Walter Scott, ‘Peveril of the Peak’ (1823)
[Continuing my read-through of the Waverley novels: previously on this blog, Kenilworth (1821), The Pirate (1821/22) and The Fortunes of Nigel (1822). There are other posts on other Scotts on other blogs. These posts are lengthy and full of spoilers, so, you know: have a care.]
The early 1820s saw Scott working an extraordinarily punishing schedule, writing-wise. It amounted to, basically, two long novels every year, along with many other writerly bits and pieces — The Monastery and The Abbot both appeared in 1820; Kenilworth and The Pirate in 1821 — though The Pirate had 1822 on the title page, as did The Fortunes of Nigel. In early 1823 Scott published Peveril of the Peak and later that same year he published Quentin Durward. Amazing, really, and all the more so when you consider the specifics of his praxis. First, Scott wrote out his novels longhand. Then, to ensure employees at his publishers and printing house did not recognise his handwriting, which apparently was quite distinctive (various people in the literary world were by now aware of Scott’s identity as ‘the author of Waverley’, but the books still appeared anonymously, and Scott wanted to preserve that) he paid an amanuensis to write-out the whole manuscript in their hand before it went to the printing house. When the proofs came back he corrected them, sometimes adding or changing the text substantially, and then had those corrections again copied out in another hand onto another set of proofs. Remarkably time-consuming and laborious, but it didn’t stop him positively churning out fat books.
It was during this period that he established (with Kenilworth) the principle, hugely influential on 19th-century publishing, of issuing his novels in ‘triple decker’ three-vol editions. He also saw his popularity, already stratospheric, reach even new heights. He became mesospherically popular. Thermospherically so.
But extraordinarily punishing writing schedules cannot be maintained indefinitely. Scott had written volume 1 of the projected 3-vol Peveril of the Peak by May 1822 when he had to stop. He stopped because he had to organise and oversee George IV’s state visit to Scotland — a very big deal, this. When that was over, his recommencement on the novel was interrupted by the death of his close friend William Erskine in August, which floored him. So he didn’t finish Peveril’s second volume until October. At that point, however, he seemed to have experienced a renewed rush of writerly energy. Mid-October, halfway through vol 3, Scott abruptly decided not only that the story was better now than it had been in the first two volumes, but that he could maintain and build on this improvement if he pushed the novel into a fourth volume. He finished the third volume by early December and the fourth before Christmas. That’s quite the acceleration.
You can tell this, reading the finished novel, though perhaps not in the way Scott hoped. The latter half of the novel loses its strength in a series of eventful but formless to-ings and fro-ings, unconvincing peril and a will-they-won’t-they romantic palaver that does not, at any point, come even close to fooling anybody: — will Richard Peveril, son of a prominent Cavalier, and Alice Bridgenorth, daughter of a prominent Parliamentarian, overcome the romeojulietish obstacles to their love and unite at the end? But of course they will . Duh. The expanded last third of the story loses traction, even as it rushes to insert more action. Action, in a novelistic things-happening, characters-running-around sense, does not equal traction. Although, that said, I’m going to argue here that the larger shape of the book, bent out of shape though it be, does some significant and interesting things.
It is a compelling novel, and for long stretches. The larger subject of the novel is the ‘Popish Plot’ — a really remarkable episode in English post-Civil War history, something akin to the US ‘Red Scare’ anti-Communist crazed panic of the 1950s. In a nutshell: into the fevered sectarian climate of 1678 (the king restored to the throne, Cavaliers triumphant, Roundheads anxious and put-upon, the king’s brother a Catholic convert, the king married to a Catholic and himself suspected of Catholic leanings) a man called Titus Oates inserted a potent and dangerous conspiracy theory: viz., Continental and British Catholics were secretly planning a state take-over: Jesuit assassins were going to kill the king, the plotters would purge the church, seize power and reclaim Britain for the Pope. It wasn’t true: Oates made it up — he perjured himself in court testimony, forged documents and generally lied. He did so because he benefitted personally from it, although it also seems he did hold some pretty virulent anti-Catholic views himself. But more to the point he was acclaimed as a Protestant hero of the nation, received a state apartment in Whitehall and an annual allowance of £1,200. Eventually he was found out, prosecuted, imprisoned and fined £10,000, but that was later. Scott sets his novel at the height of the national panic about the ‘plot’. It’s a fascinating premise for a novel: less gendered than the earlier witch-panic (Salem witch trials and so on) and less ideologically specific than the later McCarthyite HUAConspiracizing; a lens through which the variety and nature of the emerging British nation-state can be brilliantly focused.
Against this backdrop, Scott moves his action about a fair bit. We start, just before the Restoration of Charles II, in Derbyshire — the titular ‘peak’ is the elevation upon which the aristocratic Peveril family have their castellated home. Then the action moves to the Isle of Man, a place Scott never visited: a note to the 1831 ‘Magnum Opus’ edition confesses that he cribbed all his Manx topographic and cultural details from ‘WALDRON’S Description of the Isle of Man’ — from, that is, George Waldron’s 1731 book, a survey of the island, which in places the novel, frankly, plagiarises. Then the scene shifts to London, and sticks there, until the final denouement back in peaky Derbyshire.
One of the striking things about Peveril of the Peak is how sensitive and sophisticated its psychological portraiture is. That looks like an unScottian sort of quality — Scott so often seen as the creator of merely melodramatic heroes and villains, stagey grandstanding idealised types and exaggerated grotesques — but I mean it. Although I could qualify it straight away: Scott starts his novel in this mode, and spends much of the first quarter-or-so developing it, but once the story shifts to the Isle of Man and then London, and gets caught up with the young lovers and their course non-smooth-running, it loses its acuity, and the representation of character becomes much more conventionalised.
But for a time this novel is a fascinating study of contrasting subjectivities. Sir Geoffrey Peveril, in Martindale Castle up on its peak — a literalisation of his social status as a Cavalier aristocrat — is, we would say nowadays, an extravert; roundhead Major Bridgenorth, living in his expansive but topographically lowly red-brick manor house, is introverted and prone to depression. Scott pegs this latter, in the first instance, to the fact that his much-loved wife gave birth to four children, three of whom died in infancy, the fourth of which survived but killed her mother by being born. Reason enough for grief! But as the novel goes on we come to see that this is, as Freud might say, a case not of mourning but of melancholia. And despite their religious, political and temperamental differences — which lead, later in the novel, to the two men coming to blows and profoundly falling-out — in its opening scenes Scott writes with quite extraordinary tenderness of their friendship:
But, whatever prejudices the good Knight might entertain against his neighbour’s form of religion, they did not in any way influence his feelings towards him as a sufferer under severe affliction. The mode in which he showed his sympathy was rather singular, but exactly suited the character of both, and the terms on which they stood with each other.
Morning after morning the good Baronet made Moultrassie Hall the termination of his walk or ride, and said a single word of kindness as he passed. Sometimes he entered the old parlour where the proprietor sat in solitary wretchedness and despondency; but more frequently (for Sir Geoffrey did not pretend to great talents of conversation), he paused on the terrace, and stopping or halting his horse by the latticed window, said aloud to the melancholy inmate, “How is it with you, Master Bridgenorth?” (the Knight would never acknowledge his neighbour’s military rank of Major); “I just looked in to bid you keep a good heart, man, and to tell you that Julian is well, and little Alice is well, and all are well at Martindale Castle.”
A deep sigh, sometimes coupled with “I thank you, Sir Geoffrey; my grateful duty waits on Lady Peveril,” was generally Bridgenorth’s only answer. But the news was received on the one part with the kindness which was designed upon the other; it gradually became less painful and more interesting; the lattice window was never closed, nor was the leathern easy-chair which stood next to it ever empty, when the usual hour of the Baronet’s momentary visit approached. At length the expectation of that passing minute became the pivot upon which the thoughts of poor Bridgenorth turned during all the rest of the day. Most men have known the influence of such brief but ruling moments at some period of their lives. The moment when a lover passes the window of his mistress — the moment when the epicure hears the dinner-bell, — is that into which is crowded the whole interest of the day; the hours which precede it are spent in anticipation; the hours which follow, in reflection on what has passed; and fancy dwelling on each brief circumstance, gives to seconds the duration of minutes, to minutes that of hours. Thus seated in his lonely chair, Bridgenorth could catch at a distance the stately step of Sir Geoffrey, or the heavy tramp of his war-horse, Black Hastings, which had borne him in many an action; he could hear the hum of “The King shall enjoy his own again,” or the habitual whistle of “Cuckolds and Roundheads,” die unto reverential silence, as the Knight approached the mansion of affliction; and then came the strong hale voice of the huntsman soldier with its usual greeting. [Peveril, ch 1]
This seems to me very moving.
History, in the form of the Restoration (which delights Sir Geoffrey and alarms Bridgenorth) comes between them, although they remain linked by specific familial inter-entanglements — Bridgenorth was too depressed to be able to look after his infant daughter, Lady Peveril took her in and raised her alongside her own infant son. There’s also the fact that the Peveril estate has borrowed significant sums from Bridgenorth, such that the Peverils depend upon him not calling-in his debt. Nonetheless, the two men become estranged. Peveril’s hopes for preferment under Charles II come to nothing; Bridgenorth, formerly a level-headed Presbyterian becomes a severe, judgmental and life-denying Puritan. The ostensible cause of this change in demeanour is that (in a rather knotted, awkward plot-lump inserted into the early portion of the book) Lady Peveril grants sanctuary to the Countess of Derby, Queen of Man, who had — with arguably unlawful dispatch — executed a Roundhead gentleman called William Christian. Christian coincidentally was Bridgenorth’s brother-in-law, and he vows to bring justice to the elusive Countess, and to all who aid-abet her. But the novel makes more sense reading not the plotty-manifest but rather the psychological-latent rationale at work: Bridgenorth’s evolution, or devolution, into an exaggeratedly grim-faced Puritan is him growing into his psychopathology. It’s not as schematic as Scott saying ‘these florid Cavaliers are Mania, and these sour-faced Puritans are Depression, and this whole period of English history is a kind of collective manic-depression’ … but there is something in the analogy.
These two characters take, alas, much too little part in the later portion of the book, which concerns the peregrinations of Sir Geoffrey’s now grown-up son Julian, and toothsome Alice, Bridgenorth’s daughter, whom he loves, and who suffers various attempts upon her virtue, kidnappings and suchlike.
Still, I’d argue the larger shape of the book, though ungainly, is not a bad thing. By ‘larger shape’ I mean the way its tighter focus and psychological acuity gives way (‘hey! what if, right in the middle of writing this three-volume novel, I suddenly and arbitrarily decide to make it four volumes!’) to a series of much less well focused, sometimes comical-odd, sometimes just odd-odd episodes. The thing is: I find myself wondering if this, by accident or design, isn’t actually a structural and formal means for Scott to say something quite interesting about history.
As the novel goes on, Scott increasingly introduces a kind of pattern, almost a theme: a kind of anticlimactic emptying of specific event or tension build-up. Early in the novel, Lady Peveril plans a grand feast to bring together the Cavalier and Puritan communities of Derbyshire. Preparations take many pages, and as the date approaches it becomes increasingly apparent that these two bodies of men cannot be in the same space without inflaming one another, falling to blows and probably murdering one another. And yet — by dint of serving them in two separate halls — the feast actually passes off without event. In retrospect it was all much ado about nothing, which in turn makes the reader think: why was so much of the novel given over to it?
Or, a clearer example from later in the story: young Julian Peveril, sent by the Lady of Man to London on a particular mission to rally Royalist support, stops off on the way at his ancestral home to discover that the Puritans, led by quondam friend, now Puritan fanatic Major Bridgenorth, are in the process of arresting Julian’s two parents. He rushes in to defend his family against this group of, as he sees it, ruffians:
“Villains,” he said, “unhand him!” and rushing on the guards with his drawn sword, compelled them to let go Sir Geoffrey, and stand on their own defence. …
But one of those men … who saw that Julian, young, active, and animated with the fury of a son who fights for his parents, was compelling the two guards to give ground, seized on his collar, and attempted to master his sword. Suddenly dropping that weapon, and snatching one of his pistols, Julian fired it at the head of the person by whom he was thus assailed. He did not drop, but, staggering back as if he had received a severe blow, showed Peveril, as he sunk into a chair, the features of old Bridgenorth, blackened with the explosion, which had even set fire to a part of his grey hair. A cry of astonishment escaped from Julian; and in the alarm and horror of the moment, he was easily secured and disarmed by those with whom he had been at first engaged. [Peveril, ch 23]
It’s quite a shocking moment: young Peveril has shot old Bridgenorth, point blank, in the face. But the violence is immediately rolled back:
Major Bridgenorth collected himself — sat up in the chair as one who recovers from a stunning blow — then rose, and wiping with his handkerchief the marks of the explosion from his face, he approached Julian, and said, in the same cold unaltered tone in which he usually expressed himself, “Young man, you have reason to bless God, who has this day saved you from the commission of a great crime.”
We later learn the reason for this (on his journey south Peveril had stopped at an inn with a couple of new acquaintances; but these men were not what they seemed — they drugged Julian’s wine and when he was unconscious had replaced his important letters with blank paper and emptied the bullets from his pistol). But in the moment it makes for a striking, even a surreal moment.
‘Surrealism’ is an imprecise, indeed strictly inapposite, descriptor here; say rather this is a calculated and rather brilliant series of estrangements, moments where Scott wrong-foots his character expectations and so his readers’. Julian gets to London, rescues Alice, only to lose her again when Buckingham’s men accost him on the street and bundle her into a carriage. Having run one of his assailants through with his sword, Julian is arrested and thrown in prison. He bribes the jailer to be put in the same cell as his father, Sir Geoffrey. The grinning jailer obliges, but when the door is locked behind him Julian finds himself, instead, in a cell with — a dwarf. Say what?
The dwarf is actually called Sir Geoffrey. It’s just one of those strange coincidences life throws up: Sir Geoffrey Hudson, a jester from Charles’ court knighted as a kind of royal joke, who had fallen from favour — a character based on a real person — and Scott allows his whimsical pompous-comical palaver to fill several chapters. Why is mini-me Sir Geoffrey in jail? Well, in another nod to actual history, it’s because he killed a man, someone he challenged to a duel for mocking his height. The other turned up to the duel with a water pistol — I’m not making this up — presumably thinking it was all a jolly lark. It wasn’t though:
“It pleased the Honourable Mr. Crofts, so was this youth called and designed, one night, at the Groom Porter’s being full of wine and waggery, to introduce this threadbare subject … I was compelled to send him a cartel, and we met accordingly. Now, as I really loved the youth, it was my intention only to correct him by a flesh wound or two; and I would willingly that he had named the sword for his weapon. Nevertheless, he made pistols his election; and being on horseback, he produced by way of his own weapon, a foolish engine, which children are wont, in their roguery, to use for spouting water; a — a — in short, I forget the name.”
“A squirt, doubtless,” said Peveril, who began to recollect having heard something of this adventure.
“You are right,” said the dwarf; “… We fought on horseback — breaking ground, and advancing by signal; and, as I never miss aim, I had the misadventure to kill the Honourable Master Crofts at the first shot. [Peveril, ch 34]
We think back to Julian firing his pistol right in the face of Major Bridgenorth and it proving not a deadly weapon but a mere squib. It is the narrative shape of this development that is so interesting, and so expressive: the falling away from actual seriousness into ludicrous pastiche-seriousness, the knight’s-move of expectation-to-bathos. You wrestle your enemy to save your father, shooting him in the face! — only to discover it’s actually your neighbour and your gun is empty. You go willingly to prison, and bribe the jailer to be reunited with your father — only to discover ‘Sir Geoffrey’ is a ludicrous dwarf. You challenge the man who has insulted you — only for him to arrive at the duel holding a water pistol. It is, we might say, the shape of ‘the joke’; although it is here a joke with a deadly kick : Honourable Master Crofts is killed, after all. It seems to have something to do with fathers, and something to do with belittlement (hence: the dream-logic by which you hurry to your father only to find him reduced to a dwarf’s stature).
Scott continues working these episodes, these ludicostrophes, into the later portions of the novel. So, the villainous Duke of Buckingham, having kidnapped the beautiful, virtuous young Alice, Julian’s beloved, dresses himself in his finest finery and visits her in her cell with designs upon her virtue. ‘No event is more ordinary in narratives of this nature, than the abduction of the female on whose fate the interest is supposed to turn,’ says Scott at the beginning of chapter 39, sounding very much like a man trying to inoculate his novel against this very charge of mere narrative cliché by pointing it out. But the surprise this chapter has in store for Buckingham — and for us — does the actual job here: in propositioning her he begs her to remove her veil so he can admire her beautiful face. But it’s not Alice Bridgenorth at all! It’s a black African woman called ‘Zarah’ who has somehow substituted herself for young Alice. (‘“I am astonished!” said the Duke’). Zarah rebukes Buckingham in eloquently melodramatic terms:
“For what are you? — Nay, frown not; for you must hear the truth for once. Nature has done its part, and made a fair outside, and courtly education hath added its share. You are noble, it is the accident of birth — handsome, it is the caprice of Nature — generous, because to give is more easy than to refuse — well-apparelled, it is to the credit of your tailor — well-natured in the main, because you have youth and health — brave, because to be otherwise were to be degraded — and witty, because you cannot help it.”
She then jumps out of the cell’s window, navigating the considerable drop to the ground without hurt and runs off. It is a startling interruption. Now: Scott later ‘explains’ how Zarah effected her shift, who she is and how she is related to the other characters in the story — there is a great deal of sudden explanation at the end, ungainlily crammed-in. But the explanation of the quote-unquote ‘joke’ is not nearly so important as the ‘joke’ (the, we might say, seriojoke) itself. By that I mean by the shape, the form, that Scott increasingly works in with these sorts of things.
This, clearly, relates to the novel’s main premise: the Popish Plot itself, a ‘serious’ revelation of national danger that reveals itself to be nothing but a hoax, a scam, a kind of dark joke on the British nation. Scott is saying something interesting and, I think, profound about history with all this, these various narrative wrongfootings. The Popish Plot is not just the pretext for his storytelling, it is the type of ideology as such: it is the shape belief imposes on history. The first third of Peveril of the Peak does a tremendous job of showing us its readers the two chief tribes of 17th-century Britain, how earnestly and passionately each believed in their ideas, their identity and loyalty and duty. It was a serious matter, and it had serious consequences — the Civil War, regicide, the Commonwealth, events that radically reshaped England. But by choosing the focus he has here Scott is also saying: but see how it went! Such serious actual and impending forces, and they led only to Charles the Second on the throne: this foolish, foppish, shallow, not altogether wicked but weak and epicuristically selfish. History is this Larkinesque rushing eagerly, or frantically, up the staircase of seriousness and importance only to burst into fulfilments desolate attic — or not desolate: silly. Ridiculous. The orchestra mounts up Beethoven’s scale until it caps the motion with a swannee whistle down-and-up and a duck-call raspberry. Th-th th-th that’s all folks!
I’m overstating things, although not, I think, by very much. I wouldn’t say Scott ‘flirts with anticlimax’, because it’s a specific kind of anticlimax that’s at play: an almost pataphysical swerve into diminution that isn’t, in terms of reader-experience, particularly deflating, or even especially anticlimactix. But also because he doesn’t flirt with this narrative swerve, in this novel. He embraces it. It’s a key part of what Peveril of the Peak is doing as a novel. I might put it this way: Scott is anticipating the celebrated faux-Hegelianism Marx invented: that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. In this sense Peveril of the Peak is a quasi-dialectical text, a book that tries to capture the way history parleys seriousness into ridiculousness, and ridiculousness into the serious. The things the novel is about — friendship; enmity; love; what people believe about the world — are serious matters; but Scott’s whole approach as a novelist is comedic, and in this novel he brings the two together in an especially intricate, fascinting way. Scott plays a Peveril of the Peak-y blinder.
