Great Scott.(Book Review)

Sir Waiter Scott Reliquiae Trotcosienses. Edinburgh University Press, 168 pages, $64.00

Sir Walter Scott's fall from literary heights to his current obscurity is one of the great nosedives of all time. Major shifts in popular taste and literary criticism tell part of the story, but another compelling explanation comes from a curious footnote of publishing history: the 1826 financial collapse of Edinburgh's Archibald Constable and Co. Dragged into debt along with his publisher, Scott was talked into creating a collection of his Waverly novels, known as the Magnum Opus, which promised to be a cash cow.

The Magnum Opus enabled Scott to pay off his debts and was a publishing milestone--the first collected work of a novelist, But Scott's reputation has suffered for the fact that it has become the standard edition of his work. Although the collection left the texts of the Waverly novels mostly unchanged, Scott surrounded each novel with introductions and annotations--the composition of which represents the author's major literary activity from that point until his death in 1832. While this new material strengthened the theoretical claims of his "historical novels," it obscured and bogged down the epic narratives on which his reputation rested.

Unfortunately, Reliquia Trotcosienses, or, The Gabions of the Late Jonathan Oldbuck Esq. of Monkbarns, a Scott manuscript nearly completed at the author's death but published now for the first time, will win Scott few new readers. The book was begun in 1830, after Scott suffered the first of three strokes, and its patient and dedicated editors, Gerard Carruthers and Alison Lumsden, readily admit that the manuscript shows signs of the "deterioration of Scott's motor skills and verbal fluency."

A highly idiosyncratic work, which consists of several introductions and a main text that is little more than an annotated tour of Scott's estate at Abbotsford, Reliquia Trotcosienses almost feels like a Magnum Opus edition stripped of its Waverly novel. It has nothing in common with the typical Scott page-turner. But the book's publication is, one hopes, a sign that a serious scholarly return to Scott is underway, and it serves as a useful reminder of the author's strengths and weaknesses.

We first met Jonathan Oldbuck in Scott's third novel, The Antiquary, which lampoons the practice of antiquarianism. Oldbuck is Scott's most autobiographical character, as well as one of his greatest comic achievements: a goodhearted windbag who manages to charm despite pretentious prolixity and a marked lack of common sense. As an antiquary, he is a sort of amateur historian, philologist, and archeologist, whose satisfaction requires only a library of history books and esoteric artifacts. In one of his sillier moments, Oldbuck insists that a nondescript ditch on his property is a former Roman military camp, though a local mendicant claims to have dug it himself twenty years earlier. He also implores a friend to write an epic poem of Scottish history--just so he can supply annotations.

The Antiquary treats Oldbuck's pretensions with mocking levity, While some of this tone is carried over to Reliquia Trotcosienses, the manuscript's second half is distinguished by Scott's ...