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

Among the useful aspects of Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels are the ways it complements and fills gaps left by Jane Millgate’s Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History (1987). Millgate emphasized Walter Scott’s control of all aspects of his work on the Magnum Opus edition (1829–33), published by Robert Cadell; but she treated textual matters far more than the visual aspects of the labor. That is an imbalance, because the edition includes ninety-six illustrations, the product of seventy artists and engravers—Edwin Henry Landseer, David Wilkie, and David Octavius Hill among them. How the illustrations had such prominence has everything to do with Scott and with Archibald Constable, Cadell’s predecessor. In telling the origin of the Magnum, therefore, Richard J. Hill restores to Scott and Constable “a proactive part in this project” (6). Consequently, Hill claims, Scott and Constable must be recognized as “pioneers” “in the development of the illustrated novel in the nineteenth century” (5).

It was Constable who conceived the hope of profiting from illustrated collected editions of the Great Unknown’s novels and tales. The illustrations were first published in 1820 and 1821 as separate books of engravings, and then were integrated into the bound novels, which, besides being published singly, were issued in Edinburgh in five separate collected editions previous to the Magnum. But “no illustration would have taken place in Edinburgh,” Hill writes, “if his publishers had not had the author’s approval”—and, as Hill demonstrates, if Constable had not agreed to Scott’s choice of illustrators (7).

Scott hand-picked two Scottish artists, William Allan and Alexander Nasmyth, to represent him visually: a choice, Hill argues, to the detriment of English illustrators. Scott wanted his countrymen to do the job because they were more likely to be sympathetic to, as one contemporary reviewer put it, “work so completely national” (qtd. in Hill 111). Scott’s choices had to be modified for the Magnum; but his preferences had already succeeded. He had saved Allan’s failing career by turning him away from Orientalist subject matter toward Scottish history—and the Waverley novels. Hill sees Scott’s promotion of Allan (who was to become a president of the Royal Academy) as “the point at which history painting and the novel converged to create a new, national-historical identity for Scotland in the wake of a homogenising British patriotism” (131). As for Nasmyth, whose radical political views led him to abandon portraits of aristocrats for stage design, Hill sees his employment by Scott as a sign of Scott’s enthusiasm for popular culture: “the visualisation of popular literary texts,” including The Heart of Midlothian (1818) (148). Nasmyth’s extravagant sets for a dramatization of the latter preceded his pictures of the Tolbooth in later issues of the novel. The alliance of Scott with Nasmyth exemplifies for Hill Scott’s distance from the “apprehension and contempt” for visual media assigned to other Romantics by recent critics (for an example, Hill specifies Gillen D’Arcy Wood in The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860 [2001]) (153).

In Scott’s sponsorship of a future Royal Academician on the one hand, and his backing of a more demotic artist on the other, one sees many contradictions that Picturing Scotland brings to the fore. The pictorial emphasis on Scottish scenes in the Waverley editions resists “homogenising” Scotland and England; and Nasmyth’s stage sets, which rehearse his illustrations for Scott, replicate Edinburgh for an Edinburgh audience, thereby turning the environment into an occasion for historical nostalgia. The nostalgia estranges the public from its own contemporaneity, which is dominated by its new union with England. But simultaneously in the editions the contemporary scene is emphatically being homogenised, if only through the consumerist appetite, throughout Great Britain, for...