Abstract
In March 1817, at an Edinburgh dinner party, Walter Scott collapsed in a spasm of agonizing pain. It was the first hint of the illness that was to plague him in the months to come, during which period he suffered appalling stomach cramps; ingested alarming quantities of opium; fell into a melancholy depression; suffered chronic writer’s block; and fantasized writing his own obituary. Recovery was slow and debilitating, not least because Scott’s doctors had great difficulty in diagnosing his ailment (gallstones). T could neither stir for weakness and giddiness’, he reported to his friend John Morritt, ‘nor read for dazzling in my eyes nor listen for a whizzing sound in my ears nor even think for lack of the power of arranging my ideas’.1 Being Scott, however, he did manage to write a novel: Rob Roy. If productivity under such trying circumstances seems startling, the reasons for it were true to form. Additions to the Abbotsford estate had compounded a financial situation already so vulnerable that, as the self-styled ‘Laird’ confessed, ‘while my trees grow and my fountain fills, my purse, in an inverse ratio, sinks to zero’.2 In short, having pushed for an exceptionally large advance from his publisher, Scott had no choice but to try to write his way out of debt.
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Notes
John Sutherland, The Life of Sir Walter Scott: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 206.
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 150–1.
See for example, Valerie Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986), p. 189.
Graham Tulloch, The Language of Sir Walter Scott: A Study of His Scottish and Period Language (London: Andre Deutsch, 1980), pp. 255–6.
Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 13.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Books IV-V (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 188.
See, for example, Andrew Lincoln, ‘Scott and Empire: The Case of Rob Roy’, in Studies in the Novel, 34 (2002), 57.
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© 2007 Fiona Wilson
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Wilson, F. (2007). He’s Come Undone: Gender, Territory, and Hysteria in Rob Roy. In: Lamont, C., Rossington, M. (eds) Romanticism’s Debatable Lands. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210875_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230210875_5
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