Providence, Fate, and the Historical Imagination in Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1955)

Abstract

Scott is most celebrated in the history of the novel for his use of the historical imagination. He did not merely attempt to write historical fiction, and by using material from histories, represent the past; he re-created the past. His attention to authentic details of manners and speech was not, as he frankly admitted, meticulous. Interested, as he undoubtedly was, in the antiquarian studies which had developed in the eighteenth century, he used them in the fashioning of his vehicle of expression, which was a particular version of the romance. Manners or the underlying moral nature of the organization of society combined with history or the continuity of man’s experience formed the original basis of this romance. In addition, he made use of the significantly historical interpretation of the marvelous — an interpretation which emphasized the unusual as an event of lasting and penetrating consequence in the experience of a race and a nation. Within this fundamental point of view, as Grierson has pointed out, Scott united the novel which was concerned primarily with the state of society, usually contemporary, and the romance which made use of the uncommon and the marvelous.¹ The result of this union was the historical prose romance — a form which could, in The Heart of Midlothian, for instance, concentrate on manners without abandoning the sense of history and the reference to the unusual.