Popular versus Legitimate Authority in Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian

Abstract

“I suppose all imaginative people feel more or less of excitation from a scene of insurrection or tumult or of general expression of national feeling” (Scott, Journal 97). Although Walter Scott wrote these words in 1826 in the context of Scottish protest against the English imposition of changes in banking practices and the issuing of paper currency, the idea that riots and crowds arouse the imagination resonates throughout Scott’s career. In contrast to the Romantic poets and theorists of imagination that I discussed in chapter 1, Scott, as a novelist working in a mode influenced by the Gothic, believes that a novel of large scope may be able to come to terms with the crowd. In his second novel, Guy Mcmnering (1815), the title character visits Edinburgh in the early 1780s:

It was long since Mannering had been in the street of a crowded metropolis, which, with its noise and clamour, its sounds of trade, of revelry, and of licence, its variety of lights, and the eternally changing bustle of its hundred groupes, offers, by night especially, a spectacle, which, though composed of the most vulgar materials when they are separately considered, has, when they are combined, a striking and powerful effect upon the imagination. (201)