Walter Scott’s Place Reading, 1805–1816

This essay explores Walter Scott’s artistic pivot from writing poetry to writing novels during the Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent “heroic age of popular Radicalism.” In the famine-stricken postwar years, early British socialists like Robert Owen wrongly believed that Scott might support a centralized government program of wealth redistribution—a misunderstanding rooted in the implicitly collectivist politics of Scott’s staggeringly popular wartime verse romances. With the nation under threat of invasion from without, Scott’s bestselling poems portrayed British landscapes as encoding a legible, transnational history that belonged equally to Britons from a diverse set of class and gender backgrounds. Against the backdrop of postwar social unrest, and with his poems coming under increasing critical censure, however, Scott’s earliest novels revise his poetry’s collectivism in favor of offering a more qualified account of the rightful owners of British places, property, and national history.

Duke Scholars

Author Timothy Heimlich English