Adjusting the borders of self: Sir Walter Scott's The Two Drovers

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2001 by Ali, Zahra A Hussein

The world of early nineteenth-century journalism was so scummy that noone should hold Scott to the highest ethical standards. But two deaths [that of John Scott, a Whig supporter and Sir Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, a Tory], even if they are not to be laid at Abbotford's gates, could have been prevented by Scott. He should have restrained Lockhart (whose moral case was untenable) in the John Scott affair. He should either never have backed the Beacon, or having backed it he should have exercised more control or publically detached himself with a statement of censure. It is true that Scott never personally wrote lampoons, or libels. But on too many occasions for it to have been coincidence, he was an accomplice before and after the fact and bestowed favours on those who did his party's dirties work. (247)

2This study's theoretical perspective on border theory, its dynamics and poetics of space is indebted toJose David Saldivar's Border Matters: RenappingAmerican Cultural Studies.

3AII quotations are from the following edition: Sir Walter Scott, The Two Drovers. Eds. M. H. Abrams et al. The Norton Anthology ofEnglish Literature, 6' ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993). This tale, along with The Highland Widowand The Surgeon's Daughter, was originally published in 1827 under the title Chronicles of the Canongate.

`att's Waved Novels show a comparable belief in "progress." John Lauber offers, a sociological and geopolitical definition of &Ot's particular notion, of it seems

to consist in the transition of society from a barbarous to a civilized state, from superstition to reason, from tradition to fact, from violence to law, from personal to contractual relationships. The Highlands (before the uprising of 1745) stood for barbarism, the Great Britain of his own day for civilization. In the English compromise of ordered liberty, progress had apparently reached its conclusion, and further change could only be destructive. (112)

5Scott himself was a writer/entrepreneur. A most important aspect of Scott's place in the history of English literature is his expansion of the market available for serious poetry and fiction, not only within the British Isles but in Europe as well. He was the first international best-seller who earned tremendous wealth through mass book sales. Scott's purchase in 1812 of the Gothic palace of Abbotsford was a memorable evidence that fiction writing could be a lucrative business. According toj. G. Lockhart,

Scott's biographer, by 1818 he was earning 10,000 annually for his novels. Scott, however, entered a secret business partnership with James Ballantyne, owner of a printing company in Edinburgh, which ended in a financial disaster in 1826, the year Britain suffered a large-scale, devastating economic collapse. For a brief account of Scott's business affairs and troubles see Paul Johnson's The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 (NewYork: Harper Collins, 1991) 895-98. For a detailed account, see HJ.C. Grierson's Sir Walter Scott, Bart: A New Life Supplementary to, and Corrective of Lockhart's Biography (London: Constable, 1938).