Abstract
It has sometimes been claimed — though perhaps never more confidently than by the author herself — that Jane Porter’s Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810) are the first true historical novels.1 Family friend and countryman Sir Walter Scott is at any rate reported to have told George IV that the latter book, in particular, was the inspiration for the Waverley series, 2 and this long-popular work still does receive cursory mention in histories of the genre. 3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
‘The once Great Unknown — now the not less great avowed author of the Waverley Novels, in the person of Sir Walter Scott ... did me the honour to adopt the style or class of novel of which “Thaddeus of Warsaw” was the first; — a class which ... formed a new species of writing in that day.’ ‘The Author to her Friendly Readers’, in Thaddeus of Warsaw (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831), vi. This view was also endorsed by James Fenimore Cooper: ‘Commenting on Sir Walter Scott’s assumed originality as a writer of romance, Cooper observed (Knickerbocker Mag. Apr. 1838) that Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs was a work of Scott’s “own country, class, and peculiar subject, differing from Waverley merely in power”.’ James Franklin Beard, ‘James Fenimore Cooper’, in Fifteen American Authors Before 1900, ed. Robert A. Rees and Earl N. Harbert (Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 79.
This story was related in obituaries in several London papers at Porter’s death in 1850. Ann H. Jones, Ideas and Innovations (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 132n. A. D. Hook also reports this ‘admission’, notes that ‘most authorities’ disbelieve it, but concludes that it is ‘not wholly without plausibility’ and might well have happened. ‘Jane Porter, Sir Walter Scott, and the Historical Novel’, Clio 5 (Winter 1976), 181. Neither Lockhart nor Hogg mention it.
The entry for ‘The Historical Novel’ in The Oxford Companion to English Literature (ed. Drabble, 1985, 463), for example, cites the book, along with La Fayette’s Princesse de Clèves and Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent. However, John MacQueen’s The Rise of the Historical Novel (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1989) contains no reference to Porter at all. As regards its popularity, The Scottish Chiefs went through many printings, fading, with Scott, only towards the end of the nineteenth century. Hook identifies a splendid children’s edition of 1921, handsomely adorned by N. C. Wyeth, as its last appearance, but even this work has been re-issued as recently as 1991.
P. James Goldstein, The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 221–2.
The Historical Novel, trans. H. and S. Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), 32–7.
Erich Auerbach develops the same definition, from Scott through Balzac and Stendhal, to embrace all ‘modern realism’, whose subject is merely ‘contemporary history’, an extension endorsed by many subsequent critics. Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 454–92.
The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 91.
‘It’s when the extinct soul talks, and the earlier consciousness airs itself, that the pitfalls multiply and the “cheap” way has to serve.’ Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 4:208–9.
‘Habitually, Ossian laments the loss of long-dead friends and recounts their heroic deeds, always with the implication that heroic practices are themselves in decline.’ Kenneth Simpson, The Protean Scot (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 52.
Scott does describe the Scottish War of Independence in entirely Porteresque terms: ‘the grasping ambition of Edward I, gave a deadly and envenomed character to the wars betwixt the two nations; the English fighting for the subjugation of Scotland, and the Scottish, with all the stern determination and obstinacy which has ever characterized their nation, for the defense of their independence, by the most violent means.’ The Talisman, 38:113. For the phrase ‘manly intervention’ see Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 79–94.
Henry the Minstrel, The Wallace, ed. J. Jamieson (Glasgow: Maurice Ogle, 1869), 5.734.
Janet Todd, ed., Dictionary of British Women Writers (London: Routledge, 1989), 542.
Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B. G. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 229.
Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973), 132.
Quoted and explicated in Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 79.
In Girard’s view the Oedipus complex is mimetic — and a great discovery on Freud’s part — but still, in the end, only one example of a structure which is always operating in human desire. He asks, why do triangular effects most commonly seem to expand and intensify, if they are rooted in one primal crisis? For a fuller discussion of the issue, see Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 352–64.
René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), 18.
Copyright information
© 1997 Ian Dennis
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dennis, I. (1997). ‘What a Land is This!’ — The Pre-Oedipal Nation. In: Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25557-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25557-3_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-25559-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-25557-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)