comic characters, once fixed in print, were liable to pass quickly from the circulating library into the cabinet of curiosities. Typological ‘systems’ on which peculiar characters could be based, such as the physiological theory of cardinal humours, were themselves historically specific and could not be relied on to carry a character forward indefinitely:

As readers begin to require corroborating sources for character’s seemingly improbable peculiarities, the critical apparatus of the antiquary’s closet prolongs temporary characters beyond their natural lives. A Magnum footnote to The Bride of Lammermoor, for example, acknowledges that Caleb’s method of providing dinner for Ravenswood and his guests ‘has been universally considered on the southern side of the Tweed as grotesquely and absurdly extravagant’.⁷⁵ Scott insists that, while the scenario may not be plausible, it must be accurate because it can be likened to an actual historical referent, preserved in memory and conveyed vividly through oral storytelling:

The strategic phrase ‘date and names’ begs the reader to accept the authenticating move of specifying, without actually giving specifics.

Inevitably however, such footnotes cannot substitute for the reading experience of recognising, unmediated, the reality conveyed through the power of caricature. Caleb, like Sir Piercie, is founded on ‘some forgotten model’ and is ‘more likely to awaken the disgust of the reader, as unnatural, than find him food for laughter’.⁷⁶ There is too much parsley, Scott concedes – but removing it would compromise the novel’s design, would diminish the artificial combinations of high and low, tragic and comic, ideal and real, timeless and historical, which define its compendious realism. In the Magnum Introduction to The Monastery, Scott puts himself in the role of a waiter extolling an exotic sprig or mysterious purée. He feels the difficulty of countering readers’ distaste for characters they do not recognise or believe, ‘the formidable objection of incredulus odi’.⁷⁷ When readers cannot be reconciled to the unlikeliness of the real, then the conjunction of history and romance is a bad investment.

Temporary and Deep Peculiarity in the Historical Romance

Scott was concerned anew with balancing peculiarity and credulity when he decided to novelise English history, a challenge he addresses in Ivanhoe’s ‘Dedicatory Epistle’ and in the Magnum Introduction to the second edition of Ivanhoe ten years later. To Scott’s mind, seeking new material might help him avoid over-egging familiar materials, but basing novels on English history ran a new risk: that English readers, complacent in long-established modernity, would balk at highly differentiated characters and social peculiarities.

Ivanhoe’s ‘Epistle’ and Magnum Introduction explain this trade-off. Turning to English subjects will be a refreshing change for both author and readers: to a writer ‘employed in catering for public amusement, a fresh topic […] is the untasted spring of the desert’. Returning to Scottish subjects, the author will struggle to provide readers with something new: ‘in order to obtain the indispensable charm of novelty, he is forced upon caricature, and, to avoid being trite, must become extravagant’.⁷⁸ But English readers, Scott thinks, are less willing to believe the peculiarities of their own country’s history – England being a place where ‘civilization has been so long complete’ and where ‘all that gives verisimilitude to a narrative and individuality to the persons introduced’ is forgotten.⁷⁹ Due to the ‘uneven development’ of the two countries, Scotland’s peculiar characters – Edinburgh’s city guard, for example – are still within living memory. In the dedication to Ivanhoe, the antiquarian Dryasdust compares the author of the Scottish novels to the legendary witch Erichtho, who reanimates corpses ‘whose limbs had recently quivered with existence’ whereas Templeton – the fictive narrator presented as the author of Ivanhoe – must dig for material in ‘dry, sapless, mouldering and disjointed bones’.⁸⁰ These dry bones are history stripped of its distinctive textures, its conflicting energies. Everyone looks the same. Scott must differentiate these characters, strongly enough that they seem historically real, but not so extravagantly that their peculiarities seem artificial – silly outfits and quaint language making ordinary people temporarily ridiculous.

In The Monastery, Scott illustrates this point with Sir Piercie’s character. The courtier’s peculiarities are mere fashions, silly and shallow. A devotee of Euphuism and Italian conventions of swordsmanship,⁸¹ his over-elaborate dialogue – the ‘embroidery of his conversation’⁸² – is repeatedly pulled before the reader. At the end of novel, Sir Piercie’s whole identity is unravelled: he is revealed as the son of a tailor’s daughter, in an ironic twist on his penchant for fine clothing; and he himself takes a miller’s daughter, rather than a high-born lady, for his wife. This connects with the skeptical view of chivalric character as a foreign affectation in Ivanhoe, where Cedric the Saxon speaks dismissively of ‘“the fantastic fashions of Norman chivalry”’; and with the idea that chivalry is acquired through copying other people and following formulae in the 1832 Magnum Introduction to The Talisman, where Scott describes Richard I as ‘a pattern of chivalry, with all its extravagant virtues, and its no less absurd errors’.⁸³ The first edition of The Monastery, attempting to inoculate the characterisation of Sir Piercie, to make him a historically explained caricature, blames the knight’s ability ‘to parler Euphuisme’ on Lyly’s being ‘at the very zenith of his absurdity and his reputation’, his influence ‘a fashion as rapid as it was momentary’.⁸⁴ Sir Piercie’s historical peculiarities are costume drama, exhumed from the closet, not genuine flesh reanimated. Whether or not this deliberate irony was lost on readers, their reactions to the Euphuist’s sartorial and linguistic flourishes are echoed in more general criticisms that Scott’s appeal was due to the superficial attractions of ‘colour’ and ‘costume’. Comparing Scott’s historical fiction with Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720),⁸⁵ pitting a romantic realism against a realism of reportage, the Retrospective Review praises the ordinariness of Defoe’s fictional cavalier. A romance-reader might find him dull and commonplace, but to the discerning reader he is satisfyingly like reality. Captain Delgatty, the inspiration for Scott’s character in A Legend of Montrose (1819), may have been ‘an infinitely more amusing personage than any cavalier who ever served in Flanders or elsewhere, but it is precisely because he is more amusing that we lose our confidence in his reality’.⁸⁶ The critic expresses a classical preference for the general, recalling a line from Shaftesbury’s Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709): ‘The variety of nature is such, as to distinguish every thing she forms, by a peculiar original character; which, if strictly observed, will make the subject appear unlike to anything extant in the world besides.’⁸⁷ Jeffrey had made a similar point about some characters in Scott’s fiction being ‘pictures, at best, of individuals who must always have been unique and extraordinary’.⁸⁸ There is no one like Delgatty, regardless of the fact that he actually existed, whereas Defoe’s cavalier is historically real because he represents other cavaliers like him. Founded on particular historical facts, Scott’s most peculiar historical characters seem like inventions ‘called into existence by the hand of a mighty magician, and presented to the wondering eyes of the present curious generation, man and horse, in full costume’.⁸⁹ Scott’s allusions to actual referents – to the real Captain Delgatty or the real followers of Lyly – do not excuse the ways in which highly individualised characters interfere with literary realism.

Sir Piercie, the costumed knight Scott intended to be a timelessly pretentious character with historically specific pretentions, converges with the unsympathetic view of Scott’s antiquarian details as merely decorative. The historical peculiarities of the character are a superficial texture antiquating familiar things in order to make them novel; the Euphuist is ‘really’ nothing but a fop or dandy in old-fashioned clothing. Lukács distinguishes the historical richness of Scott’s novels – his characters real ‘historical-social types’ – from the luxury of the ‘false historicism’ endemic to lesser fiction:

Whereas Lukács stresses that ‘local colour’ is only one of many features in Scott’s ‘artistic demonstration of historical reality’,⁹¹ others have seen it as crucial to readers’ taste for – if not Scott’s actual composition of – the novels’ historical representations.

Readers’ taste for this kind of period costuming will prove as temporary as the sartorial fashions themselves, Thomas Carlyle suggests, reviewing Lockhart’s Memoirs a few years after the publication of the Magnum Opus:

Sartorial fashions were not only new or strange in themselves, but were also signs of the accelerating newness and strangeness of modernity, whose cast-offs would soon join Scott’s historically ‘costumed’ characters in the dust. Timothy Campbell argues that eighteenth-century Britons’ ‘increased sensitivity to cycles of fashion – and to now-familiar dynamics of currency and obsolescence in everyday commercial life […] both shaped and vexed the period’s projects of historical representation’.⁹³ Campbell reveals in Kenilworth (1821) a ‘commercializing pastiche’ of Elizabethan fashion viewed through the consumer culture of the Romantic period.⁹⁴ While Scott used sartorial fashion as a system of historical representation across the Waverley novels, as Campbell demonstrates, it seems appropriate that Scott wrote Kenilworth – with its heightened consciousness of fashion as a means of sorting and marketing history – shortly after The Monastery’s satirical rendering of an Elizabethan courtier seemed to have disappointed readers. Rather than sartorial consumerism being attributed exaggeratedly to a single character, and made part and parcel of that character’s silliness, commercialised fashion is woven throughout Kenilworth. This has the effect of giving a sense of the peculiarities – superficial though they might be – of a historical milieu, immersing the reader in an old-fashioned ‘fashionable’ world.

The methods of compendious realism opened Scott up to charges of ‘caricature’ not only on the grounds that historical romance’s heightened peculiarities and contrasts were artificial, but also on the grounds that its historical representations were often superficially concerned with ‘costume’ and ‘colour’. Characters with dwarfish and gigantic physical features, on the other hand, were an opportunity to incorporate ‘deep peculiarity’ in the novels’ historical realism. By including references to the credulity of older generations and children, and quoting from their folklore, while using actual referents to factualise the fantastic beings of myth and legend, Scott romanticises and historicises non-normative bodies in such a way that readers can both indulge in the ‘“auld-warld stories”’ and reserve their distance from the original scene of storytelling, with its participants ‘“sitting on the broomy knowe and cracking about Black Dwarfs, and siccan clavers, as was the gate lang syne, when the short sheep were in fashion”’.⁹⁵ Whereas Sir Piercie’s and Caleb Balderstone’s manners are ‘temporary’, absurdly peculiar because of the historical reality that shapes them, the physically disproportioned Rob Roy MacGregor and Sir Edward Mauley are fantastic in spite of their historical reality. Whereas historical fashions are quickly changed, put on and taken off, dwarfish and gigantic figures supply a deeper peculiarity that connects real, historical people to the figures of storybook romance and oral legend. Whereas Sir Piercie Shafton is a ‘historically explained caricature’ made peculiar by Euphuism and Elizabethan court manners, Scott’s novels present dwarfish and gigantic figures as deeply peculiar: ‘caricatures’ who embody the most fantastic qualities of romance in historical characters appropriate to particular times and places.

Scott’s dwarfs are invariably connected with necromancy and supernatural beings, often with reference to popular beliefs. Sir Edward Mauley, the titular character of The Black Dwarf (1816), is first seen as a witch, then as a ghost, before being likened to ‘a giant in a romance’ and finally accepted as ‘a being of blood and bone’ yet ‘in close league with the invisible world’, a wizard.⁹⁶ In Kenilworth, the ‘gigantic porter’ enlisted to play the part of Hercules in Dudley’s courtly entertainments ‘represented excellently one of those giants of popular romance, who figure in every fairy tale or legend of knight-errantry’.⁹⁷ In The Pirate (1822), Nick Strumpfer is the real version of ‘Trolld’, the saga-famed inhabitant of the Dwarfie Stone; Magnus Troil likens him to ‘Pacolet’, a character in the Carolingian romance Valentine and Orson, and he is described as ‘the hideous mis-shapen figure of Pacolet’; Triptolemus, taking him for a goblin, addresses him in Latin; and he is associated with dragons, being seen to emerge from behind a stone ‘like some overgrown reptile’ and (unreliably) reported as flying on a dragon.⁹⁸ ‘Sir’ Geoffrey Hudson, in Peveril of the Peak (1822) is associated with ‘the fraternity of gnomes, or fairies, whom he resembled so much in point of size’, and likened to ‘an alchemist, or […] necromancer’.⁹⁹ Dwarfism also has romantic connections in The Talisman (1825), where the female court dwarf calls herself ‘Guenevra’ after the queen of Arthurian legend, while the male court dwarf has taken on the identity of ‘Nectabanus’, referring to the ‘Nectanebus’ character of Egyptian legend (based on the real pharaoh Nectanebo II) who disguises himself as a dragon and fathers Alexander the Great in the Alexander Romance. Looking on the two dwarfs ‘as if spellbound’, Sir Kenneth remembers ‘the popular creed … concerning the gnomes or earthly spirits which make their abode in the caverns of the earth’.¹⁰⁰ Additional tropes in Scott’s representation of dwarfs include emerging from rocks or subterranean passages, supernatural strength (for moving rocks), being illuminated by lamps or moonlight, unearthly voices, outlandish clothing, overgrown facial hair, and disproportioned, even gigantic, physical features. (I discuss the gigantism of Scott’s dwarfs in Chapter 6, alongside my commentary on the dwarf character in Mary Shelley’s story ‘The Transformation’.) Overall, Scott frames physiological dwarfism as a deep peculiarity, specifically located in history yet with a consistent aesthetic that recalls the supernatural and necromantic beings of old romances and rumours.

Dwarfs, in Scott’s novels, can be objects of fun. However, bodies perceived to combine ‘dwarfish’ and ‘gigantic’ qualities easily become objects of apprehension, recalling tales supposedly more widely believed in ancient times. Scott repeatedly professes feelings of revulsion and pity towards the dwarf characters, an attitude which he frames as enlightened by contrast with amused contempt or credulous fear. The Talisman, for example, contextualises the historical phenomenon of employing court dwarfs as jesters by referring to the unenlightened mindset of an earlier age: Sir Kenneth ‘could not, from their language, manners, and appearance, doubt that they belonged to the degraded class of beings whom deformity of person and weakness of intellect recommended to the painful situation of appendages to great families, where their personal appearance and imbecility were food for merriment to the household’; and the knight, ‘[s]uperior in no respect to the ideas and manners of his time, […] might, at another period, have been much amused by the mummery of these poor effigies of humanity’.¹⁰¹ Unable to sympathise with the view of court dwarfs as amusing, Scott asks the reader to share in his feelings of disgust and pity, the words ‘poor’ and ‘unhappy’ occurring in all his characterisations of dwarfs.

By far the most complex and humanised of Scott’s dwarf characters is ‘Sir’ Geoffrey Hudson, in Peveril of the Peak (1822), who is described as ‘rather ludicrous than disagreeable to look upon’, having ‘nothing positively ugly in his countenance, or actually distorted in his limbs’.¹⁰² Geoffrey combines the role of a court dwarf with the Quixotic fanaticism of a romance-reader, the pretensions of a cavalier and the comedy typical of a garrulous servant character. The novel suggests that the court’s treatment of him is a kind of abuse, even while hypocritically partaking in some scenes as ‘food for merriment’. As well as the more dramatic humiliations, Geoffrey is subject to quotidian ableism: ‘“Confusion to the scoundrel Clink, he has put the spice-box out of my reach!–Will you hand it to me from the mantelpiece?”’¹⁰³ In varying its language for continual references to Geoffrey’s size, the narrative uses phrases such as ‘little Knight’, ‘dwarfish hero’ and ‘this diminutive person’, as well as the term ‘pigmy’ (from the Greek pugmaios, ‘dwarf’), rather than likening him to an animal. Scott’s relatively measured and sympathetic accounting of Hudson’s physique, atypical of descriptions of dwarfs elsewhere in his novels, has techniques in common with the description, in Rob Roy, of the hero’s disproportioned body: Geoffrey’s body is ‘much thicker than was consistent with symmetry’, while Rob’s shoulders and arms exceed ‘the rules of symmetry’.¹⁰⁴ Rob’s body is a deep peculiarity, connecting him with the beings in the tales of ‘ancient times’ told by Frank’s Northumbrian nurse: ‘according to her traditions, […] a sort of half goblin half human beings, distinguished, like this man, for courage, cunning, ferocity, the length of their arms, and the squareness of their shoulders’.¹⁰⁵ The Black Dwarf, having recounted the discovery of the Black Dwarf’s true identity of Sir Edward Mauley, concludes with a reassertion of the common beliefs and tales, among the local people, about ‘the Man of the Moors, whose feats were quoted by Mrs Elliot to her grandsons’. Over time, Mauley’s association with the malignant supernatural has only increased, such that ‘the evils most dreaded and deprecated by the inhabitants of that pastoral country, are ascribed to the agency of the Black Dwarf’.¹⁰⁶ Scott qualifies this in the Magnum Introduction to the novel with a note that ‘some of the poor and ignorant, as well as all the children, in the neighbourhood, held [David Ritchie] to be what is called uncanny’, and that ‘even in a rude Scottish glen thirty years back, the fear of sorcery was very much out of date’.¹⁰⁷ The novels make ‘interest’ out of the ‘deep peculiarity’ they ascribe to dwarf characters – presenting their bodies for reader’s awe and amusement – while also consigning that attitude to the past.

While the texts of the novels inhabit the credulity of local, common and ancient attitudes to dwarfs generally, the Magnum editions of The Black Dwarf, Rob Roy and Peveril of the Peak ground the novels’ ‘personal descriptions’ in anecdotes about specific historical people. The Magnum Opus Rob Roy repeats words from Frank’s description in the form of a historical anecdote, changing Frank’s phrase ‘I afterwards heard’ to ‘it was said’, and giving a measurement in inches (something also done in the Magnum notes on the other dwarf characters):

Giving evidence for the character Sir Geoffrey Hudson in the Magnum Opus notes to Peveril, Scott begins by clarifying that this is the name of a real individual: ‘Geoffrey or Jeffrey Hudson is often mentioned in anecdotes of Charles I.’s time’.¹⁰⁹ The Magnum notes specify Jeffrey Hudson’s height in feet and inches at different times of life, substantiate the character’s own tales of the pie and the duel, and allude to ‘many squabbles with the King’s gigantic porter’ (suggesting an echo with Kenilworth’s ‘gigantic porter’ who finds a ‘“dwarfish auxiliary”’ in Dickie Sludge), who is mentioned in the novel as a ‘“tall fellow”’ who ‘“carried you about in his pocket, Sir Geoffrey, as all the world heard tell”’.¹¹⁰ Scott refers the reader to Van Dyck’s painting Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson (1633) and to Hudson’s clothes, ‘said to be preserved as articles of curiosity in Sir Hans Sloan’s [sic] Museum’.¹¹¹ The Van Dyck painting, which physically idealises both subjects and registers the queen’s favouritism for Hudson (who became valued as an advisor as well as an entertainer) makes an ironic contrast with Scott’s description of Geoffrey – equipped with a simmering pot and a massive codex ‘well-nigh and tall and bulky as himself’ – as fit for a more ‘romantic’ sort of painting, where the sitter takes on an exotic character:

In fact, Scott’s narrator reveals, Geoffrey is making soup for breakfast.

Fleshing out anecdotes of a historical person of whom little is known, Scott builds a relatively sympathetic many-sided portrait that nevertheless has dwarfism at the centre of it, as the shaping force of Geoffrey’s character. There is a touch of Lismahago’s perverse arguments in Geoffrey’s obsession with proving ‘the superiority of men of little stature’, a topic ‘so great a favourite with him, that […] the dwarf had collected almost all the instances of their victories over giants, which history or romance afforded’.¹¹² Peveril, like Dwarf, attempts a sympathetic view of the misanthropy expressed by the persecuted dwarfs, imagining through the character of Geoffrey that the real Jeffrey Hudson must have possessed ‘great jealousy of being despised, on account of the peculiarity of his outward form’.¹¹³ Following Francis Bacon’s notion of ‘a perpetual Spur’ within the deformed person,¹¹⁴ Scott speculates that dwarfism engenders ‘restless desire’ for importance, framing Geoffrey’s Piercie-like vanity for lavish clothes and large moustaches as the result of ‘the unhappy taste which frequently induces those whom nature has marked by personal deformity, to distinguish, and at the same time to render themselves ridiculous, by the use of showy colours, and garments fantastically and extraordinarily fashioned’.¹¹⁵ Geoffrey first appears to Peveril as ‘a small bundle of crimson cloth’ and the court dwarfs in The Talisman also wear red cloth, luxurious ‘samite, fantastically cut and flounced’.¹¹⁶ Scott’s dwarf characters are rendered either ridiculous or repulsive by their clothing, with ‘the richness of [Nectabanus’s clothing] render[ing] his ugliness more conspicuous’, and the Black Dwarf’s ‘cap made of badger’s skin, or some other rough fur, […] add[ing] considerably to the grotesque effect of his whole appearance, and overshadowed features’.¹¹⁷ This was a romantic departure from the existing anecdotes about Ritchie, with Robert Chambers’s essay for the Scots Magazine (1817) noting ‘nothing very uncommon about his dress’.¹¹⁸ The Magnum Introduction to The Black Dwarf is Scott’s most extensive grounding of a character in a recently living person – breaking the taboo against creating particularised portraits of contemporary individuals.

The Body-Corporate: National Caricatures

In this final part of the chapter, I consider a selection of ‘explained caricatures’ of national and ethnic minorities in Scott’s novels. First, I look at how Rashleigh’s caricature of a Scottish national character in Rob Roy, like Hazlitt’s essay ‘On the Scotch Character’, views the Scottish character as a self-inflicted caricature of itself. I suggest a link with Austen’s moral concept of caricature as an effect of self-importance and self-interest, here applied to a national character distinguished primarily by its ‘corporate’ self-regard for national character and national interests. Scott uses Rashleigh’s cynical voice to theorise that individual self-love is the psychological complex underlying clannishness and beyond that a ‘selfish nationalism’. I analyse how The Heart of Mid-Lothian uses Jeanie Deans’s interactions with fellow Scots to agree with Rashleigh’s essential premise, as part of a sympathetic account of Scots’ conflation of self and nation. The last pages of the chapter examine Scott’s hateful account of Jewish character in Ivanhoe. I show how Scott offers a historical explanation for Jewish character being an actual and self-inflicted caricature of itself, and how he uses the story of Abraham of Bristol to illustrate his idea that Jewish self-defence under international persecution was self-demeaning in ways that perpetuated anti-Semitism. Scott’s idea that a group of people can ‘distort’ and ‘dwarf’ itself into a literal caricature through adapting to cope with oppression echoes the rhetoric from Wollstonecraft’s comparison of women with the English Dissenters, as groups self-caricatured through a combination of passiveness and energy expended in a restricted sphere. In contrast to these histories of excluded groups resorting to evasive, reactive tactics, the self-interested wariness of the Scottish national character – made so offensive by Rashleigh’s and Hazlitt’s characterisations – is framed by Scott as an active strategy, taken independently of other groups.

In Rashleigh’s characterisation of Scottish nationalism, the Scotsman is the architect and defender of a fortified castle, a castle that represents the limitations placed on the individual’s humanitarian impulses by a nationalism that is merely an extension of self-interest. The castle simultaneously prevents outsiders from entering and prevents inhabitants from leaving. Mixing metaphors, Rashleigh also imagines the Scottish national corporation as a failing circulatory system, unable to pump blood far from its heart. He describes:

Terms such as ‘philanthropic’, ‘attachment’ and ‘social affection’ only partly conceal that Rashleigh is talking about love in order to talk about money. When Diana objects that the caricature ‘“is not true’” – Rashleigh retorts that ‘“is true, […] because you cannot deny I know the country and people intimately, and the character is drawn from deep and accurate consideration”’.¹¹⁹ He speaks from experience, he says, when he accuses Campbell (really Rob MacGregor) of being too efficient a businessman, hesitating to help Frank due to ‘“seeing no prospect of personal advantage, but, on the contrary, much hazard of loss of time and delay of business”’. Diana is forced to concede the point when Rashleigh points out Campbell’s business concern in the matter.¹²⁰ The ‘discharging’ and ‘pulsation’ of the heart’s blood is an expenditure that must be strictly rationed, and must be spent in ways that will yield some personal return. Rashleigh’s Scotsman is like Austen’s John Dashwood on a national scale, extending help to others only so far as his generosity guards his own interest, his selfishness doubled by the joining of others’ interests to his own.

The satirical characterisation of the Scots corporation in Rob Roy draws somewhat on the common perceptions, frequently expressed by English natives throughout the long eighteenth century, that England was overrun with Scots ‘placemen’; that Scots were conspicuously partial to working with each other; and that Scots advocated too much for Scotland (and, directly or indirectly, for themselves). In his essay ‘On Scotch Character’ Hazlitt holds up Smollett’s character Lismahago as a humorously exaggerated portrait of Scottish patriotism – pointing out, however, that in everyday life this patriotism might be unpleasantly militant and take hostile forms. Whereas Rashleigh’s self-interested Scot is a besieged and isolated castle – a Scot in Scotland – Hazlitt’s is one of many mobile mercenaries prepared to go anywhere for what he can get:

In the Scots body-corporate, the nation and the individual are one and the same, patriotism a means of self-importance and self-interest. Hazlitt’s image of the Scots as ‘a swarm of bees’ recalls satirical prints representing Scots as locusts and bringers of plague to England,¹²² a prejudice ironically reversed in Rob Roy when Andrew complains about new British taxmen with references to the spoiling of Egypt in Exodus 12:36.¹²³ As in Rashleigh’s caricature, the characterisation of Scots as stingy with their love, trust and assistance barely conceals the anxiety about how well Scots might be ‘getting on in the world’ financially.

Scott, himself named in Hazlitt’s essay as a self-interested member of the Scots body-corporate,¹²⁴ joins Smollett in the role of cosmopolitan Scotsman professing a good-humoured, self-deprecating attitude to English characterisations of Scottish patriotism. Commenting on the propagandistic characterisations of the French, the Scots and the Irish in Smollett’s 1757 farce The Reprisal,¹²⁵ Scott opines that ‘[t]he Scotchman and Irishman are hit off with the touch of a caricaturist of skill and spirit’.¹²⁶ An exiled Highlander turned ensign in the French service, the Latin-spouting Jacobite is obsessed with his family connections. The Englishman ‘Heartly’ and his clever English servant ‘Brush’ play on Maclaymore’s clannishness to secure his assistance against the French: ‘I won his heart’, says Brush, ‘with some transient encomiums on his country. I affected to admire his plaid, as an improvement on the Roman toga […] and in order to clinch my remonstrance, told him that my master’s great grandmother’s aunt was a Scotchwoman of the name of Mackintosh, and that Mr. Heartly piqued himself on the Highland blood that ran in his veins’.¹²⁷ Playing to an English crowd, Scott and Smollett acknowledge the truth of the body-corporate and use it to flatter and entertain readers.

Scott was well aware that national ‘caricatures’ of the Scots and Irish were popular among English audiences – and the less they knew about Scotland and Ireland, the more exaggerated the characters had to be. Writing to London friends in June 1821, Scott urged them to attend a one-night performance of Rob Roy featuring a Scots actor, a ‘Monsieur Mackay’, who played the role of Baillie Nicol Jarvie – ‘the purseproud [sic] consequential magistrate humane and irritable in the same moment’ – ‘with a degree of national truth and individuality which makes the part equal to any thing I have ever seen on stage’. Scott supposed that Mackay’s acting would be underappreciated by the majority of the audience, ‘doubt[ing] whether the exhibition will prove as satisfactory to those who do not know the original from which the resemblance is taken’, and ‘observ[ing that] the English demand (as is natural) broad caricature in the depicting of national peculiarities’ and Mackay’s Baillie is ‘not sufficiently caricatured for their apprehensions’.¹²⁸ Scott does his bit to secure Mackay a Scottish reception at Covent Garden. Writing to Lord Montagu, he supposes that Mackay will be ‘like a cow in a fremd loaning and glad of Scots countenance’. Writing to Baillie, he encourages her ‘to collect a party of Scotch friends’ to see Mackay: ‘let it not be said that a dramatic genius of Scotland wanted the countenance and protection of Joanna Baillie’. Without ‘broad caricature’, Mackay’s performance of a distinctively Scottish character relies on Scottish patronage. Despite making a great success of the part in Edinburgh, he will be at Covent Garden for one night only. Scott hoped that by expanding his English readers’ knowledge of Scotland, and by providing historical explanations for ‘substantially true’ renderings of national peculiarities, he could help to nuance appetites for ‘caricature’ and problematise antagonistic characterisations like Rashleigh’s, which could scarcely ameliorate relations between inhabitants of the two countries. Since the writing of Rob Roy overlapped with the planning of The Heart of Mid-Lothian,¹²⁹ the second novel’s depiction of the Scots corporation can be seen as Scott’s immediate response to Rashleigh’s caricature of stingy sympathy.

In Heart of Mid-Lothian, Scott takes the concept of Scottish self-interest expressed unsympathetically by the outsiders Rashleigh and by Hazlitt – and turns it around, revealing the intimacy on the other side of exclusivity. Passages about Scots ‘intimacy’ in The Heart of Mid-Lothian use very different language and imagery to describe what is essentially the same concept of the Scots body-corporate, countering Rashleigh’s satirical tone while agreeing with the premise of his caricature. Where Rashleigh’s vocabulary focuses on what the Scots body excludes by means of ‘bulwarks’, ‘barrier’, ‘obstacle’ and ‘boundary’, The Heart of Mid-Lothian, acknowledging the diversity of Scottish society, focuses on how the body-corporate can include Scots people of different classes and regions. Where Rashleigh depicts a Scots sympathy soon ‘exhausted’, Heart of Mid-Lothian sees it ‘extended’. Concrete metaphors of ‘bulwarks’ and ‘barriers’ are switched out for more abstract ‘connections’, ‘bonds’ and ‘associations’. Scott considers from an insider’s perspective how the Scots body-corporate morally – rather than materially – benefits its members, particularly those who might find themselves at a socio-economic disadvantage. Because members of the corporation see themselves as representatives of larger units, they are more personally involved in a larger range of moral events. This is explored when Scott depicts Jeanie Deans struggling, self-consciously, with her part in the Deans family corporation. The narrator states even-handedly that Scots’ ‘intimacy’ with each other has positive as well as negative effects: the self-interest and self-importance of the body-corporate can have self-improving effects on individuals, encouraging them to value their good qualities more highly, and to imagine more far-reaching consequences for their misdeeds. Being self-involved may be morally suspect in itself, but it has the effect of making the individual more deeply involved overall, increasing their total investment in the qualities they value, and raising the importance of the education and guardianship that members might extend to each other. These bonds, Scott suggests, are strongest within families, and most intense where the family lacks shared assets of more material worth:

By illustrating the principle of Scots intimacy with Jeanie’s tears, shed for herself as well as her sister, Scott disarms the body-corporate that bristles with masculine energy and military fortification in Rashleigh’s and Hazlitt’s imagery. By exemplifying the Scots corporation in a powerless and impoverished family, Scott distances the concept from nepotism and ill-gotten upward mobility, cleansing words such as ‘prized’, ‘valued’, ‘accounted’ and ‘guarantee’ of pecuniary associations.

When Jeanie encounters the Duke of Argyll later in the novel, Scott suggests that Scots intimacy can also connect the most disadvantaged families with the highest ranking, thus lending the body-corporate an ideal of nobility. Again, an insider’s perspective is required to appreciate that from exclusivity and meanness to non-Scots, the body-corporate derives its strengths of inclusivity and generosity:

Scots intimacy is romanticised, here, as an effect of a static society that retains historic identifications of people and place. The corporation seems to preserve the ghost of an ancient ‘honour’ that was not merely a code of behaviour, but an intense and authentic sensitive response to perceived wrongs. Scott invites English readers to reconceive the Scots body-corporate as an ancient kinship natural to all peoples, lost to civilization – not a self-defensive construction peculiar to the Scots.

The Heart of Mid-Lothian addresses the moral problem of the body-corporate most directly, and counters Rashleigh’s and Hazlitt’s arguments most explicitly, in the scene where the Scottish landlady of an English inn presses Jeanie to accept her assistance. Here, Scott acknowledges the hostility towards the ‘prejudice’, ‘narrowness’ and ‘partiality’ of the Scots body-corporate. Once more, he asks the reader to shift their perspective: rather than judge the Scottish character against an ideal of universal beneficence, they might understand the corporation as an honour system enabling individuals to deploy their finite resources in targeted, effective ways. The landlady’s ability to feel personally involved in the interests of a countrywoman she has never met before is not merely a ‘feeling’ or ‘sentiment’, however. Her honour consists both in her acceptance of the national ‘guarantee’ for Jeanie’s character, and in her belief that Jeanie sees her in the same way. Mutually assured, each woman owes to the other the good conduct for which their common national character stands surety:

Hazlitt’s essay uses the phrase ‘bond and surety’, a synonymising that sharpens the words’ financial associations, in describing Scots’ ‘double existence’ of national and individual character. Scots’ reliance on each other for material advantage, for ‘getting on in the world’, presents outsiders with a debt-based economy of characters: commodities are continually dissolving into promissory notes, and notes into commodities; every asset is mortgaged, collateral for another enterprise. Scottish characters seem, like paper money, infinitely interchangeable and possessing no intrinsic value. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, on the other hand, Scott’s repeated use of the word ‘guarantee’ (as well as ‘bonds’ and ‘binding’) describes a national network of Scots honourably and mutually indebted, such that individual characters secure credit for themselves by advancing it to others. The system enables even the members of society with fewest material advantages to incur debts of assistance and repay them in another form. Because it is impractical to try to assist everyone in an entirely disinterested and impartial way, ‘general benevolence’ is of less market value than an honour system where different benefits are more readily exchanged and nebulous sympathies made ‘efficient’. Thanks to a collective feat of imagination, tangible benefits convert easily to intangible ones, and vice versa. The Scottish economy of national character is, as The Heart of Mid-Lothian presents it, a virtuous cycle of the intrinsic value of individuals adding to the extrinsic value of the national character which is invested back into individuals. Hazlitt admits, ‘I do not know how it may be among themselves’. The body-corporate that presents outsiders with the effect of a self-constructed ‘national caricature’, Scott claims, will necessarily seem more exclusive, prejudiced and political – not just a character but an identity – the more that its solidarity, maintained by mutual self-interest, is strong and effective.

In Rob Roy and The Heart of Mid-Lothian, the ‘national caricature’ effect emerges from the strength and activity of a self-interested and self-identifying Scots body-corporate engaging in a virtuous cycle of giving and receiving. Scots’ supposed propensity to help each other is imagined as a debt-based economy facilitated by the abstraction of national character. In Ivanhoe, on the other hand, Scott’s description of a Jewish self-caricature – though it contains a measure of sympathy in its emphasis on the history of hated and oppression of Jews by ‘Norman, Saxon, Dane, and Briton’¹³³ – presents financial instruments for exchange of foreign currencies both as an adaptive response to persecution and as a mechanism for exacerbating detestable national peculiarities. Jews, Scott claims, are a self-made caricature emerging from a vicious cycle, where channelling the moral defect of materialism into survival tactics exacerbates an obsession with money:

This first introduction of the ‘Isaac of York’ character, though it emphasises the hatred directed at Isaac, also assumes the reader’s agreement about physical and ethical peculiarities of a Jewish ‘national character’. The narrator shifts from complimenting Isaac on his individual physiognomy, to claiming that his face was inevitably read as a signifier of ugliness:

Scott’s sympathetic framing of Isaac’s appearance at Cedric’s court – ‘an outcast in the present society, like his people among the nations, looking in vain for welcome or resting place’ – sits alongside the strong insinuation that Jews are complicit in anti-Semitism: that they did not have the moral character to withstand unjust persecution, and thus are responsible for a national character that provokes a now righteous persecution.¹³⁵

While Scott makes the beauty of Isaac’s physiognomy a contrast with anti-Semitic hatred of Jewish faces, he still locates elements of ‘national caricature’ in Isaac’s body. He gives the evasiveness and passiveness of the ‘national character’ a physical dimension, following the logic used by Wollstonecraft in her argument that Dissenters were physically diminished by the tactics to which they habitually resorted and by self-imposed limits, ‘shap[ing] their persons as well as their minds in the mould of prim littleness’.¹³⁶ Isaac of York is first pictured ‘advanc[ing] with fear and hesitation, and many a bow of deep humility’, through which practice he has permanently altered his stature: ‘a tall, thin old man, who, however, had lost by the habit of stooping much of his actual height’.¹³⁷ An explained caricature not completely unlike Hazlitt’s Scotsman ‘armed at all points against impugners’ and Rashleigh’s Scotsman fortified against philanthropy, Scott’s characterisation of Isaac claims that the Jew’s offensiveness arises from the amplification of moral failings by his own defensive tactics. The narrative acknowledges the Jew’s vulnerability among racist opportunists, reasoning that Isaac’s ‘doubts [about Ivanhoe, disguised as a pilgrim] might have been indeed pardoned; for, except perhaps the flying fish, there was no race existing on the earth, in the air, or the waters, who were the object of such as unintermitting, general, and relentless persecution as the Jews of this period’.¹³⁸ Isaac seeks the safety of Sheffield, a town with a substantial Jewish community where he can ‘“harbour with [his] kinsman Zareth, and find some means of travelling forth with safety”’.¹³⁹ He directs Ivanhoe to Leicester, where his ‘kinsman’ Kirjath Jairam will lend the knight gear for the tournament. Having promised Ivanhoe credit to secure a horse and armour, Isaac does not withdraw his offer in spite of the knight’s warning that he may not be able to repay the debt – but ‘[t]he Jew twisted himself in his saddle, like a man in a fit of the cholic’, a physical convulsion that betrays self-interest so chronic that it distorts the body.¹⁴⁰ Ivanhoe smiles on him with amusement and contempt. The Jewish national character is demeaned by prejudice – but that character then really is diminished, Scott claims, with Isaac physically diminished by his own fearfulness. Scott implies that an upright posture of bravery and dignity would have allowed the Jews to adopt a better national character. Key passages in Ivanhoe thus intellectualise, through historical explanations, the early nineteenth-century suspicions about ‘wandering commercial Jews’ also expressed in Scott’s personal writings.¹⁴¹ In this ‘historically explained caricature’, Jews are supposedly complicit in the diminishing and deforming of character to fit the outlet granted to it.

Complicity is a factor in Jewish national caricature also in Edgeworth’s relatively sympathetic Harrington (1817). After her correspondence with an American reader, Rachel Mordecai, Edgeworth wrote a novel focused on Jewish characters and with a plot revolving around a fictional history painting titled The Dentition of the Jew. One of the characters purchases and destroys this painting, to prevent its being purchased by an engraver and thus ‘“seen and sold in every print-shop in London”’.¹⁴² The painting depicts the much-chronicled story of King John’s torture of a Jewish merchant, named Abraham of Bristol in some accounts. In 1210, John extorted money from England’s wealthier Jewish families by imprisoning important male family members and demanding massive ransoms. Abraham was held in Bristol Castle, where torturers removed one of his molars on each of the seven days that he refused to pay the ten thousand marks King John demanded. In Harrington, Montenero wants to destroy The Dentition because it causes painful disgust to those who see it. Glimpsing the framed painting in Montenero’s hands, the protagonist is ‘struck […] with such associated feelings of horror’ that he physically recoils from the image, shouting ‘“I cannot bear it! I cannot bear that picture!”’ Montenero suggests that the painting made Harrington feel ‘“sick”’.¹⁴³ When Montenero tears it up and burns the pieces, he explains that he would destroy, if he could, “‘every record of cruelty and intolerance”’: The Dentition is one such record ‘“that can keep alive feelings of hatred and vengeance between Jews and Christians!”’¹⁴⁴ Harrington ironically refers to the painting’s destruction as an ‘auto-da-fé’. Edgeworth thus shows a Jewish character taking responsibility for repairing Jewish–Christian relations by attempting to erase the most sadistic acts of anti-Semitism from the historical record.

While Edgeworth’s depictions of a Jewish family differ greatly from Scott’s in Invahoe, in this respect they are singing from the same hymn sheet: Montenero represents Scott’s ideal Jew, who would take a particular kind of active role in rapprochement – not only forgiving Christians’ cruelty, but attempting to remove the need for forgiveness by preventing Jews’ and Christians’ knowledge of it. My view of the novel’s ideal of Jewish heroism is supported by the fact that Montenero destroys a painting inspired by historical chronicles, rather than speaking against textual caricatures of Jews of the kind that occur in Harrington’s reading material:

Edgeworth is clearly reflecting on the ways in which her own fiction participates in the caricaturing of Jews, and acknowledging that ‘the indisputable authority of printed books’ enables such caricatures to reinforce readers’ anti-Semitism.¹⁴⁵ However, like Scott in Ivanhoe two years later, Edgeworth also insists on Jews proving themselves undeserving of persecution by minimising the impact it has on them and by re-forming their character as though the violence never took place. Scott, too, refers to the dentition of Abraham of Bristol in Ivanhoe, where the formulation of the character’s name ‘Isaac of York’ is the first allusion to the historical narrative. In Ivanhoe, Abraham of Bristol is used to illustrate both the extreme cruelty of the Jews’ oppressors and the extremity of the Jewish self-caricature. Abraham’s capacity to withstand torture and tolerate mutilation seems to prove, for Scott, the depth of his avarice:

The implication is that only a man obsessed with money would lose teeth rather than pay a ransom. Scott’s assumption here – that his British readers would be willing to accept Abraham’s dentition as a story illustrating Jewish just as much as English greed – perhaps sheds light on the fact that the characters in Harrington perceive Edgeworth’s fictive painting The Dentition of the Jew as both a record of anti-Semitic persecution and a derogatory caricature of ‘the Jewish character’, because it seems to represent materialism extreme enough to justify anti-Semitism. Whereas Edgeworth proposes that the painting be destroyed, the history effaced and the vicious cycle of national caricature broken, Scott makes his history of the Jews indispensable to explaining what Jews are ‘really like’. Harrington speculates on a world where the historical caricature of Jewish materialism and ‘passive courage’ is perceptible as rotten, sickening.

This chapter has explored how Scott’s admiring concept of historical ‘caricature’ was beset, in practice, by readers’ objections to compendious realism’s non-protagonist characters as artificial, incredible and temporary. Characters such as Caleb Balderstone and Piercie Shafton, Scott realised, might fail to convince a broad and multi-generational readership that historical ‘caricatures’ – characterisations identifying absurdity and peculiarity in historically specific manners, mental processes and ways of life – were key to his novels’ varied and highly textured realism. On the other hand, the characters whose bodies can be compared with graphic caricatures – such as Edward Mauley, Rob MacGregor and Geoffrey Hudson – afford a ‘deep peculiarity’ intersecting romance and actual reference. The Magnum Opus editions work hard to substantiate all these characters with historical sources, giving a sense of such potential ‘caricatures’ – peculiar to the point of implausibility – as especially vulnerable to time passing and literary tastes changing, despite all the apparatus that a critical edition can provide. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian, when Scott gives a historical explanation for the ‘national caricature’ of the Scots body-corporate, he imagines Scots being able to share highly peculiarised realities: ‘mutual recollections of remarkable objects are more accurate’ between them. In this imagining of histories intimately shared by living Scottish people – a minutely textured and folkloric knowledge of things past – there is a natural and vernacular precursor to his own compendious, historical and romantic realism. In novels for a broad readership, however, historical ‘caricature’ carries within it the nightmare of a tapestry rotting before the author’s eyes: this is the many-coloured fabric of knowledge and assumptions about historical reality that his readers share with him and with each other, disintegrating at an accelerated rate. Other realisms might deteriorate more slowly. Austen’s realism has been able to make relatively strong claims to literary immortality, first because it prides itself on the author’s complete knowledge of a limited time and place, and second because it retains a readership whose understanding of that moment has been shored up by adaptations and cultural heritage.

For Scott’s compendiously historical novels, however, as readers’ knowledge (including their assumptions and prejudices) about the novelist’s subjects becomes vaguer, realism becomes less assured. The scope of readers’ caricature talk contracts, with characters’ peculiarities generally less subject to detailed debate and instead dismissed as unintelligible, extraneous or offensive. Through the historically explained caricatures in Scott’s romances, we can experience an acute, even exaggerated, anxiety about the contingency of literary realisms: they might seem to forecast the fragility and obsolescence of all realisms, as they present us with an extreme case of realism’s betrayal by readers who know differently.