SOURCE: Edwards, Gavin. “Scott and Crabbe: A Meeting at the Border.” Essays in Criticism 22, no. 1 (February 1998): 123-40.

[In the following essay, Edwards analyzes the relationship between Crabbe and Sir Walter Scott, including their meetings, their impressions of each other, how they influenced each other, and how they dealt differently with similar themes.]

Walter Scott (1771-1832) and George Crabbe (1754-1832) met twice, first in London at John Murray's in Albemarle Street, in 1817, then in August 1822 when Crabbe was Scott's guest in Edinburgh. But although a guest, Crabbe did not see much of his host, who was busy stage-managing the state-visit of George IV.¹ Scott and Crabbe, Lockhart tells us, had “but one quiet walk together, and it was to the ruin of St. Anthony's Chapel and Muschat's Cairn, which the deep impression made on Crabbe by The Heart of Midlothian [1818] had given him an earnest wish to see” (4:57). It is not surprising that The Heart of Midlothian made a deep impression on Crabbe since, as Tony Inglis notes, he “steps in and out of the novel from beginning to end.”² It is the literary relationship between the two men, the meeting of minds, that I want to explore here: a relationship that can be followed through their correspondence, through the biographies by Lockhart and George Crabbe, Jr.,³ and, above all, through allusions in the poems and novels themselves.

Different as the two writers were in important respects, their regard for each other was high. In fact, it was probably the special compound of similarity and difference that made each so significant to the other and caused each to some extent to work out what he was doing by measuring himself against what he thought the other was doing. A study of their literary relationship must, therefore, have a double focus and look at the influences running in both directions.

Crabbe's son records his father's first encounter with Scott's poetry. One day in 1805,

casually stepping into a bookseller's at Ipswich, my father first saw the Lay of the Last Minstrel [1805]. A few words only riveted his attention, and he read it nearly through while standing at the counter, observing, “a new and great poet has appeared!”⁴

Sharply different as Crabbe's own poetry is from Scott's—the one antiromantic, the other ultraromantic—Crabbe seems to have felt there was also an affinity. “Peter Grimes” (in The Borough [1810]) begins with an epigraph from Marmion (1808), and the “Preface” to The Borough makes an explicit comparison between Grimes and “the ruffian” in Scott's poem.⁵

Scott's admiration for Crabbe's poetry went back much earlier, to Scott's late teens, when he read extracts from The Library (1781) and The Village (1783) in Dodsley's Annual Register. These two poems, together with The Newspaper (1785), were the poems of Crabbe's eighteenth-century literary career. When he appeared again, over twenty years later, with Poems (1807), The Borough (1810), and Tales (1812), Scott's earlier enthusiasm was renewed. This is the story Scott told in his first letter to Crabbe, written on 21 October [1812] after reading Tales. “It is,” wrote Scott,

more than twenty years … since I was for a great part of a very snowy winter the inhabitant of an old house in the country in the course of a poetical study so very like that of your admirably painted young poet [John, in “The Patron”] that I could hardly help saying “that's me” when I was reading the tale to my family. Among the very few books which fell under my hands was a volume or two of Dodsley's Register one of which contained copious extracts from the “Village” & the “Library” particularly the conclusion of Book I of the former and an extract from the latter beginning with the description of the old Romancers—I committed them most faithfully to my memory where your verses must have felt themselves very strangely lodged in company with ghost stories Border riding ballads scraps of old plays and all the miscellaneous stuff which a strong appetite for reading … had assembled in the head of a lad of eighteen.⁶

Lockhart records that in the reading aloud in the Scott household, “Crabbe was, perhaps, next to Shakespeare, the standing resource” (3:197). It was Crabbe's poems—“Players” in The Borough and the story of Phoebe Dawson from “The Parish Register” in Poems are mentioned—that Lockhart recalls reading to Scott during his final illness (5:423-24). Most important, Crabbe was a standing resource for Scott's fiction. After Shakespeare—albeit a long way after him—Crabbe is one of the most frequently quoted authors in the quotation-packed Scottish novels; and Crabbe's letters, in turn, record the pleasure he and his family took in spotting these quotations.

In 1981, Jane Millgate published a fine pioneering essay, “Scott and the Dreaming Boy: A Context for Waverley”;⁷ but apart from that, little critical attention has been paid to the Scott-Crabbe relationship. The principal reason is simple: the continuing invisibility of Crabbe's poetry to most specialists in either eighteenth- or nineteenth-century literature. On the other hand, enthusiasts for Crabbe must share the blame. For example, when I wrote George Crabbe's Poetry on Border Land (1990), I did not realize that the metaphor of the border, which I took from Crabbe's poem “Delay has Danger” (in Tales of the Hall [1819]), probably originated in Crabbe's reading of Scott.

“Delay has Danger” describes a girl called Fanny who is the daughter of a clergyman. When her father dies, she goes to live with her uncle and aunt who are the senior servants—“steward and steward's lady”—in a large aristocratic household. Her precarious situation in the household is described in the following terms:

Fanny was held from every hero's sight,
Who might in youthful error cast his eyes
On one so gentle as a lawful prize,
On border land, whom, as their right or prey,
A youth from either side might bare away.
Some handsome lover of th'inferior class
Might as a wife approve the lovely lass;
Or some invader from the class obove,
Who, more presuming, would his passion prove
By asking less—love only for his love.

(Complete, 2:505-6)

The literary affiliation I focused on in my book was that with Jane Austen, who had named the heroine of Mansfield Park (1814) after the Fanny Price in Crabbe's “Parish Register” and arranged for Edmund Bertram to find a copy of Tales (1812) on the table in Fanny's room.⁸ Since Austen's Fanny lives on a figurative borderland—awkwardly placed between classes and between families—it could be that the name “Fanny” in “Delay has Danger” acknowledges and returns Austen's gesture of affiliation (though sadly too late for Austen to enjoy it).⁹

It may be that the borrowing from Scott is a similar gesture, responding to Scott's borrowings from Crabbe in Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), or The Heart of Midlothian, though the most likely specific source for Crabbe's borders metaphor is the story of Margaret of Branksome in The Lay of the Last Minstrel. However, Crabbe's metaphor, just because it is a metaphor, marks his distance from, as well as closeness to, Scott. Scott's borders may sometimes be read as metaphor, but they are first and foremost literal borders traversed, as often as not, by literal invaders. They are geopolitical or geocultural borders, between England and Scotland, Highland and Lowland. Crabbe's borders on the other hand, although sometimes literal—notably in The Village and The Borough—are in most of his tales purely metaphorical: the borderland between families and between social classes on which Fanny, like so many of Crabbe's young women and young men, is vulnerably stranded. Crabbe's focus is on the world of class, not on the world of tribe and clan, which he can invoke as an analogy only by virtue of its literal absence.

The link between Scott and Crabbe identified by Jane Millgate is, on the face of it, of a quite different kind, a shared preoccupation not with borders but with the image of the “dreaming boy” (though I shall argue that borders are where dreaming boys live). The “dreaming boy” of Millgate's essay is first of all the boy described in the 1808 revised version of The Library, who is drawn into the romance world “as actor rather than observer” (Millgate, p. 207):

The Giant falls; his recreant throat I seize,
And from his Corslet take the massy keys:—
Dukes, Lords, and Knights in long procession move,
Releas'd from bondage with my virgin love;—

(Complete, 1:151)

The dreaming boy is also the young poet-to-be of “The Patron,” who “is removed to the country for his health and there sustains himself on a diet of romantic reading” (Millgate, p. 286):

Robbers at land and pirates on the main;
Enchanters foil'd, spells broken, giants slain;
Legends of love, with tales of halls and bowers.

(Complete, 2:65-66)

He is also the young Scott himself and the Wilfred Wycliffe of Scott's 1813 poem Rokeby.¹⁰ Perhaps most intriguing of all, when we think of Scott reading “The Patron” in 1812, the dreaming boy is Edward Waverley, whose boyhood Scott had already described in unpublished chapters written in 1805, and which, after writing Rokeby, he revised and published as his first novel, Waverley (1814).

This chronology of reading and writing is important because it helps us to understand Scott's move from poetry to the historical novel, a move made with the help of the “indirect exchange with George Crabbe” (Millgate, p. 286). Scott and Crabbe, Millgate argues, responded to the conflict between the romance world of dreaming boyhood and the adult world of reason in different ways. Crabbe, in “The Library,” had seen an absolute conflict between romance on the one hand and reason and experience on the other:

With Fiction then does real Joy reside,
And is our Reason the delusive Guide? …
No, 'tis the infant mind, to Care unknown,
That makes th'imagin'd Paradise its own; …
Enchantment bows to Wisdom's serious Plan,
And Pain and Prudence make and mar the Man.

(Complete, 1:131)

Scott, by contrast, attempts to establish a continuity between the opposed values. Millgate argues that he does this—with Waverley—by making

the other world of romance into which he conducted his hero not simply there rather than here, then rather than now, but an actual place with a geography, history and culture of its own, and with established connections in time and space with the ordinary world established by author and reader.

(p. 291)

This analysis needs to be developed in a number of respects, however. For one thing, it stops at Scott's first novel. For another, it describes the ways in which Scott builds on the influence of Crabbe, but not the ways in which Crabbe builds on the influence of Scott. We need to do justice to the relationship between Scott's post-Waverley novels and the work of Crabbe's second literary career in its whole range, including “The Parish Register” and The Borough as well as the volumes of tales.

It is scarcely surprizing that Millgate's essay, which starts with Scott and Crabbe, should eventually leave Crabbe to follow Scott. Scott and Millgate have history on their side, in two senses. The history of taste and consciousness went their way, and it went their way through Scott's (and in another sense Wordsworth's) discovery of history. Whatever the wider advantages or disadvantages of a postmodern consciousness, it may allow history to be brushed against the grain and George Crabbe's greatness to be acknowledged. Millgate's argument tells an evolutionary success story in which Scott succeeds in resolving a problem—the conflict between reason and romance—that Crabbe cannot solve. But it could be that Crabbe, by refusing Scott's or any other solution, is adopting the more truthful and courageous position. In any case, it is a position that needs to be taken as seriously as Scott's, as I believe Scott himself recognized.

We can get a clearer sense of the different ways in which Scott and Crabbe addressed their common problem if we recognize that three of Millgate's “dreaming boys”—the young Walter Scott, the young protagonist of Crabbe's “Patron,” and the young Edward Waverley—share rather specific social circumstances that encourage their dreaming. In “The Patron,”

In childhood feeble, he, for country air,
Had long resided with a rustic pair;
All round whose room were doleful ballads, songs,
Of lovers' sufferings, and of ladies wrongs;
Of peevish ghosts, who came at dark midnight,
For breach of promise, guilty men to fright;
Love, marriage, murder, were the themes, with these,
All that on idle, ardent spirits seize;
From village-children kept apart by pride,
With such enjoyments, and without a guide;
Inspir'd by feelings all such works infus'd,
John snatched a pen, and wrote as he perus'd:
With the like fancy, he could make his knight
Slay half an host, and put the rest of flight;

(Complete, 2:65-66)

These dreaming boys, it turns out, inhabit the same social borderland as Fanny in “Delay has Danger.” They live with adoptive parents who are sometimes uncles and aunts and often of a different social class. The young person's romantic fantasies, which often involve getting ideas above their station, are encouraged by their isolation from their contemporaries and from the firm guiding hand of a parent, especially a father.

It is this set of circumstances that Scott and Crabbe develop in different directions. Whereas in Crabbe (and Austen) the division within the family is primarily a class division and the border therefore a figurative one, in Scott it is an ideological, historical, and geographical division, associated with literal borders. Edward Waverley's father represents Hanoverian allegiance; his uncle, Jacobite allegiance. The former is associated with reason, the Lowlands, and the juridically integrated British State; and the latter with romance, the Highlands, and clan society. All the opposed terms have positive value for Scott, but they are incompatible: he reconciles their value and their incompatibility by allocating each to a distinct stage of history.

The contrast between Scott and Crabbe is sometimes less sharp, however. In The Borough, for instance, Crabbe is writing about literal borders. The poem seems to offer a contrast between two specific, actual places and the distinct ways of life associated with them; but just how specific or actual these places are is a moot point. The poem takes the form of a series of letters written by an “imaginary personage … a residing burgess in a large sea-port” (Complete, 1:344) to a friend living inland. This seaport has normally been identified as a thinly disguised version of Crabbe's native Aldburgh and the burgess, therefore, as a thinly disguised Crabbe. Consequently, when Crabbe tells us in the “Preface” that he has invented an “ideal friend” (1:345), it is natural to identify this person with the inland friend to whom the burgess is writing.

Although the burgess is writing his letters from the seaport, Crabbe is explicitly writing the poem from inland. The “Dedication” to the duke of Rutland “plead[s] the propriety of placing the titles of the House of Rutland at the entrance of a volume written in the Vale of Belvoir” (1:341), and in the “Preface” Crabbe describes himself as the “inhabitant of a village in the centre of the kingdom” (1:344). Since the “ideal friend” has been invented to keep the reader from identifying the borough too closely with “any particular place” (1:345), it is at least possible that he is the seaport burgess rather than the burgess' inland correspondent. The question cannot, I think, be confidently decided, partly because the grammar of the relevant passage of the “Preface” is ambiguous; and the effect of the uncertainty is to emphasize the sense that Crabbe is, in a slightly uncomfortable way, at both ends of the poetic correspondence. He is writing in the character of a seaport burgess to himself in the character he happened to be occupying at the time, the character of the occupant of an inland village. He is writing to himself across the border between two contrasting watery phenomena:

Seek then thy Garden's shrubby bound, and look,
As it steals by, upon the bordering Brook;
That winding streamlet, limpid, lingering, slow,
Where the reeds whisper when the Zephyrs blow:
.....Draw then the strongest contrast to that stream,
And our broad river will before thee seem.

(Complete, 1:361)

The brook borders the inland garden; but it also helps to constitute a border that is more conceptual than actual, one that could not be seen by the eye but only by the mind's eye. The inland and coastal waters are not actually adjacent, either in the poem or in reality. In the poem, the river that might actually link the brook (or “stream”) to the estuary (Crabbe's “broad river”) is not described: it has been cut out to produce a montage effect. As for reality, there could be no intermediate river because no stream that rises in the Vale of Belvoir does actually flow into the sea on the Suffolk coast. What we get in these lines are representations of elements of real places used to construct a contrast between kinds of place.

It is hard to be sure, from one Letter or part of a Letter to another, what kinds of place these are. If the initial contrast had been between an inland borough and a seaport borough this situation might not have arisen: we would be pondering two species of the same genus; but since the contrast is between an inland village and a seaport borough, Crabbe has actually committed himself to a taxonomy that is intriguingly unpredictable. Furthermore, the poem does not fill out an initially established framework, so much as continually reframe its material as it proceeds. Both its attention and its direction repeatedly deviate and proceed crablike. Correspondingly, the framing address from the borough burgess to the inland friend doesn't frame systematically: it comes and goes as the implicit contrast in terms of which the borough is being defined alters. Sometimes, Crabbe seems to be presenting the borough as a singular place (the borough), sometimes as a generic borough; sometimes as an example of the species seaport-borough in contrast to other species of the genus borough; and so on. Crabbe is interested in classifying, but his classification is not systematic. The borough, like the people and things in it, belongs to different categorical classes at once, and sometimes incompatibly so (as do the social classes in “Delay has Danger”).

So while Crabbe in some ways seems to be offering what Millgate says Scott offers—“a place with a particular geography … of its own”—he is never quite doing that. David Simpson is right to argue that it is the “refusal to produce the poetry of strong localism [that] helps explain the anachronism of George Crabbe.”¹¹ Strong localism, of course, was being developed in close association with strong temporality, to produce Wordsworth's “spots of time” as well as Scott's locohistorical novels. And what Crabbe certainly does not do, at least in The Borough, is link a geography to a history, a place to a past, a people to their forebears. There is no sense, for instance, in which either the seaport borough or the rural inland are more archaic or more modern than the other. Not only are they contemporary (as Scott's juxtaposed cultures often are) but neither of them has the future or the past in its bones. Nor, despite the fact that the Vale of Belvoir is announced as his current domicile and the place from which the poem is written, while coastal Suffolk would be known to most of his readers as his native place, is there any sense of a personal present in relation to a personal past. It is a depersonalized adult Crabbe who is on both sides of a border.

If, as John Barrell claims, Crabbe makes an “attempt to abolish the sense of history altogether,”¹² it is remarkable that Hazlitt's essays on Crabbe and Scott in The Spirit of the Age (1825) should be so very similar. Hazlitt says of Crabbe, “Whatever is, he hitches into rhyme”,¹³ of Scott, “our historical novelist firmly thinks that nothing is but what has been.” (Hazlitt, 11:58). In both cases Hazlitt is echoing Pope's “Whatever IS, is RIGHT,” so as to suggest a common conservatism. Crabbe's attention is fixed on the present, Scott's moves between present and past: both prevent us imagining a different future, confining our imagination to what has already existed. Indeed, it is Crabbe's language of confinement—recently explored in greater detail by Christopher Ricks¹⁴—that Hazlitt astutely identifies and argues with. “The hill of Parnassus is a penitentiary, of which our author is the overseer: to read him is a penance, yet we read on!” Crabbe is to be contrasted with the tragic poet who “shows the sad vicissitudes of things and the disappointments of the passions” (Hazlitt, 11:165), but who at least

strengthens our yearnings after imaginary good, and lends wings to our desires, by which we “at one bound, high overleap all bound” of actual suffering. … The situation of a country clergyman is not necessarily favourable to the cultivation of the Muse. He is set down, perhaps, as he thinks, in a small curacy for life, and he takes his revenge by imprisoning the reader's imagination in luckless verse. … And while he desolates a line of coast with sterile, blighting lines, the only leaf of his books where honour, beauty, worth, or pleasure bloom, is that inscribed to the Rutland family!

(11:165)

Hazlitt misquotes Paradise Lost. When Satan “to the border comes / Of Eden” (4:131-32) he “At one slight bound high overleap'd all bound / Of Hill or highest Wall” (4:181-82). Milton's double meaning of “bound” is taken up by Hazlitt as a pointed rejoinder to Crabbe because the word “bound” is important to Crabbe too (normally as an adjective or a noun).

It is a key word in a passage Hazlitt quotes from “Peter Grimes”:

Thus by himself compell'd to live each day,
To wait for certain hours the Tide's delay;
At the same time the same dull views to see,
The bounding Marsh-bank and the blighted Tree;
When Tides were neap, and, in the sultry day,
Through the tall bounding Mud-banks made their way,
Which on each side rose swelling, and below
The dark warm Flood ran silently and slow;
There anchoring, Peter chose from Man to hide,
He nurst the Feelings these dull Scenes produce,
And lov'd to stop beside the opening Sluice;
Where the small Stream, confin'd in narrow bound,
Ran with a dull, unvaried, sad'ning sound;

(Complete, 1:569-70; italics added)

Here, at the border of land and sea, “bounding” and “bound” refer to a confining border rather than to the action of leaping over such a border to freedom. Escape from the constraint of things as they are: that is what, according to Hazlitt, Crabbe denies to his characters and to his readers.

“By degrees,” writes Hazlitt, we readers of Crabbe “are reconciled to our fate, like … prisoners in the condemned cell” (11:165). “Peter Grimes” is in fact immediately followed by “Prisons” where

          separate Cells awhile in Misery keep
Two doom'd to suffer: there they strive for Sleep;
By day indulg'd, in larger Space they range,
Their Bondage certain but their Bounds have change.

(Complete, 1:581)

One, condemned to death because she “fir'd a full-stor'd Barn” (1:581), was “Pauper bound, who early gave / Her mind to Vice, and doubly was a Slave” (1:581). The link, for a pauper child, between being bound apprentice and being bound with ropes is as close here as it is for Peter Grimes's apprentices (though the sexual dimension of the bondage is more explicit in this case) and explains why, both in Crabbe's poetry and in reality, the boundaries of the parish were often as oppressive to those they admitted as to those they excluded. In characteristic fashion, Crabbe's description of the condemned woman puts side by side the harsh circumstances of her upbringing and the freedom of her choice (“she gave / Her mind to Vice”): neither mitigates the other. There is no suggestion that the law is wrong or wrongly applied. His feeling for her is fear rather than pity:

Sullen she was and threat'ning; in her Eye
Glar'd the stern Triumph that she dar'd to die;

(Complete, 1:581)

The other condemned cell is occupied by a “highwayman” (1:575) convicted for assaulting a “timid Traveller” (1:582), who dreams in his restless sleep:

Yes! all are with him now, and all the while
Life's early Prospects and his Fanny's smile: …
Then through the broomy Bound with ease they pass,
And press the sandy Sheep-walk's slender Grass,
Where dwarfish Flowers and the Gorse are spread,
And the Lamb browzes by the Linnet's Bed;
Then 'cross the bounding Brook they make their way
O'er its rough Bridge—and there behold the Bay!

(Complete, 1:582-83)

He dreams that he and Fanny are strolling along the shoreline, delighted by its objects:

Pearl-shells and rubied Star-fish they admire,
And will arrange above the Parlour-fire, -
Tokens of Bliss!—“Oh! horrible!—a Wave
Roars as it rises—save me, Edward! save!”
She cries:—Alas! the Watchman on his way
Calls and lets in—Truth, Terror, and the Day.

(Complete, 1:584)

Hazlitt's Satan bounds across the border into Paradise. Crabbe's highwayman dreams of an earthly paradise with open borders, unrestricting “bounds” that can be crossed easily. The brook here does bound in both senses, so as to emphasize the ease with which one may innocently leap across it. But all this is in a dream, and when the dreamers reach the seaside—the border across which they might perhaps escape—it becomes the closed border of the nation-state, reminding the condemned man that he is literally bound, the circling sea-coast quickly contracting to a noose.

Hazlitt's essay on Scott does not speak of incarceration, literal or figurative. But Scott himself does, and borrows extensively from Crabbe to help him do so: the novel is The Heart of Midlothian, named after the prison it is partly about.

In a letter to Crabbe written on 1 June 1813, Scott associates his own Scottish borders with Crabbe's Vale of Belvoir through the figure of an outlaw, though a more benign one than Peter Grimes or the condemned highwayman of “Prisons:”

You must be delightfully situated in the Vale of Belvoir, a part of England for which I entertain a special favour for the sake of the gallant heroe Robin Hood who (as probably you will readily guess) is no small favourite of mine, his indistinct ideas concerning meum & tuum being no great objection to an outriding Borderer.

(Selected Letters, p. 109)

This passage no doubt helped convey Scott's borderland into “Delay has Danger.” It must also have helped to embed Crabbe and the Vale of Belvoir in Scott's mind, where they are associating with outlawry by courtesy of Ben Jonson's unfinished play The Sad Shepherd, or A Tale of Robin Hood (1637), in which Robin “invited all the shepherds and shepherdesses of the Vale of Belvoir to a feast in the forest of Sherwood.”¹⁵ Crabbe, Robin Hood, and the Vale of Belvoir resurface together five years later in the English Midland chapters of The Heart of Midlothian.

The Heart of Midlothian “is, as the references to Milton, Bunyan, and Measure for Measure indicate, a puritan fable—one in which Scott denies the imagination the kind of preeminence he had assigned it hitherto.”¹⁶ In addition, Jeanie Deans is of a lower social class than Scott's other protagonists and to an unusual extent focuses his attention on class as an issue. So there are a number of reasons for not being too surprised that the novel is also full of references to Crabbe.

Crabbe is introduced into the novel's opening chapter—which we are to imagine as set in the present—by Halkit, one of the two young Edinburgh lawyers stranded at the Wallacehead inn. Here, Halkit suggests to Peter Pattieson, the village schoolmaster who is also the novel's supposed author, that the annals of the Edinburgh city goal, the Tolbooth—the so-called Heart of Midlothian—would be a better source of stories than any novelist's imagination:

“The inventor of fictitious narratives has to rack his brains for means to diversify his tale, and after all can hardly hit upon characters or incidents which have not been used again and again, until they are familiar to the eye of the reader, so that the elopement, the enlevement, the desperate wound of which the hero never dies, the burning fever from which the heroine is sure to recover, become a mere matter of course. I join with my honest friend Crabbe, and have an unlucky propensity to hope when hope is lost, and to rely upon the cork-jacket, which carries the heroes of romance safe through all the billows of affliction.” He then declaimed the following passage … :

“Much have I fear'd, but am no more afraid,
When some chaste beauty, by some wretch betray'd,
Is drawn away with such distracted speed,
That she anticipates a dreadful deed.
Not so do I—Let solid walls impound
The captive fair, and dig a moat around;
Let there be brazen locks and bars of steel,
And keepers cruel, such as never feel;
With not a single note the purse supply,
And when she begs, let men and maids deny;
Be windows those from which she dare not fall,
And help so distant, 'tis in vain to call;
Still means of freedom will some Power devise,
And from the baffled ruffian snatch his prize.”

(Complete, 1:546)¹⁷

After quoting those lines from “Ellen Orford” (The Borough), Halkit goes on to contrast novels with “the real records of human vagaries,” as they can be read in “the State Trials, or in the Books of Adjournal, where every now and then you read new pages of the human heart, and turns of fortune far beyond what the boldest novelist ever attempted to produce from the coinage of his brain” (p. 20). The history of the Tolbooth “might afford appropriate materials” for such a narrative because “the true thing will triumph over the brightest inventions of the most ardent imagination” (p. 21). In addition to quoting “Ellen Orford,” here Halkit may be recalling similar sentiments from earlier lines of the same poem. Halkit's defense of a document-based realism also contains echoes of The Village (“Then shall I dare these real ills to hide, / In tinsel trappings of poetic pride” [1:158]), and of “The Parish Register” with its contrast between what “the Poet sees” and what “these Records give” (1:213). Perhaps the most direct hint, however, comes in a letter Crabbe wrote to Scott dated 5 March 1813. Prompted by Scott's description of himself “fagging as a Clerk” (Crabbe, Selected, p. 98) in the Scottish Supreme Court, Crabbe writes, “I have often thought that I should love to read Reports that is, brief Histories of extraordinary Cases with the Judgements” (p. 104). With “The Parish Register” Crabbe brought his two careers—poet and clergyman—together. Prompted by Crabbe, The Heart of Midlothian brings Scott's two careers—novelist and lawyer—together.

“Ellen Orford” is one of Crabbe's earliest full-length verse tales. Its introductory section, from which Scott's young lawyer borrows, constitutes a manifesto for the final and major stage of Crabbe's literary career. He is defining his own purposes by contrast with romantic fiction much as he defined his earlier purposes in The Village and “The Parish Register” by contrast with pastoral poetry. In quoting Crabbe in the first chapter, Scott appears to be taking over Crabbe's manifesto as his own.

What makes the quotation from “Ellen Orford” specially pointed is that, like the lines from The Library that Scott had read nearly thirty years before, it links the romance plot to incarceration. Crabbe, Hazlitt, and Scott are all making associations of this kind. The Borough's final couplet rhymes “Rhyme” with “Crime” (Complete, 1:598), as if to stress simultaneously the pleasures and pains of enclosure. Hazlitt, by contrast, sees a poetry preoccupied with prisons and which “imprisons the imagination of its readers.” As for Scott, Crabbe enters his Heart of Midlothian at the beginning, with a passage on incarceration, and leaves it with the epigraph to chapter forty, taken from the description of the condemned woman in “Prisons”: he is then quickly left behind, as Jeanie Deans heads for her romance ending on the island of Roseneath.

In “Ellen Orford” Crabbe seems to say that we should not expect justice in life or, therefore, poetic justice in realistic poetry. So it is significant that Scott alludes to but does not actually quote the lines in which Crabbe most radically questions the fictional world “where Plots are laid and Histories are told.” Perhaps, with Crabbe in mind, Scott is setting himself the task of showing that justice and poetic justice can be achieved in a way that is plausible but which does not involve burning ricks or storming gaols. Bad laws should be changed and their current victims spoken for, Scott believes, but not in ways that challenge the established rule of law.

Scott's description of the crowd advancing on the Tollbooth “carries what would have been for his first audience unmistakable overtones of both the French Revolution and contemporary radical disturbances.”¹⁸ Some of these contemporary overtones are explicit, including the narrator's frequent comparisons between past and present, and Scott's allusions to contemporary poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Crabbe.

Crabbe's part in establishing a relation between present and past is particularly important. This is not because he makes such contrasts himself, for he seldom does. Rather, he is a modern poet writing realistically about modern people. If Crabbe's “is” takes up his whole field of vision, as Hazlitt and Barrell suggest, then the contrast between “is” and “is not” is stronger than any contrast between “is” and “was.” When Crabbe's verse moves into Scott's historical fiction however, the significance of his focus on what “is” is changed: his descriptions take on a historical dimension they do not have in their original context.

Furthermore, to early nineteenth-century readers, Crabbe did seem to embody in his own life and writing a striking juxtaposition of past and present:

His “Parish Register” was published at the interval of twenty-two years after The Newspaper; and, from his thirty-first year to his fifty-second, he buried himself completely in the obscurity of domestic and village life, hardly catching, from time to time, a single glimpse of the brilliant society in which he had for a season been welcomed, and gradually forgotton as a living author by the public.

(Life, p. 125)

We have seen Scott recording, in his first letter to Crabbe, his pleasure at discovering that Crabbe was in fact still a living author. It may be, however, that Scott had a strong sense of Crabbe as a poet with two lives, belonging to two separated periods, two centuries. Furthermore, the eighteenth century to which Crabbe belonged was not only the 1780s of The Library and of Scott's youth, but the earlier eighteenth century of Dryden and Pope—and of the Porteous riots. Crabbe was at once a literary innovator and a literary throwback belonging to the period of The Heart of Midlothian. Crabbe's presence in Scott's novel has a variety of consequences; but we will find that he is often there of focus our attention on the relationship between the time of the novel's writing and the time of its action.

Chapter nine, which describes the early relationship between Reuben Butler and Jeanie Deans has an epigraph (p. 85) from the “Marriages” section of “The Parish Register” in which Crabbe describes the similarly prudent courtship of “Reuben and Rachel.” Lines from the same section of the poem, describing the beautiful and imprudent Phoebe Dawson, then introduce Scott's description of Jeanie's sister Effie (p. 98). These young people function in Crabbe's poem to illustrate a contrast: Phoebe, with her illegitimate child, is one of many examples of sexual and economic imprudence, whereas Reuben and Rachel are one of only two examples (Fanny Price is the other)¹⁹ of happily prudent marriages. Scott's contrast follows Crabbe's: on the one hand there is sexual passion leading to a woman left unprotected with an illegitimate child; on the other hand there is restraint through a long engagement, leading to an economically secure, emotionally quite strong, but rather sober marriage.

In Crabbe, the names Reuben and Rachel may indicate that a sectarian affiliation would have initially brought the couple together. Crabbe does not follow this up, however, focusing instead on their shared class position as “servants” (p. 433) rather than “farmers” (p. 390). Reuben and Jeanie, by contrast, are from farming families—though tenant farmers, and not wealthy ones—and Scott's interest is in their religious culture as much as in the class position to which it is linked. It is by taking up Crabbe's suggestion of a sectarian affiliation, where Crabbe does not do so, that Scott links the question of economic and sexual prudence both to the historical and geographical progress of distinct strands in the national culture, and to the particular law—rescinded by Scott's time—under that Effie Deans is charged. At the same time, it is the references to Crabbe which most explicitly mark the fear of sexual licence and illegitimacy in the novel as the Malthusian fears of Scott's own time. Hazlitt called Crabbe “a Malthus turned metrical romancer” (11:167), and it would be “The Parish Register” he had in mind.

It is when Jeanie embarks on her journey south to petition the monarch that Scott really moves into Crabbe's territory, and this in two senses. Following the 1813 letter to Crabbe, Scott moves the turbulent border and its outlaws down into the English Midlands, to the Vale of Belvoir where Crabbe lived. It is one of Crabbe's literary territories too: the quintessential English parish, at “the centre of the kingdom”—the Heart of the Midlands—where Crabbe placed himself in the Preface to The Borough.

The analogy between the Border and the English Midlands is first made by Ratcliffe—master thief turned Keeper of the Tolbooth—who warns Jeanie that she may “meet wi' rough customers on the Border, or in the Midland” (p. 257). In the event, the Border presents few problems: outlawry has moved south. The ostler at the York inn where Jeanie stays warns, “Have a care o' Gunnerby Hill, young one. Robin Hood's dead and gwone, but there be takers yet in the vale of Bever” (p. 291)—takers who, according to Dick Ostler's song, see themselves as heirs of Robin Hood:

Robin Hood was a yoeman right good,
          And his bow was of trusty yew;
And if Robin bid stand on the King's lea-land,
          Pray, why should not we say so too?

(p. 291)²⁰

The Vale of Belvoir section (chapter twenty-nine) itself is introduced by lines from The Borough, Letter 18—“The Poor and their Dwellings” (1:531)—describing (as Tony Inglis puts it) “a disused warehouse let out to beggars, vagabonds, and social outcasts” (p. 636). Meg Murdockson's gang assembled in an old barn constitutes a similar milieu. It is to this barn that the kidnapped Jeanie is taken from Gunnerby Hill, a real place just North of Grantham in Lincolnshire, five miles from Crabbe's parish of Muston and from Belvoir Castle. She is then led out of captivity to the (invented) village of Willingdon by Meg's daughter Madge Wildfire. The distracted Madge, mother—like Effie—of a child by George Robertson that she has now lost, imagines herself inhabiting the itinerant world of Pilgrim's Progress. She sings a song “made on me lang syne, when I went with him to Lockington wake, to see him act upon a stage, in fine clothes, with the player folk” (p. 316). We already know that Robertson has “been a soldier, and … a play-actor” (p. 166). He united the two skills when he led the assault on the Tolbooth disguised as a woman, dressed in Madge's clothes. So one way and another, it is as if a whole troop of traveling people, real and imagined, past and present, are moving along the road toward the village of Willingdon: single women with children, pilgrims, soldiers, petitioners, thieves and highwaymen, outlaws, strolling players.

When Jeanie and Madge meet the village beadle—introduced by lines from Crabbe's description of the overseer in The Borough—it certainly seems to be the spectre of promiscuous vagabondage that he sees in these two women. Controlling entry to the parish, the beadle's job is to separate the traveling sheep from the traveling goats: those like Jeanie who can support themselves, from those like Madge who might become a burden on the rates. Jeanie is allowed to stay a few days; Madge is sent packing to the next parish where her mother is already in the stocks. Meg moves directly from vagabondage to bondage, the converging extreme forms of what it means to be inside and outside the parish boundary.

The beadle asks Madge, “‘What's brought thee back again … to plague this parish? Hast thou brought ony more bastards wi' thee to lay to honest men's doors?’” (p. 324). Whether the beadle intends to pun on the literal and metaphorical senses of “lay at the door,” it is a pun that goes to the heart of the sexual and economic anxieties of parish paternalism as Crabbe represented them in “The Parish Register.” Madge would hold the parish responsible for her baby because its father lives in the parish. She might also have literally laid it at Mr. Staunton's door, both because the rector's son, George, is the infant's father and because the parish, under the authority of the rector, has an obligation to act in loco parentis toward a foundling. Scott's pun echoes Crabbe's pun on “sires” in “The Parish Register” (Complete, 1:232):

          To name an Infant met our Village-sires,
.....Some harden'd knaves, who rov'd the country round,
Had left a Babe within the Parish-bound.
.....Then by what name th'unwelcome guest to call,
Was long a question and it pos'd them all:
For he who lent it to a Babe unknown,
Censorious men might take it for his own. …(21)

Crabbe's presence can be felt most strongly, however, on the two occasions when Jeanie and the reader are introduced to Mr. Staunton. The first of these is at the join between chapters thirty-one and thirty-two (pp. 323-24):

The clergyman was satisfied there must be something extraordinary in all this, and as a benevolent man as well as a good Christian pastor; he resolved to enquire into the matter more minutely.

CHAPTER XXXII

There govern'd in that year
A stern stout churl—an angry overseer.

Crabbe

While Mr Staunton, for such was this worthy clergyman's name. …

Something very similar happens at the join between chapters thirty-three and thirty-four (pp. 347-348):

Ere [George Staunton] could complete the sentence, his father entered the apartment.

CHAPTER XXXIV

And now, will pardon, comfort, kindness, draw
The youth from vice? will honour, duty, law?

Crabbe

Jeanie arose from her seat, and made her quiet reverence when the elder Mr Staunton. …

Firm but kindly, bookish, botanizing, living in the Vale of Belvoir, introduced and surrounded by quotations from his own poems, there can't be much doubt who this clergyman is supposed to be, drawn back into the eighteenth century, drawing the action of the novel forward into the nineteenth century.²²

The epigraph to chapter thirty-four, which links Crabbe and Mr. Staunton, also links the clergyman's son, George, to the dissolute Frederick Thompson of “Players”; and the immediately following lines from the same poem are quoted at the end of the chapter (p. 358) to underline the resemblance. We are told that George's

early history may be concluded in the words of our British Juvenal, when describing a similar character:

Headstrong, determin'd in his own career,
He thought reproof unjust and truth severe;
The soul's disease was to its crisis come;
He first abused and then abjured his home;
And when he chose a vagabond to be,
He made his shame his glory; “I'll be free.”(23)

This fine and complex poem describes the visit to the borough of a troop of strolling players. Like other literary works about actors—notably like Hamlet, to which the poem movingly alludes—“Players” makes two basic moves. Punning on the word “acting,” it distinguishes the actors' real lives from the roles they play; but it also complicates and partially dissolves that distinction. And punning on words such as “troop,” the poem makes extensive links between actors and soldiers of the kind that Gillian Russell has shown to be active in the language and conduct of the military and the stage in the public life of this period.²⁴ Finally, Crabbe links both these groups—soldiers and players—to the vagrant unemployed; and once again the link is partly made by a pun, the pun on “career” in the lines quoted by Scott.

Crabbe revives old or commonplace metaphors more often than he invents new ones. He explores his society's habits and beliefs by exploring the relationships between the existing meanings of ordinary words. He turns “career,” for instance, into a pun, highlighting its distinct meanings of a settled job with prospects and a very fast movement (usually downhill). And if to revive dead metaphors is to return to currency meanings dulled by habit, then the “habit” metaphor is especially telling. The context is the wearing of theatrical costumes and military uniforms:

Vice, dreadful habit! when assum'd so long,
Becomes at length inveterately strong;
As more indulg'd, it gains the Strength we lose,
Maintains its Conquests and extends its Views;
Till the whole Soul submitting to its Chains,
It takes possession, and for ever reigns.

(Complete, 1:478)

The Frankenstein sense of artificial people being constructed out of real ones echoes an earlier passage:

The Master-mover of these Scenes has made
No trifling Gain in this Adventurous Trade; -
Trade we may term it, for he duly buys
Arms out of use and undirected Eyes;
These he instructs, and guides them as he can,
And vends each Night the manufactur'd Man:
Long as our Custom lasts, they glady stay,
Then strike their Tents, like Tartars! and away!

(Complete, 1:472)

Crabbe's editors tell us that “Arms out of use and undirected eyes” refer to the faults of incompetent or untrained actors (Complete, 1:739). Crabbe also makes them refer to the unemployed: “arms out of use” are like “idle hands.” So we get a powerful image of the drilled actor or soldier as a “manufactured man,” made for sale out of the living body parts of the vagrant poor.

The inventors of George Staunton and Frederick Thompson both associate illegitimate children with the illegitimate theatre. But in Crabbe's poem these are not associated with any direct threat to political legitimacy, whereas in Scott's novel they are. On the other hand, while Crabbe's poem is in this case less explicitly political than Scott's novel, the presence of lines from the poem both intensifies and redirects the novel's political implications. Crabbe's proleptic presence helps to link Tolbooth to Bastille, Jacobite to Jacobin. Robertson/Staunton is a bounder, an heir of Milton's Satan; he is a “satire,” as Fiona Robertson points out, “on the masquerading revolutionary … as perfect a combination as any anti-Jacobin could desire of indulgent bourgeois upbringing … adolescent rebellion, promiscuity, and sentimental attachments posing as egalitarian principles.”²⁵ But her illuminating survey of Staunton's literary and cultural origins misses the source that Scott himself most explicitly identifies, in the work of Britain's leading anti-Jacobin poet.

Of course Robertson/Staunton is a more romantic, more gothic figure than Frederick Thompson. The telling of his life story is one stage in this novel's accelerated transformation into a romance as it moves away from its documentary source and toward the bourgeois-aristocratic Arcadia of its ending. It is appropriate that Crabbe's presence in the novel more or less ends when Jeanie leaves the Vale of Belvoir for London. He appears just once after that, during her return journey from London, as the coach carrying her and the duke of Argyle's manservant travels across the border country into Scotland. Lines from the description of the condemn'd woman in “Prisons” who “had grievous ill / Wrought in revenge” introduce the grim death of Meg Murdockson at the hands of a lynchmob. Scott's border had moved down to Crabbe's Midlands; Crabbe now moves up to the Scottish border. Meg and Madge die where “many an outlaw, and border-rider of both kingdoms, had wavered in the wind during the wars, and scarce less hostile truces, between the two countries” (p. 408): a spot of time, where “wavered” grimly echoes Waverley.

The Heart of Midlothian ends by consolidating personal and national unions within a united kingdom, harmonizing different ideological traditions and the different territories and historical epochs with which they are particularly associated. But it is a precarious ending,²⁶ and one of the things that makes it so is the way it blatantly breaks the promise Halkit, inspired by Crabbe, seemed to be making on Scott's behalf in chapter one. The “little bark” (p. 424) that carries Jeanie Deans up the Firth of Clyde to the island of Roseneath is surely lawyer Halkit's “cork-jacket which carries the heroes of romance through all the billows of affliction.”

The real-life model for Jeanie Deans, Helen Walker, “survived, unmarried, in great poverty”:²⁷ an ending more like Ellen Orford's. Of course Hazlitt would have resisted both endings: Scott's because it idealizes things as they are, Crabbe's because it resigns us to them. And when the novel's own narrator says that “it was too wonderful to be believed—too much like a happy dream to have the stable feeling of reality” (p. 407), it is almost as if Scott, with Crabbe at his elbow, is telling us that what he is giving us here is indeed pure fiction, its only logic the logic of romance plot itself.²⁸

Notes

1. The simultaneous visits of Crabbe and George IV to Edinburgh are described by J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott (London: Macmillan, 1900), 4:31-57. Scott's management of the state-visit, with the Hanoverian monarch dressed in “Stuart Tartans” (4:43) has been widely discussed as an episode in the creation of Heritage Scotland within a united Britain. See, e.g., Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbaum & Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1983), pp. 15-43.

2. “… And an Intertextual Heart: Rewriting Origins in The Heart of Midlothian,” in Scott in Carnival: Selected Papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference, ed. J. H. Alexander & David Hewitt (Aberdeen: Assoc. for Scottish Literary Studies, 1993), p. 220.

3. It should be noted, however, that the prominence given to Scott in the Life of George Crabbe and to Crabbe in the Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott may in part be due to the fact that Lockwood edited (and anonymously reviewed) the former immediately prior to writing the latter. For Lockwood's role in the Crabbe biography, see Thomas C. Faulkner, “George Crabbe: Murray's 1834 Edition of the Life and Poems,” Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979): 246-52.

4. The Life of George Crabbe, by his Son, intro. E. M. Forster (London: Oxford Univ., 1932), p. 164.

5. George Crabbe: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Norma Dalrymple-Champneys & Arthur Pollard, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 1:634 & 355. The ref. is to Marmion, II, xxii, 1-7.

6. Selected Letters and Journals of George Crabbe, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner with Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), pp. 90-91.

7. Review of English Studies, n.s., 32 (1981): 286-93.

8. George Crabbe's Poetry on Border Land (Lampeter & Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1990), pp. 19-33.

9. Tales of the Hall was published in June 1819. Lines 211-27 seem to have been added to “Delay has Danger” at a late stage, possibly after the publication of The Heart of Midlothian in late July or early Aug. 1818.

10. That Crabbe and Scott had identified a cultural phenomenon is suggested by Crabbe's letter to Scott of 29 June 1813: “I fully agree with you respecting the necessity of a profession for a youth of moderate fortune. Woe to the Lad of Genius without it & I am flattered by what you mention of my Patron. … I have a Letter from a Young poet, which were I his Father would make my Heart ach & as his friend I have written a strong Dissuasive, but how will he take it? May not Envy have dictated every Line?—or what is the same with Respect to its Effect on him, may not he think so? but there is an Expression in his Letter, for which his Distance (a small Town in Devonshire) & his own Obscurity (an Apothecary's Apprentice) do not Account. He writes of my Patron, I mean the Tale, & after observing that he is in no Danger, which is only saying, he does not know it, He adds, ‘that tale which Mr Walter Scott has lately embellished’—what he can possibly mean, I cannot conjecture” (Selected Letters, p. 115). The young man probably meant Rokeby.

11. The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1995), p. 150. “For all the apparent locospecificity of so many of Crabbe's titles … there is little if any geographical localization—real place-names, real people, times, events. … He was working against the spirit of the age” (p. 150). Simpson is contrasting Crabbe with a “spirit of the age” that Scott did as much as anyone to create.

12. The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1980), pp. 87-88.

13. William Hazlitt: The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe (London: 1930-34), 11:164.

14. “George Crabbe's Thoughts of Confinement,” in Essays in Appreciation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 67-89. This is one of the few essays to do justice to Crabbe's subtlety, though it does less than justice to Hazlitt's.

15. I am indebted to Stephen Knight for drawing my attention to the Jonson connection. See his Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 139-43.

16. Jane Millgate, Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. 1984), p. 153.

17. The Heart of Midlothian, ed. Tony Inglis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), pp. 19-20. Scott is here reworking the argument of his unsigned review of Emma, published in the Quarterley Review for March 1816, a piece that links Scott, Crabbe, and Austen, as Crabbe may be doing in “Delay has Danger.” Scott allocates Austen's novel to “a class of fictions which has arisen almost in our own times, and which draws the characters and incidents introduced more immediately from the current of ordinary life, than was permitted by the ordinary rules of the novel,” rules derived from Romance, which put its heroes and heroines through extraordinary dangers from which they were unfailingly rescued at the last minute. Scott supports his argument by quoting ll. 113-19 of “Ellen Orford” by “Mr Crabbe [who] has expressed his own and our feelings excellently on this subject” (Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction, ed. Ioan Williams [London: Routledge, 1968], pp. 227 & 228).

18. Jane Millgate, “Scott and the Law: The Heart of Midlothian,” in Rough Justice: Essays in Crime and Literature, ed. M. L. Friedland (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto, 1991), p. 103.

19. I do not think it has been noticed that Fanny Price and Jeanie Deans can trace ancestry to adjacent stories in “The Parish Register.” In the absence of patriarchal authority—for Scott, the monarch's absence in London (or France); for Austen, Sir Thomas's absence in Antigua—it falls to sternly puritanical young women of humble origin to uphold standards their “betters” are often failing to uphold. To this end, Fanny refuses to act, while Jeanie refuses to lie.

20. The Penguin edn. notes that “the verse linking him to later practices of highway-robbery does not occur among the many Robin Hood ballads collected in Child” (p. 636). It may be that the verse, or the phenomenon it represents, or both are Scott's invention. In any event, if Scott is preoccupied with the Robin Hood story as a potentially dangerous popular inheritance, we may speculate that it is a hidden presence in Scott's presentation of the Porteous riots themselves. Ritson's collection of Robin Hood materials, which Scott certainly knew, quotes a description, from Arnot's History of Edinburgh, of the Edinburgh corporation's attempts to “repress the game of Robin Hood by public statute. … In the year 1561, the mob were so enraged, at being disappointed in making a Robin Hood that they rose in mutiny, seized on the city-gates, committed robberies upon strangers; and one of the ringleaders being condemned by the magistrates to be hanged, the mob forced open the gaol, set at liberty the criminals and all the prisoners, and broke in pieces the gibbet erected at the cross for executing the malefactor” (Joseph Ritson, Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads now extant, relative to that celebrated English Outlaw; to which are prefixed Historical Anecdotes of his Life [London, 1795], pp. lxvii-viii). Is George Robertson/Staunton, the masquerading revolutionary from the Vale of Belvoir, “making a Robin Hood”?

21. For a fuller discussion of the Richard Monday and Reuben and Rachel episodes in a Malthusian context, see George Crabbe's Poetry on Border Land, pp. 105-26.

22. If Mr. Staunton is a thinly disguised George Crabbe, however, it has proved an effective disguise. Perhaps we are dealing with a private nudge-and-a-wink communication, conducted in public by that master of the thin disguise, the Author of Waverley. Crabbe wrote to Scott (23 July 1822) “I think of setting out [for Edinburgh] on Friday the 25 Inst & of resting at York: my kind friends here—viz. the Ladies of Mr Hoare's Family—advise an earlier Repose, Grantham or Newark, between which places one could not travel by Night without thinking of the bad people who haunt the environs of Gunnborough Hill” (Selected Letters, p. 183).

23. Crabbe, Complete, 1:478.

24. The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793-1815 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).

25. Legitimate Histories: Scott, Gothic, and the Authorities of Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), pp. 206 & 209.

26. His happy endings feel more precarious than Jane Austen's (Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830 [Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1981], p. 111).

27. Claire Lamont, “Introduction,” to her edn. of The Heart of Midlothian (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1982), p. xviii.

28. See Ian Duncan's discussion of the novel's ending in Modern Romance and the Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1992), pp. 146-76. Scott's part in forging the link between romance and the nation is discussed in Doris Sommer, “Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhaba (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 71-98.