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Guy Mannering Analysis

Sir Walter Scott

Places Discussed

Ellangowan

Ellangowan (el-lan-GAO-an). Ancient Scottish home of the noble Bertram family, located in Dumfries, a region in the southwest of Scotland, near the fictional village of Kippletringan. The Auld Place, the ruins of the family castle, overlooks the Point of Warroch and commands an impressive view of the bay. The family now resides in the New Place, built by Lewis Bertram using stones from the original castle’s ruins. Central to the book’s plot is the question of whether society and the legal system will allow the estate to be auctioned off to the family’s agent—a man of no family history or prowess who drove the Bertrams into debt in the first place—or whether the missing “laird,” young Harry Bertram, will return to claim his inheritance.

Physically, the estate is at the intersection of three contrary and warring worlds, each with its own excesses and vices. It is bordered on one side by Warroch Bay, a favorite landing place for smugglers hoping to avoid Great Britain’s high tariffs on goods such as tea and brandy imported from Holland. On another side is Woodbourne, the estate rented by Mannering as his temporary residence in the region. Although he provides a home for Lucy Bertram when she is ousted from Ellangowan, the house is the site of a standoff between revenue officers and smugglers that results in the death of Vanbeest Brown, one of Hatteraick’s crew and an accomplice of the local gypsy clan.

Ellangowan estate is also close upon the Kaim of Derncleugh, a site of local folklore and superstition, supposed by the region’s peasants...

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Bibliography

(Great Characters in Literature)

Alexander, J. H., and David Hewitt, eds. Scott and His Influence. Aberdeen, Scotland: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1983. These papers are from the Scottish Literary Studies Conference of 1982, and contain two significant papers on Guy Mannering by Jana Davies and Jane Millgate, on landscape and chronology, respectively.

Bold, Alan, ed. Sir Walter Scott: The Long-Forgotten Melody. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983. A collection of essays mainly concerned with the background to Scott’s fiction. Index.

Cockshut, A. O. J. The Achievement of Walter Scott. New York: New York University Press, 1969. The first part of this study focuses particularly on Scott’s two voices, the romantic and the social. Guy Mannering is discussed at some length in this light. Cockshut sees Scott as torn between the conventional and the romantic artist: It is a deeper dichotomy than mere literary technique. Index.

Garside, Peter. “Meg Merrilies and Gypsies.” In The Politics of the Picturesque: Literary Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770, edited by Stephen Copley and Peter Garside. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Helps place Scott’s novels in the Romantic tradition.

Millgate, Jane. Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. One of the more penetrating and sophisticated studies of Scott and his techniques. Deals with Guy Mannering in one of its chapters, focusing on its structures, particularly on parallelism and Shakespearian allusions.

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