Sir Walter Scott and the Gentrification of Empire

Abstract

From their implied audiences to their choices of subject matter, perhaps no two novelists seem more different than the once thought “serenely apolitical” Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott, whose tales of rebellion, succession and war encapsulate what was once thought the sum of politics.¹ But just as politics are rarely so narrowly defined today, so are the differences between Austen and Scott less stark than they at first appear. Austen’s quiet countryside certainly bears little resemblance to the settings of Scott’s historical novels, where the omnipresence of war and persistent threat of change render every place hallowed and every gesture historically fraught. What these different-looking visions share, however, is the assumption that political struggles unfold elsewhere, whether in another place or in another time. The Austen fantasy of a quiet life lived in a stable, self-enclosed community, untouched by global commerce and imperial violence, today takes the form of Janeite nostalgia, though the novels themselves render it spatially: an ocean separates Mansfield Park from the slave-holding plantation on which it depends. In Waverley, Scott looks sixty years back to a time when blood was spilled on British soil, and even then, Jacobitism appears dated and a little romantic. With “a sigh,” Edward Waverley marks the end of Britain’s succession controversies and arrives at the bittersweet knowledge that “the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced” (283).