Reading Order
Waverley Reading Order
Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since (1814) by Walter Scott is the founding text of the historical novel — the book that invented a form so pervasive it is now almost invisible as a form. Edward Waverley, a young English officer of romantic imagination and uncertain convictions, is posted to Scotland in 1745 and becomes entangled in the Jacobite rising of Bonnie Prince Charlie, caught between the Highland world of his host Fergus Mac-Ivor and the Lowland-English world of his Hanoverian duty. The novel is about much more than its plot: it is about the relationship between past and present, about how traditional societies are destroyed by modernity, about the romance of lost causes, and about the way the historical imagination works — Scott understood that the Highland world he was describing had effectively ceased to exist in the sixty years since 1745, and Waverley is simultaneously an attempt to recover that world through imaginative sympathy and an acknowledgment that the recovery is always partial and mediated. The novel influenced virtually every major novelist of the nineteenth century: Balzac, Stendhal, Fenimore Cooper, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dickens, Thackeray, and Manzoni all acknowledged the debt. It is also, within its romantic plot structure, a remarkably intelligent analysis of how people hold onto romantic self-images while being moved by practical self-interest — Waverley's own character, despite his romantic posturing, is finally shaped by prudence more than passion.
Where to start
Waverley (1814) — the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels is the definitive scholarly text; for general reading, the Penguin Classics edition edited by Andrew Hook (1972; 2011) or the Oxford World's Classics edition edited by Claire Lamont is excellent. The novel's first six chapters are slow (they establish Waverley's character and education) — persevere; the novel fully comes alive when he reaches the Highlands.
Complete Waverley Book List
- 1Buy
Waverley (Penguin Classics)
Walter Scott (ed. Andrew Hook)·2011·The most readable modern edition for general readers — Hook's introduction is the best short account of the novel's formal innovation and its place in the history of the historical novel; the notes explain the Jacobite history without overwhelming the text. - 2Buy
Waverley (Oxford World's Classics)
Walter Scott (ed. Claire Lamont)·2015·The other standard scholarly edition — Lamont's introduction emphasizes the Scottish cultural context and the novel's engagement with questions of identity and historical change; useful notes on Highland culture. - 3Buy
The Heart of Midlothian
Walter Scott·1818·The novel most critics consider Scott's masterpiece — Jeanie Deans's walk to London to plead for her sister Effie's life is one of the great sustained narratives in the nineteenth-century novel; read after Waverley to see Scott at his most humanly sympathetic. - 4Buy
Old Mortality
Walter Scott·1816·Scott's darkest and most politically complex novel — the story of the Covenanting wars of the 1680s is his most sustained engagement with religious fanaticism, civil war, and the costs of ideological commitment; the finest of the Tales of My Landlord series. - 5Buy
Walter Scott: The Critical Heritage
John O. Hayden (ed.)·1970·Collection of contemporary reviews and Victorian responses to Scott's novels — essential for understanding the novel's immediate impact and the critical tradition; Scott's reputation rose and fell dramatically between 1820 and 1930 and is now undergoing re-evaluation.
Waverley — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Waverley by Walter Scott about?
Waverley (1814) by Walter Scott follows Edward Waverley, a young English officer of romantic imagination, who is posted to Scotland in 1745 and becomes entangled in the Jacobite rising of Bonnie Prince Charlie — caught between the romantic Highland world of his host Fergus Mac-Ivor, which seems to embody the chivalric values his imagination loves, and the practical English world that his prudence eventually embraces. The novel is about the gap between romantic historical imagination and political reality, about the destruction of traditional societies by modernity, and about the romance of lost causes.
Why is Waverley important in literary history?
Waverley (1814) invented the historical novel — the form in which a fictional protagonist moves through historically documented events and encounters historical figures, and in which the historical setting is used to illuminate something about the present by contrast or analogy. Before Waverley, there were historical romances and chronicles, but Scott's form (the ordinary individual caught up in extraordinary historical events, experiencing them at ground level while we as readers see both the personal and the historical dimensions) was new. Balzac, Stendhal, Tolstoy (War and Peace explicitly), Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities), and almost every major nineteenth-century novelist acknowledged the debt.
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