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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
KENILWORTH FALLS INTO THAT ABUNDANT CATEGORY OF SCOTT NOVELS forgotten by most twentieth-century readers, yet it is an important book in the context both of Scott's career and of the cultural history of the novel. In some respects it marks the apex of his popularity and influence. Brought out by Constable in January 1821 at the literally unheard-of price of thirty-one shillings, it was the first novel published in the triple-decker format: a fact that in itself makes Kenilworth arguably the most influential work of fiction of the nineteenth century. Despite its high price, the book sold briskly: 10,000o copies in the first three weeks, another 3,000 in the next month, a second edition within six weeks of the first.(1) And if you read through the contemporary reviews, what you find is one unending hymn of praise. In 1821 the Author of Waverley was almost beyond criticism. Balzac called the plot of Kenilworth "the grandest, most complete, most extraordinary of all" Scott's achievements.(2) The novel's popularity lasted, too: Kenilworth was one of the half-dozen Scott novels most often reprinted in the nineteenth century.
What did nineteenth-century readers respond to in Kenilworth that later readers have trouble discerning? The short answer, I believe, is spectacle. A fuller answer would involve an inquiry into the way twentieth-century criticism has gone about writing the history of the novel. For all the good work done over the last twenty years on nineteenth-century fiction--and there has been a lot of it--when we come to write histories of the form we continue too often to equate "the novel" with "the novel of domestic realism." Such definitions exclude much more than they include, leaving vast tracts of prose narrative unaccounted for. If, as John Sutherland contends, "our map of nineteenth-century fiction has shrunk to Lilliputian dimensions,"(3) that is partly because we remain enthralled by what we might call Jamesian theories of the novel. By those criteria, narratives like Kenilworth simply don't signify, at least not in ways we have agreed to consider interesting. Kenilworth does offer a domestic drama in the form of the marital tribulations of Amy Robsart and the Earl of Leicester, but it is just about as dull as it could be. If you trace the reception history of this novel in the nineteenth century, one thing you learn is that few readers have ever found the Leicester-Robsart plot terribly compelling or have made the mistake of considering it the focus of the narrative as a whole.
Instead, what nineteenth-century readers responded to most enthusiastically in Kenilworth are precisely those aspects that are apt to seem least "novelistic" to us, namely the elaborate spectacles surrounding the figure of Queen Elizabeth. The entire narrative builds towards the climactic revels at Leicester's castle in honor of the Queen, and Scott's descriptions of them dominate the last third of the novel. For critics inclined to dislike or dismiss Scott, these sections of Kenilworth provide abundant ammunition. For one thing, they are full of egregious historical inaccuracies. For another thing, all that fictional pageantry and spectacle, all that wassailing and declaiming and striking of poses, all that "gadzookery," somehow just doesn't seem sufficiently serious. Collectively we remain puritan enough in our sensibilities to insist that novels, if we are going to waste our time reading them, ought somehow to improve us. Kenilworth inaugurated--and this is another mark of its importance in the history of the novel--that thriving subgenre of Victorian fiction, the lusty (and utterly unserious) Elizabethan costume drama, the kind of thing Thomas Carlyle so roundly disapproved of in the nineteenth century and Georg Lukacs disparaged in the twentieth. The kind of thing serious literary...
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