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Chapter VIII - Scott and The Novel of Terror
Scott's review of fashionable fiction in the Preface to Waverley ;
his early attempts at Gothic story in Thomas the Rhymer and The Lord
of Ennerdale ; his enthusiasm for Bürger's Lenore and for Lewis's
ballads; his interest in demonology and witchcraft; his attitude to
the supernatural; his hints to the writers of ghost- stories; his
own experiments; Wandering Willie's Tale, a masterpiece of
supernatural horror; the use of the supernatural in the Waverley
Novels; Scott, the supplanter of the novel of terror.
In 1775 we find Miss Lydia Languish's maid ransacking
the circulating libraries of Bath, and concealing under her
cloak
novels of sensibility and of fashionable scandal. Some twenty years
later, in the self-same city, Catherine Morland is "lost from all
worldly concerns of dressing or dinner over the pages of Udolpho,"
and Isabella Thorpe is collecting in her pocket- book the "horrid"
titles of romances from the German.
In 1814, apparently, the vogue of the
sentimental, the scandalous, the mysterious, and the horrid still
persisted. Scott, in the introductory Chapter to Waverley ,
disrespectfully passes in review the modish novels, which, as it
proved, were doomed to be supplanted by the series of romances he
was then beginning: "Had I announced in my frontispiece,
'Waverley, A Tale of Other Days,' must not every novel reader have
anticipated a castle scarce less than that of Udolpho, of which the
eastern wing has been long uninhabited, and the keys either lost or
consigned to the care of some aged butler or housekeeper, whose
trembling steps about the middle of the second volume were doomed to
guide the hero or heroine to the ruinous precincts? Would not the
owl have shrieked and the cricket cried in my very title page? and
could it have been possible to me with a moderate attention to
decorum to introduce any scene more lively than might be produced by
the jocularity of a clownish but faithful valet or the garrulous
narrative of the heroine's fille-de-chambre, when rehearsing the
stories of blood and horror which she had heard in the servant's
hall? Again, had my title borne 'Waverley, a Romance from the
German,' what head so obtuse as not to image forth a profligate
abbot, an oppressive duke, a secret and mysterious association of
Rosycrucians and Illuminati, with all their properties of black
cowls, caverns, daggers, electrical machines, trap- doors and dark
lanterns? Or, if I had rather chosen to call my work, 'A Sentimental
Tale,' would it not have been a sufficient presage of a heroine with
a profusion of auburn hair, and a harp, the soft solace of her
solitary hours, which she fortunately always finds means of
transporting from castle to cottage, though she herself be sometimes
obliged to jump out of a two - pair - of - stairs window and is more
than once bewildered on her journey, alone and on foot, without any
guide but a blowsy peasant girl, whose jargon she can scarcely
understand? Or again, if my Waverley had been entitled 'A Tale of
the Times,' wouldst thou not, gentle reader, have demanded from me a
dashing sketch of the fashionable world, a few anecdotes of private
scandal ... a heroine from Grosvenor Square, and a hero from the
Barouche Club or the Four in Hand, with a set of subordinate
characters from the elegantes of Queen Anne Street, East, or the
dashing heroes of the Bow Street Office?"
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