Scott’s Border Characters
Scott’s Border Characters

Summary/Abstract: In the General Preface to the Waverley novels, Sir Walter Scott explains how he initially turned to fiction after his great success in verse: “I had nourished the ambitious desire of composing a tale of chivalry, […] with plenty of Border characters and supernatural incident.” How broadly should we understand the category of “Border characters” in this account? What relationship between characterization and plot is implicit in his conjoining of border characters and supernatural incident? I argue that there are many borders in Scott’s fiction, not just the regional ones, and indeed many kinds of borders, each with its own border characters. Long before Georg Lukács developed his account of Scott’s historical novel as turning on the figure of the “mediocre hero,” Andrew Lang observed that Scott’s strong suit lay in imagining not respectable heroes but “Borderers, buccaneers, robbers, and humorsome people, like Dugald Dalgetty and Bailie Nicol Jarvie and Macwheeble.” These are, I contend, border characters all, not just those from Liddesdale or Peebles. Focusing on the first two Waverley novels, I show how Scott deploys this array of human types and figures not only to map the different kinds of borders that interested him but also to dramatize the complex role of coincidence – improbable “incident” – in his fiction. Dissenting from Lukács’s assimilation of Scott’s fiction to that of Balzac, I conclude by suggesting that Scott’s border characters supply a key to what is really distinctive about his immense international influence.

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