Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel by Richard J. Hill (review)

In this accessible study, Richard Hill successfully challenges existing claims that Scott was indifferent or averse to the illustration of his novels. Making judicious use of primary sources such as Scott's correspondence, he further demonstrates that Scott played an active part in this process long before his financial troubles of 1826, and that he was involved with literary illustration across a variety of genres throughout his career. In Hill's hands, Scott's artistic, historiographical and pedagogical agenda comes into focus alongside the acknowledged commercial imperatives that drove his Edinburgh publishers to illustrate the Waverley novels as part of their repackaging for wider consumption by an emergent middle-class readership in the 1820s. What also emerges is a clear sense of the democratising effect that advances in steel-plate technology and the professionalisation of the engraving industry had upon book-production, the shifting cultural and material value of the book as object, and the increasingly synergistic relationship between literature, visual art, and theatre during this period.

Hill's study focuses upon the conception and development of the first Scott-sanctioned illustrations produced by or for his Edinburgh publishers, Archibald Constable, and, subsequently, Robert Cadell, between 1819 and 1833, as these were the ones over which Scott exercised authorial control. As Hill reveals, Scott's close involvement in their production led not only to his proofing of engravers' plates, but also to personally appointing the artists who created the illustrations for them. Showcasing two key artists, William Allan and Alexander Nasmyth, Hill argues eloquently for Scott's conception of the supplementary, documentary function that literary illustration should perform. Allan specialised in history painting, while Nasmyth was a well-established landscape painter. Under Scott's supervision, and in a complementary division of labour that separated narrative from scenery, they produced illustrations fitted perfectly to Scott's vision that the ethnographic and topographical aspects of his narratives be visually rendered with complete accuracy and attention to idiosyncratic details of regionally-specific Scottish costumes, characters, settings and architecture, thereby enacting a form of resistance to the totalising myth of British national identity being fostered through imperial expansion. In turn, they aided Scott in the reimagining of Scotland's past, and in inscribing that fictionalised past upon its collective cultural memory. Their illustrations became the generic prototypes of all Waverley illustrations that followed. Hill offers fine close readings of specific Scott passages and related artists' images in this section of his study, creating a desire for similar analysis of other illustrations selected for reproduction in this work.

Further to establishing Scott's participation in the aesthetics and mechanics of the illustration industry, Hill helpfully contextualises the achievement of Scott and his Edinburgh publishers within the early- to mid-nineteenth-century vogue for illustrated travel literature, annuals, keepsakes and gift-books; he identifies literary precedents in the anthologies of canonised eighteenth-century novelists, and contemporary Scottish poetry (including Scott's own), most notably that of Robert Burns; and, as the subtitle of his study suggests, he situates the illustrated Magnum Opus edition of Scott's novels as the direct literary precursor to the Victorian illustrated novel. What this emphasises is Constable's ingenuity in identifying and creating market-demand in Edinburgh for an anthologised, illustrated edition of the works of a living novelist, and the wider impact this had upon the literary marketplace. It further suggests how Scott, Constable and Cadell astutely responded to the shift towards a consumer-driven market that valued illustrated novels as objects of conspicuous consumption, affording us an insight into the importance of the illustrated Waverley novel to both book-history and to popular culture.

Appended to Hill's study is a catalogue that he has compiled of all the Waverley illustrations produced for Scott's Edinburgh publishers during Scott's lifetime. The significance of this index (the first of its...