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Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Andrew Lincoln
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
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Summary

He was a man of intensely conservative quality; he accepted, he accepted wilfully, the established social values about him; he had hardly a doubt in him of what was right and what was wrong, handsome or ungracious, just or mean. He saw events therefore as a play of individualities in a rigid frame of values never more to be questioned or permanently changed.

H. G. Wells

Wells's view of Scott finds a counterpart in some of the most authoritative readings of later twentieth-century critics. It is echoed, for example, in the landmark study by Alexander Welsh (1963), who argues that the experience of revolution and war ‘inflated the moral currency’ in Britain, so that ‘the felt triumph of stability and status’ obscured the rapid changes taking place in contemporary society. In this reading, Scott's fiction, like that of his contemporaries, ‘figured forth a vision of permanence and perpetuity’. Such accounts make Scott appear irrelevant to a modern age interested in change, instability, uncertainty, and diversity. In view of this it is perhaps not surprising that since Welsh's study appeared, the impression of certainty and permanence has been modified by a succession of critics who have uncovered a more doubtful, duplicitous, and sceptical Scott. The move begins tentatively, as when Robert C. Gordon and D. D. Devlin find a vein of Tory ‘pessimism’ in Scott's work, or when Peter Garside emphasises the ‘shifting perspectives and uncertain pictures’ through which Scott's fictional vision of the past appears.

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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  • Preface
  • Andrew Lincoln, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: Walter Scott and Modernity
  • Online publication: 12 September 2012
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  • Preface
  • Andrew Lincoln, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: Walter Scott and Modernity
  • Online publication: 12 September 2012
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Preface
  • Andrew Lincoln, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: Walter Scott and Modernity
  • Online publication: 12 September 2012
Available formats
×