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, Reliquiæ 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.”
It has nothing in common with the typical Scott page-turner.
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, Reliquiæ 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 Reliquiæ Trotcosienses, the manuscript’s second half is distinguished by Scott’s earnest interest in the text itself. But before coming to Scott’s thinly veiled description of his own home and antiquarian collection, the reader must weave through a series of literary smokescreens. The first third of Reliquiæ Trotcosienses is made up of three separate prefatory sections—an introduction, proem, and preface—each of which has its own author, none of which has any discernible plot.
The strongest of these introductory sections is the proem. Purportedly written by one of Oldbuck’s friends after Oldbuck’s death, the proem aims to explain the curious word “gabions” in the book’s subtitle. According to Oldbuck’s nameless friend, the word first appeared in a poem, written by a member of a seventeenth-century antiquary club, in which “gabions” is used to describe the obscure objects of an antiquary’s obsessions: “curiosities of small intrinsic value, whether rare books, antiquities, objects of the fine or of the useful arts.” Showering the members of this club with warmhearted condescension, Scott rediscovers in the proem the successful tone of The Antiquary.
Following the proem are a brief preface, the only section of the book written by Oldbuck, and the main text, a list of Oldbuck’s (actually Scott’s) gabions. This catalogue comprises the remainder of the book and includes descriptions of a pulpit used by a secessionist Presbyterian minister, a complete suit of feudal armor, cuirasses from Waterloo, stags’ horns, a bust of Shakespeare, and a library filled with obscure volumes. Along the way, the text wanders off on narrative tangents, such as a humorous aside about the danger posed to bibliophiles by libraries with books stacked too high. Yet few of these tangents are memorable, and the text as a whole—written in a convoluted, at times impenetrable prose—is dull and ponderous.
To his credit, Scott seems aware of the limitations of Reliquiæ Trotcosienses. The proem concludes by relating a conversation between Oldbuck and yet another friend, who says that he will not involve himself in publishing the catalogue: “I have too much respect for you . . . to be mingled up with an affair from which, believe me, your memory is like to come off halting.” This statement reverberates well beyond Scott’s own reservations about the text’s opaque ruminations. One even senses that the author wrote Reliquiæ Trotcosienses to parody his related work for the Magnum Opus.
Despite the success of the proem, Reliquiæ Trotcosienses reminds us that description and narrative, rather than authorial self-awareness, esoteric annotation, and metafictional diversion, are Scott’s true strengths. In recent years, the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverly Novels has attempted to reintroduce the Waverly novels in their original, pre-Magnum Opus form, and one hopes that a new generation of readers will discover the author’s remarkable descriptions of historical battles, deadly storms, and colorful Scottish villages without the distraction of footnotes and authorial asides. While Reliquiæ Trotcosienses is not an altogether enjoyable text, it suggests that Scott understood long ago what it has taken scholars nearly two hundred years to recognize on their own: Scott the novelist is far more compelling than Scott the antiquarian.
David Grosz is an Adjunct Professor of English at Brooklyn College.