A fourfold landmark of world literature

Waverley is not a work without flaw: it does contain weaknesses in the characterization of Edward and Rose; it does reveal missed opportunities when compared with its immediate successors in the genre; there is (as often in Scott) an undue haste in its conclusion; and, yes, il y a des longueurs. But whatever criterion of literary greatness one applies apart from artistic perfection, Waverley stands the test.

No work of literature will survive, Erich Heller once said, unless it has a ‘syntax of ideas’ underpinning it. Waverley has such a syntax, indeed two syntaxes. There is the constellation of themes concerned with social relationships in a world where the old familiarities and co-ordinates are being swept away by change – relationships between yesterday and tomorrow, ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’, periphery and centre, nationhood and empire. And there is the constellation of ideas concerned with how those yesterdays are to be recollected, with what constitutes the right depository for the worlds we have lost.

A classic, Frank Kermode has argued, is a work which transcends provincial boundaries. Few works of European literature have done that so resoundingly, its themes providing a new structure of self-understanding and its form and manner providing a new mode of writing for virtually all the emergent national literatures of Europe and for many who were to become the nineteenth century's most eminent novelists.