[In the following essay, Ferris observes that the publication of Waverley in 1814 prompted a critical reevaluation of the novel by associating the genre with seriousness, rationality, and the accurate depiction of history and culture.]

When Henry Brougham reviewed The History of the Maroons in the Edinburgh Review in 1803, he emphasized its incompetence as a history by linking it generically to the novel: “The style is thoroughly wretched, and the composition is precisely that of a novel.”¹ Writing in the same review a quarter of a century later, Thomas Babington Macaulay also linked the genres of history and the novel—but to a very different end. Contemporary historians, Macaulay declares in a well-known passage, would do well to look to the novels of Sir Walter Scott, which deploy “those fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind them, in a manner which may well excite their envy.”² The difference underlines the degree to which by 1828 Macaulay no longer works within the same hierarchy of genres that allowed Brougham in 1803 to assume his readers' automatic reception of the word “novel” as the sign of a worthless writing removed from all standards of truth or literary merit. Macaulay, while careful to maintain the primacy of history, refers without embarrassment to the practice of a contemporary novelist as exemplary for historians as historians. Macaulay can do so because the novelist he cites is Walter Scott, whose literary dominance of the age reflects the innovative power of the Waverley Novels in altering the generic field in place at the turn of the century. So rapidly was Scott's achievement absorbed by the culture that, shortly before his death in 1832, T. H. Lister found it necessary to remind readers of the Edinburgh Review that prior to the publication of Waverley the novel was the form “the least respected in the whole circle of literature,” whereas now it takes “a place among the highest productions of human intellect.”³ If the status of the novel was neither quite so exalted nor so secure as Lister here suggests, Scott's extraordinary success had made the novel a major genre.⁴ And that success depended on the way in which conventions of genre, gender, and literary authority intersected at the time of Waverley.

For the early nineteenth century, literary (more broadly, critical) authority was invested in the male middle-class reviews, notably in the Edinburgh Review, whose own innovations in book reviewing in 1802 had transformed a disreputable trade into a powerful cultural force.⁵ By 1814 quarterlies like the Whiggish Edinburgh and its Tory rival, the Quarterly Review, along with the major monthlies, were firmly established as the institutionalized site of critical discourse for a reading public moving into cultural and political prominence.⁶ Despite their differing political allegiances, the reviews wielded a shared vocabulary of assessment. Words like “rational” and “spirited” served as signs of approval, while others like “absurd” and “insipid” marked denunciation. This common rhetoric does not mean that terms within that rhetoric were understood in the same way—far from it, in a context of heated ideological debate, internecine rivalry, different readerships, and individual quirkiness on the part of reviewers. But it does imply consensus about the critical project and points to certain important areas of convergence. One such area was the contemporary novel: contemporary fictions, all agreed, were in general “absurd.” But whether or not the novel as a form was absurd was a more disputed question. While some reviews simply dismissed the genre, others signalled a readiness to take more seriously a form obviously entrenched in the culture. Several of the reviews of Waverley, for example, open with attempts to place the genre historically or theoretically, and the publication of Scott's novel coincided with the publication of John Dunlop's The History of Fiction, a multivolumed study of European prose fiction which drew the attention of the two powerful quarterlies.⁷ Some months later, the Edinburgh Review printed William Hazlitt's “Standard Novels and Romances,” historically important both as an early statement on the novel by a romantic critic and as a sign of the growing sense that the novel, in the words of Hazlitt, “deserves more attention than we have ever yet bestowed on it.”⁸ Such instances point to the existence of a potentially receptive critical climate for a novel which could be perceived as counteracting the “absurdity” of contemporary fictions.

Waverley was precisely such a novel, not least because this ostensibly anonymous work was not anonymous at all. To be sure, it looked exactly like hundreds of novels of the period, and to the modern reader the text of the first edition looks naked or incomplete without the introductions and notes to which we have become accustomed. But to Scott's contemporaries, this apparently routine publication was of unusual interest. Rumors of his authorship surface in almost every review, and their significance is apparent in the statement by the crusty Critical Review: “we neither like the work nor the subject; but the name of Walter Scott claims attention.”⁹ The name of Walter Scott—name of a famous poet, respected scholar, and undisputed gentleman—immediately distinguished Waverley in a period when the novel was not only held in low critical esteem but also (a not unrelated point) regarded as dominated by women to a degree unusual even for a genre that had been closely linked to women since the mid-eighteenth century.¹⁰ Thus when the British Critic announces that it is “unwilling” to consider Waverley “in the light of a common novel, whose fate it is to be devoured with rapidity for the day, and to be afterwards forgotten for ever,” or when Francis Jeffrey asserts in the Edinburgh Review that Waverley belongs “rather with the most popular of our modern poems, than with the rubbish of provincial romances,” the assumptions about genre are inseparable from assumptions about gender.¹¹ Especially revealing is the strategy of J. Merivale in the Monthly Review, who characterizes Waverley as “a tale which has little of the ordinary attractions of a novel to recommend it, and which will therefore probably disappoint all those readers who take it up at a circulating library, selecting it at random from amid sundry tomes of Emmeline, Castel Gandolpho, Elegant Enthusiasts, and Victims of Sensibility.”¹² To disappoint such readers is obviously a positive value, and their gender would have been immediately apparent. Merivale's cluster of motifs—circulating library, aimless reader, standard titles—constitutes the contemporary code of female reading, a code so well established that he does not need to decode it for his readers.¹³ And neither does Scott himself when he makes a similar point in the first chapter of Waverley, satirizing the conventions of popular fictional modes as part of a sly argument that to read his novel one must have no expectations at all. From the outset Waverley locates itself outside the context of female reading, and its two explicit addresses to “my fair readers” later in the text reinforce the opening point. Apologizing to his readers at the end of Chapter 5 for “plaguing them so long with old-fashioned politics,” the narrator comments: “I do not invite my fair readers, whose sex and impatience give them the greatest right to complain of these circumstances, into a flying chariot drawn by hyppogriffs, or moved by enchantment” (24). At the opening of Chapter 55, the narrator again stresses the divergence of his text from the expectations of female readers: “If my fair readers should be of opinion that my hero's levity in love is altogether unpardonable, I must remind them, that all his griefs and difficulties did not arise from that sentimental source” (257). Both passages draw on stock notions, inscribing a reader who is impatient of political analysis, interested only in romantic love, and eager for undemanding, escapist fictions. At the same time, Scott locates himself within the context of female writing in the Postscript where he acknowledges as his model the “admirable Irish portraits” of Maria Edgeworth. She is not, of course, his only model—the Postscript records debts to writing in several genres by both genders—but Scott credits Edgeworth with showing him how to undercut the debasing national stereotypes that literary fictions tended to propagate. She is thus allied with the serious cultural project of Waverley and dissociated from the trivial fantasies of the common novel.

In its deployment of “fair readers” and “female authors,” Waverley points to the typical division of the fictional field at this time into two kinds of novels under two different female signs: that of female reading, which is located as the origin of the worthless common novel; and that of female writing, which generates the superior, morally edifying mode of the proper novel. Both signs, however, cohere in marking confinement as the general condition of the practice of fiction in the period.

Female reading, obsessively demanding “repetition of the same adventures, the same language, and the same sentiments,”¹⁴ simply reinforces the confinement it seeks to escape. An endless loop, such reading is characterized as enervating, irresponsible, and oddly impersonal—as are the novels produced to satisfy its desires. These novels are typically depicted as stamped out by the printing press, not as written by authors. In a symptomatic moment, the Antijacobin regrets the “shoals of compositions” that have issued from “the London presses.”¹⁵ Its recoil from the proliferation of volumes and insistence on their mechanical production reflect the general sense that the common novel participated in an economic system of manufacture and consumption rather than in a literary system of authoring and reading.¹⁶ The “shoals of compositions” are emphatically printed, not written; devoured rather than read. They offer formula and deception, both of which are underlined by the foregrounding of their status as printed objects. So Sydney Smith comments sarcastically that the Minerva Press has always on hand a “ready composed” stock of type to produce its novels of adultery,¹⁷ while the Gentleman's Magazine images the events in novels as “inflicted with a beautiful type, and upon paper wire-wove and hot-pressed” in its argument about the gap between the “distresses” of real life and those “produced by the printing press.”¹⁸ The complex of concerns expressed by the printing motif reveals that what is at stake is the very novelness of the novel: its capacity for novelty and its function as a representation of experience. Self-enclosed and self-perpetuating, the common novel has floated free of referential responsibility.

But if the female reading that fuels the common novel is the sign of the irresponsibility of fiction, female writing operates, by contrast, as the sign of its social and moral utility. A letter to the editor entitled “on Modern Tales or Novels” in the Scots Magazine in 1810 is representative in approving a “well conducted natural tale” that edifies while it amuses and establishes “just notions of propriety and decorum.”¹⁹ What respect was expressed in the reviews for contemporary fiction was directed precisely to the “well conducted” mode of the novel of manners, a mode that seems to have been practiced almost exclusively by women.²⁰ Certainly, as in this comment in the Scots Magazine, only women are cited as exemplary, with Maria Edgeworth generally heading the list. Her “admirable” tales appear here as a wholesome contrast to the “preposterous and extravagant trash” of the ordinary novel, and commendation is also extended to Elizabeth Hamilton for uniting “pertinent observation” with “pious and moral instruction.” Female writing is seen as restoring to the novel something of its ethical function but in a limited sense. It figures primarily as antidote to female reading, which the period routinely images as poison and disease.²¹ Nor are these images always metaphoric. An 1802 Scots Magazine article which cites a medical treatise claiming that young women may be “precipitated” into “diseases” of romantic passion “merely, by reading improper novels” is adopting a standard strategy.²² Improper novels were commonly associated with what we might call horizontal reading—supine, erotic, luxurious. The proper novel, on the other hand, promoted vertical reading, countering the “enraptured fancy” and “delusive sensations” of female reading with the upright feminine virtues of piety, chastity, and patience. The point is that each notion requires the other—female writing implies female reading, and vice versa—so that what is created is in effect a closed system.²³ Outside that system stands the real novel as represented by the eighteenth-century canon that was being set in place in these years. So John Croker of the Quarterly pursues a historical argument whereby the current novel is defined as “minute,” as “less comprehensive and sublime” than novels of the previous century. Of course, he notes, “so far as utility constitutes merit in a novel, we have no hesitation in preferring the moderns to their predecessors.” Reading Edgeworth's Tales of Fashionable Life or Hamilton's Cottagers of Glenburnie, he grants, improves “morals or manners” in a way that reading Tom Jones or Peregrine Pickle certainly does not.²⁴ But there is no doubt which, for Croker, are the better novels.

The contemporary (and female) novel is consistently situated in a context of generic decline from the great (and male) tradition of the eighteenth century. The reviews construct a golden age of English fiction when (in the words of the Antijacobin) the novel stood high “in the estimation of the rational and well-informed part of the world.”²⁵ The canon, whose core is the work of Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, and Sterne, allows reappropriation of the novel as a genuinely male form that has become feminized and so has lost the centrality it once enjoyed. Setting up the canon at once rescues the genre itself from the contempt of rational persons and allows its current practice to be designated as either degenerate (the common novel) or narrow (the proper novel). No one demonstrates this more clearly than William Hazlitt in “Standard Novels and Romances,” a piece occasioned by the publication of Fanny Burney's The Wanderer. The article concentrates on the canonical four before turning to Burney in its final pages. She is a significant figure for Hazlitt, who sees her as the sole representative in the current debased condition of the novel of the “old school” that he values. But Burney's gender precludes her from extending its achievements. As “a very woman,” she looks at “persons and things … in that point of view in which it is the particular business and interest of women to observe them. We thus get a kind of supplement and gloss to our original text, which we could not otherwise have obtained.”²⁶ As “supplement” and “gloss,” Burney's narrative can only circle in and around the “original text,” those male “masterpieces” whose structures contain and define value and significance. Women for Hazlitt are partial and conservative beings impelled by “their senses or habitual prejudices,” their attention characteristically focused on “a violation of the rules of society, or a deviation from established custom.” Hence female novelists like Burney are incapable of dealing with the novelistic matter of manners “in the most extended sense of the word, as implying the sum-total of our habits and pursuits.” Instead they have narrowed the concept to “the manners of people in company.”²⁷

This cluster of assumptions about the contemporary novel forms the critical context of the reception of Waverley, a context that helps to make sense of the reviewers' reiteration of two points: the “variety” of mode, scene, and characterization in the novel; and the “fact” and “accuracy” of its depiction of historical event and cultural life. Both are ways of registering the sense that this novel has restored to contemporary fiction something of the full, broad power of novelistic representation that the dominance of female writing and female reading has threatened. There are, of course, disagreements—Waverley has not yet turned into the authoritative Waverley Novels—but in general the reviews set up Scott's text as marking a return to the novel of responsibility, rationality, public concerns—in short, of centrality. The vocabulary of assessment for Waverley, as in Jeffrey's important review in the Edinburgh, merges easily (if not fully) with that used for nonfictional works under review, thereby underscoring the point that this novel fits into what are regarded as serious and central concerns of the age. And Waverley itself, restoring male writing in a very specific sense, weaves into the narrative a constant strain of allusion to the European literary canon, so locating itself in a literary mainstream that is neither precisely modern nor exclusively novelistic. The British Critic notes with approval “a perpetual allusion to the English and the Latin classics.”²⁸

But the validation of Waverley as a novel that satisfies the official critical idiom of value (“fact,” “truth,” “intellect,” “nature”) exists in tension with another, less authoritative valuation signalled by words like “extraordinary” and “wild.” If the analytic portions of the reviews keep stressing the realist value of the novel, the plot summaries and the passages chosen for quotation keep highlighting its romantic appeal. Over and over again the same passages describing the “extraordinary” life at Tully-Veolan and in the Highlands are presented to the reader. The choice of such passages is usually explained as occasioned by a rational interest in a particular “state of society” or as somehow compelled by the exigencies of reviewing. Merivale, for example, adopts the latter approach to account for the way in which he rapidly passes over the proper heroine, Rose Bradwardine, and her excellent qualifications for domestic life: “while we give to those qualifications in real life the full tribute of our sincere preference, we feel it to be our duty on the present occasion to pass from them to the delineation of more striking characteristics.”²⁹ In a parallel passage in the Quarterly, Croker similarly commends Rose's domestic virtues, then announces that he must “hasten from the character which, in real life, would most attach us, to a description of the uncouth personages who partook with Waverley the wild hospitalities of Tully-Veolan.”³⁰ As rational men, as responsible critics, Merivale and Croker cannot surrender too easily to the satisfactions of fiction, which here appear clearly divorced from those of life. The tension in the response to Waverley surfaces most obviously at the end of John Scott's review in The Champion. “On looking back to our observations,” he notes with some alarm, “we see there is a risk of its being thought from them, that this work is chiefly a romantic Novel … but this idea must not be entertained. Its chief merit is its accurate and lively delineation of character and manners. …”³¹

John Scott's comment underlines the struggle in the reviews to contain Waverley within the categories that would establish its distinction from the dubious romantic fictions of the common novel. That struggle enacts the contemporary male suspicion of fiction; at the same time, it signals the male release into the satisfactions of fiction which Scott's historically grounded narrative made possible. As Scott is careful to point out in the Postscript, “the most romantic parts of this narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact” (340). Paradoxically, Scott's commitment to external reference—to that “fact” valorized by the reviews—permitted him to be more, not less, fictional. Francis Jeffrey, for instance, argues that an artist guided by “nature and truth,” rather than by “the phantasms of his own imagination,” has rooted himself in a principle whose internal consistency gives him the confidence “occasionally to risk a strength of colouring, and a boldness of drawing, upon which he would scarcely have ventured in a sketch that was purely ideal.”³² Terms like “risk,” “strength,” and “boldness” set Waverley apart from both the common and the proper novel, marking it as a liberation of the imagination from a confined and enervated space. As Hazlitt was to suggest shrewdly, this space was in some sense the space of civilization itself, and the Waverley Novels offered an outlet for emotions and desires necessarily repressed by civilized society. In an essay entitled “On The Pleasure of Hating,” Hazlitt muses about how the progress of civilization does not so much weaken primitive energy (as was commonly feared) as block the direct expression of certain forms, leaving intact the energy itself: “We give up the external demonstration, the brute violence, but we cannot part with the essence or principle of hostility.” Civilized persons must therefore resort to rituals of violence (like burning the guy on Guy Fawkes day) and to its imaginative displacement. Herein, says Hazlitt, lies the “secret of the success of the Scotch Novels,” for these novels transport readers to a less restrained time of feuds, wrongs, and revenge. “As we read, we throw aside the trammels of civilisation … the heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at being restored once more to freedom and lawless, unrestrained impulses.”³³ That sense of freedom and unrestrained impulse is, of course, firmly contained by the rational and conservative structure of historical interpretation in the Waverley Novels, but it is integral to that structure.³⁴ Desire and reason, fantasy and fact conjoin in the powerful myth of history through which Scott opened up the novel for the male gender.

This does not mean that the novel now became male. As Elaine Showalter has demonstrated, the association of the novel with women continued throughout the century.³⁵ Indeed, one can argue for the “feminine” elements of Scott's fiction itself: the passive, feminized heroes; the foregrounding of the maternal tongue of Scots; the contestation of centralized authority through attention to marginal forms and peoples.³⁶ All these have important political and cultural implications, but so too does the way in which the “masculine” concerns of the novels yielded to the categories of value assumed by the male reviews so as to establish the novel as a major form. After the intervention of Walter Scott, the debate about fiction in the nineteenth century occupied a different ground. The genre was now accorded a literary authority and cultural centrality that it had not been granted at the turn of the century, largely because the Waverley Novels had ensured that the novel could no longer be perceived as the confined genre of a confined gender.

Notes

1. Edinburgh Review 2 (Jul 1803): 377.

2. Edinburgh Review 47 (May 1828): 365.

3. Edinburgh Review 55 (Apr 1832): 64. Ralph Cohen has stressed that alteration of the relationship of literary forms is a distinguishing feature of generic innovation. See, for example, “Innovation and Variation: Literary Change and Georgic Poetry” in Ralph Cohen & Murray Krieger, Literature and History (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, 1974) 3-42.

4. For a review of the nineteenth-century reception of the Waverley Novels, see James T. Hillhouse, The Waverley Novels and Their Critics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1936). For two recent arguments stressing the dependence of Victorian fiction on the Waverley Novels, see Alexander Welsh, Reflections on the Hero as Quixote (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981) ch. 6, and Judith Wilt Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (Chicago and London: UP of Chicago, 1985), especially the Introduction.

5. See John Clive, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review 1802-1815 (London: Faber, 1957).

6. For a discussion of the cultural force of the reviews, see Jon Klancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790-1832 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987), especially ch. 2.

7. The History of Fiction: Being a Critical Account of the Most Celebrated Prose Works of Fiction. From the Earliest Greek Romances to the Novels of the Present Age, 3 vols. (London, 1814). The Edinburgh reviews Dunlop's study in the same issue as it does Waverley, Edinburgh Review 24 (Nov 1814): 38-58. The Quarterly reviews Dunlop somewhat later, Quarterly Review 13 (Jul 1815): 384-408.

8. “Standard Novels and Romances,” Edinburgh Review 24 (Feb 1815): 322. John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel: Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830 (New York: King's Crown Press, 1943) feels that by about 1800 the novel was beginning to be recognized as a literary form by reviewers, even as it started to encounter a strong new opposition from evangelical religious forces (110). J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (1932; rpt. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1961) discerns an increased interest in the novel as a form in the last decades of the eighteenth century and correlates this interest with a rise in the reputation of Fielding (330). More recently, Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford UP, 1987) has argued that in the 1790's one “suddenly” comes across more sophisticated classifications of fiction in the reviews amidst the standard warnings against fiction (106). See also Michael Munday, “The Novel and Its Critics in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Studies in Philology 79 (1982): 205-26.

9. Critical Review 5th ser. 1 (Mar 1815): 288. For a list of contemporary reviews, see Claire Lamont's recent edition of Waverley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) All references to the novel are to this edition.

10. For traditional historical surveys of the association of women and fiction in the reviews (and outside them), see Tompkins (ch. 4) and Taylor (ch. 3). Nancy Armstrong's more Foucauldian history argues that the English novel originated and developed as a specialized feminine discourse that was central to establishing the hegemony of middle class ideology. Suggestively, the period when the Waverley Novels were at their most dominant and popular is designated as a “gap” in her history, an “interval” when domestic fiction was not being written (ch. 4).

11. British Critic ns 2 (Aug 1814): 204; Edinburgh Review 24 (Nov 1814): 208.

12. Monthly Review ns 75 (Nov 1814): 279-80.

13. For a discussion of the consensus view of female reading, see Robert Uphaus, “Jane Austen and Female Reading,” Studies in the Novel 19 (1987): 334-45.

14. “The Projector, No. xliv,” Gentleman's Magazine 75 (Oct 1805): 911-12. For a striking example of the standard view of female reading, see “On Novels and Romances,” Scots Magazine 64 (Jun-Jul 1802): 470-74, 545-48. Interestingly, the admission in this article that “some men” do read novels simply reinforces the conventional trope of female reading, for the writer declares that such men doubtless would read even more fiction were male social roles as “circumscribed” as are those of women (471).

15. Antijacobin Review 47 (Sep 1814): 217.

16. See, for example, “The Projector, No. lxxxviii” Gentleman's Magazine 78 (Oct 1808): 882-85. This article playfully deploys the vocabulary of political economy in accounting for the “manufacture” of novels.

17. Edinburgh Review 2 (Apr 1803): 176.

18. “The Projector, No. xlix” 912.

19. “On Modern Tales or Novels,” Scots Magazine 72 (Jun 1810): 418-419.

20. Scott's later introduction to his only attempt at a contemporary novel of manners, St. Ronan's Well (1824), presents him as entering a form defined by women. Female success, he remarks, “seems to have appropriated this province of the novel as exclusively their own.” Scott here names Burney, Edgeworth, Austen, Charlotte Smith, and Susan Ferrier. Waverley Novels, 25 vols (Edinburgh: Black, 1871) 17: 1.

21. For these metaphors, see Taylor (ch. 3) and Armstrong (98-106). Such fears about female reading were not restricted to Britain or North America. Michel Foucault quotes eighteenth-century French texts that make similar points in Madness and Civilization (New York: Vintage, 1965) 219. On the question of the proper novel as antidote, see Robert A. Colby, Fiction With a Purpose (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1967), ch. 2. Colby here discusses Waverley in terms of the Anti-Romance, a popular mode centering on a foolish female reader who unlearns female reading in the course of the novel. Austen's Northanger Abbey remains the best known example. Austen, incidentally, does not figure among the eminent contemporary novelists in the reviews before or in 1814, the year she published Mansfield Park.

22. “On Novels and Romances” 471-72.

23. My thanks to my colleague April London for her helpful comments on this section.

24. Quarterly Review 11 (Jul 1814): 355.

25. Antijacobin Review 217.

26. “Standard Novels and Romances” 336.

27. “Standard Novels and Romances” 336-37.

28. British Critic 209. A classical education, as Walter Ong has shown, long functioned as a central mechanism of gender definition, Fighting for Life (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1981). Scott, of course, uses several languages; see Wilt (ch. 3).

29. Monthly Review 284.

30. Quarterly Review 357.

31. The Champion, No. 81, 24 Jul 1814: 239.

32. Edinburgh Review 208.

33. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1931) 12: 127-29.

34. See Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (1963; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1968).

35. A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977), ch. 3. For a recent sociological study that builds on Showalter, see Gaye Tuchman, with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1989).

36. On Scott and gender, see Wilt (ch. 4). For an expansion of the point about marginal forms and peoples, see my “Story-Telling and the Subversion of Literary Form in Walter Scott's Fiction,” Genre 18 (1985): 23-35.