Walter Scott, ‘The Fortunes of Nigel’ (1822)

[Continuing my read-through of the Waverley novels: previously on this blog, Kenilworth (1821) and The Pirate (1821/22). There are other posts on other Scotts on other blogs. These posts are lengthy and full of spoilers, so, you know: have a care.]

If The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) is a much better novel than The Pirate (1821) that’s not because of its plot. The plot here is really just the tracing of the ups and downs (and final ups) of the title character’s fortunes. Not that it’s badly plotted, exactly: the looser scaffold allows for a series of excellent set-pieces and character interactions, and avoids the tangle Scott sometimes gets himself into, in which plot-knots are laboriously tied into the first half of his novels only so that he can untie them in the second. The throughline here depends on Nigel, his likeability, and our investment in him overcoming his misfortunes. But I don’t mean to overemphasise the plotty aspect of this book. Its real interest is less narrative and more something else. Indeed in this work Scott does two linked things that are fascinating, and rather brilliant.

The titular Nigel is Nigel Olifaunt, Lord Glenvarloch, a young Scottish peer who has been reduced to a state of penury. He makes his way, in rags, to London, with his servant, the feisty, Calvinist Richie Moniplies (also in rags) to petition King James 1st (6th of Scotland) for the repayment of a large sum Nigel’s now dead father loaned to James when he was on his royal uppers, before he inherited the English crown and its vast wealth. Scott tells us that James’s relocation from Edinburgh to London was the occasion for a flood of Scotsmen and -women to follow him, some to do him loyal service, rather more with an eye on the main chance.

And that’s the one of the things The Fortunes of Nigel does exceptionally well: creating a wonderful, immersive city, its whole social and physical existence. Scott’s leisurely prosaicism, his eye for detail of costume, prop and setting — much of it lifted from a wide reading in Jacobean city comedies and tragedies — and especially his superb way with idiolect and dialect, all builds together to convoke its world. ‘Worldbuilding’ is a large part of science fiction and fantasy, in which modes (love them though I do) it is often done badly — M John Harrison’s stomping foot of nerdism, the tactless and flattening pouring out of specific invented detail. Unlike writing in the realist mode, where the author can assume her reader has at least some sense of the setting simply by virtue of living in such a place or similar, SF and Fantasy, and Historical Fiction too, must let the reader know how and in what ways the world of their novels are different to, and realisable in, our world. This can be better or worse done of course, but the slow-paced gradualism of Scott’s writing works to achieve this in The Fortunes of Nigel beautifully. The portrait of a city in which the natives deal, often resentfully or with outright hostility, with the influx of a large population of ‘foreigners’ is expertly and vividly drawn and remains of course highly current. Indeed, I wonder if this isn’t the first novel to delineate the urban space as defined by its immigrants, and the frictions as well as the diversity and creative energies of that fact.

We start with peripheral characters: the (historical) figure of the watchmaker and astrologer David Ramsay, his two apprentices and his beautiful young daughter Margaret; and also the (also historical) royal goldsmith and moneylender George Heriot, who takes an interest in the (fictional) protagonist, Nigel. James 1st is introduced as a character, though, as per Scott’s usual strategy, he is not a central character. Heriot takes the impoverished Nigel under his wing, dresses him in proper clothes and introduces him to court, where our young hero meets and befriends various noblemen.

It’s what Heidegger praises in his ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ essay (1950). Like Van Gogh’s ‘Peasant Shoes’ canvas, Scott’s novel presents its subject (Scott’s characters, their words and actions) and by doing so enworlds them, evokes a sense of the larger social lived-experience in which they are embedded. He does so not by the exhaustive — and exhausting — itemisation of specific detail of the later Realist novel, but by indicative characters and deftly chosen material particularities. Because the plot proceeds by a kind of melodramatised idealisation (very readable, but heightened into histrionism of action that trespasses on the pantomimic) it’s possible to miss just how much compelling verisimilitude the writing is able to generate. Not to go too deep into the thicket of Heideggerianism, but it seems to me Scott manages that eloquent double-agency, that his 1620s London is, in Heidegger’s terms, sketched in “the tension of emerging and not emerging”: the world of the courtly logic that is still, if in increasingly remnant mode, James’s kingship, as against the coming world of bourgeois capitalism, money, profit, the deracination of status as the key social logic and its replacement with contractual social identity. The tension of the two construes the story.

So for example: Scott situates his characters in a vividly rendered spatiality — the streets, alleys, courts and rooms of London — that is also a dynamic temporality. Here is George Heriot setting out to visit the king, sell him some silverware and, at the same time, press Nigel’s suit.

He mounted his mule, and rode on westward along the Strand.

It may be worth while to remind our readers, that the Temple Bar which Heriot passed, was not the arched screen, or gateway, of the present day; but an open railing, or palisade, which, at night, and in times of alarm, was closed with a barricade of posts and chains. The Strand also, along which he rode, was not, as now, a continued street, although it was beginning already to assume that character. It still might be considered as an open road, along the south side of which stood various houses and hotels belonging to the nobility, having gardens behind them down to the water-side, with stairs to the river, for the convenience of taking boat; which mansions have bequeathed the names of their lordly owners to many of the streets leading from the Strand to the Thames. The north side of the Strand was also a long line of houses, behind which, as in Saint Martin’s Lane, and other points, buildings, were rapidly arising; but Covent Garden was still a garden, in the literal sense of the word, or at least but beginning to be studded with irregular buildings. All that was passing around, however, marked the rapid increase of a capital which had long enjoyed peace, wealth, and a regular government. Houses were rising in every direction; and the shrewd eye of our citizen already saw the period not distant, which should convert the nearly open highway on which he travelled, into a connected and regular street, uniting the Court and the town with the city of London.

He next passed Charing Cross, which was no longer the pleasant solitary village at which the judges were wont to breakfast on their way to Westminster Hall, but began to resemble the artery through which, to use Johnson’s expression “pours the full tide of London population.” The buildings were rapidly increasing, yet certainly gave not even a faint idea of its present appearance. [Nigel, 5]

There’s a lot of this in the novel, which is to say: Scott inviting us to visualise the different world he is describing by mapping its differences onto our familiarised contemporaneity. But this is more than just a writer’s trick. One of the strengths of Nigel is the way it creates a world that is in flux, the way it captures the verité of historical change. Characters look back, nostalgically, to the time of Queen Elizabeth; but James is a new monarch, and symptomatic of a world altering in small and large ways. This means not just that London is suddenly awash with Scots — although Nigel does an excellent job of portraying exactly this — but that a new monetary logic is superseding the older feudal structures.

Nigel’s petition is first rejected by the king (because it is presented incorrectly, by a servant in rags) and when it is re-presented, more properly, James — whose lavish spending means he is always short of cash — tries to evade it. The senior peer Lord Huntinglen manages to press the document upon the king on Nigel’s behalf:

The king hastily looked over the petition or memorial, every now and then glancing his eye towards the door, and then sinking it hastily on the paper, ashamed that Lord Huntinglen, whom he respected, should suspect him of timidity.

“To grant the truth,” he said, after he had finished his hasty perusal, “this is a hard case; and harder than it was represented to me, though I had some inkling of it before. And so the lad only wants payment of the siller due from us, in order to reclaim his paternal estate?” …

All this while the poor king ambled up and down the apartment in a piteous state of uncertainty, which was made more ridiculous by his shambling circular mode of managing his legs, and his ungainly fashion on such occasions of fiddling with the bunches of ribbons which fastened the lower part of his dress.

Lord Huntinglen listened with great composure, and answered, “An it please your Majesty, there was an answer yielded by Naboth when Ahab coveted his vineyard — ‘ The Lord forbid that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee.’”

“Ey, my lord — ey, my lord!” ejaculated James, while all the colour mounted both to his cheek and nose; “I hope ye mean not to teach me divinity? Ye need not fear, my lord, that I will shun to do justice to every man; and, since your lordship will give me no help to take up this in a more peaceful manner — whilk, methinks, would be better for the young man, as I said before, — why — since it maun be so — ‘sdeath, I am a free king, man, and he shall have his money and redeem his land, and make a kirk and a miln of it, an he will.” So saying, he hastily wrote an order on the Scottish Exchequer for the sum in question, and then added, “How they are to pay it, I see not; but I warrant he will find money on the order among the goldsmiths, who can find it for every one but me.” [Nigel, ch. 9]

The first half of the novel gives quite a lot of story-space to George Heriot, whose wealth — as a successful goldsmith — has been the occasion for him to move into the even more lucrative world of moneylending. He, we come to see, has the real power, and it is based not on status but contract.

“Donna tell me of what the city is,” said King James; “our Exchequer is as dry as Dean Giles’s discourses on the penitentiary psalms — Ex nihilo nihil fit … Hark ye, Heriot, let the lad have twa hundred pounds to fit him out. And, here — here” — (taking the carcanet of rubies from his old hat) — “ye have had these in pledge before for a larger sum, ye auld Levite that ye are. Keep them in gage, till I gie ye back the siller out of the next subsidy.”

“If it please your Majesty to give me such directions in writing,” said the cautious citizen.

“The deil is in your nicety, George,” said the king; “ye are as preceese as a Puritan in form, and a mere Nullifidian in the marrow of the matter. May not a king’s word serve ye for advancing your pitiful twa hundred pounds?”

“But not for detaining the crown jewels,” said George Heriot.

And the king, who from long experience was inured to dealing with suspicious creditors, wrote an order upon George Heriot, his well-beloved goldsmith and jeweller, for the sum of two hundred pounds, to be paid presently to Nigel Olifaunt, Lord of Glenvarloch, to be imputed as so much debts due to him by the crown; and authorizing the retention of a carcanet of balas rubies, with a great diamond, as described in a Catalogue of his Majesty’s Jewels, to remain in possession of the said George Heriot, advancer of the said sum, and so forth, until he was lawfully contented and paid thereof. By another rescript, his Majesty gave the said George Heriot directions to deal with some of the monied men, upon equitable terms, for a sum of money for his Majesty’s present use, not to be under 50,000 merks, but as much more as could conveniently be procured.

The length and specificity of this last paragraph is especially notable. ‘From Status to Contract’ is Henry Sumner Maine’s argument, and is a vital conceptual context for understanding how Scott takes history as a process, a movement, a change from one thing to another, in this (and his other) novels. The Lukacsian take on this, which sees Scott intuitively grasping that history as such as dialectical, is one valuable way of understanding what is going on in his novels. But Maine’s thesis is just as important, I think, not least because the shift from an affinity-and-status social logic to a contractual one enables the novel itself as a form, the novel being a kind of textual contract between author and reader, a documentary embodiment of a documentary free-associative social world.

Scott’s various, mostly impoverished noblemen are splendid, especially the ugly, deformed, bitter and endlessly satirical Sir Mungo Malagrowther, who lopes about the novel, always on the margins of the court, always on the edge of penury, commenting with unremitting sarcastic pessimism about everyone and everything. These financially squeezed sirs and lords are a crucial part of Scott’s novelist fabric. It’s something that comes into Scott’s novels as the series progresses. Edward Waverley is extremely rich, a fact to which he and the other characters in Waverley make repeated reference (his great wealth as well as his high social status are why Bonnie Prince Charlie is so keen to recruit him). By the time we get to Nigel, though, Scott has moved on to a much more interesting dramatic conception. Now his nobility are almost all brassic lint. Nobody in this novel floats free of fiduciary constraint, not even the king. This, Scott is saying, is the world now, even though his characters cling to the status-defined world that has passed. Fortunes, in the title, means: the luck of Nigel, how well he does in the world. But it also means: loadsamoney.

To repeat myself: Scott’s world-building situates his characters not just in space, but in time. As George Heriot passes through Whitehall, the narrator employs a kind of temporal focus-pull, evoking a layered sense of historical motion, but also calling forth that Scottian sense of our human commonality, the ‘dark dignity of man’: our shared mortality. James son, ‘Babie Charles’, appears as a young character in the main plot of this novel; but he is haunted by futurity.

He next passed Charing Cross, which was no longer the pleasant solitary village at which the judges were wont to breakfast on their way to Westminster Hall, but began to resemble the artery through which, to use Johnson’s expression “pours the full tide of London population.” The buildings were rapidly increasing, yet certainly gave not even a faint idea of its present appearance.

At last Whitehall received our traveller, who passed under one of the beautiful gates designed by Holbein, and composed of tessellated brick-work, being the same to which Moniplies had profanely likened the West-Port of Edinburgh, and entered the ample precincts of the palace of Whitehall, now full of all the confusion attending improvement. It was just at the time when James, — little suspecting that he was employed in constructing a palace, from the window of which his only son was to pass in order that he might die upon a scaffold before it, — was busied in removing the ancient and ruinous buildings of De Burgh, Henry VIII., and Queen Elizabeth, to make way for the superb architecture on which Inigo Jones exerted all his genius. The king, ignorant of futurity, was now engaged in pressing on his work; and, for that purpose, still maintained his royal apartments at Whitehall, amidst the rubbish of old buildings, and the various confusion attending the erection of the new pile, which formed at present a labyrinth not easily traversed. [Nigel, ch 5]

That devastating little parenthesis — James little suspecting that he was employed in constructing a palace, from the window of which his only son was to pass in order that he might die upon a scaffold before it — is superbly done: an interjection blowing like a stiff, cold wind through the craftily cluttered prose describing the cluttered building-site of 1620s London.

***

Nigel’s ‘fortunes’ wax and wane. A number of people take an interest in him on his arrival in town, and either genuinely or else deceivingly promise to help him. They’re all only making plans for Nigel: George Heriot lends him money so he can dress fittingly for his rank and so attend court; the young Lord Dalgarno corrupts Nigel into the ways of the gaming house (assuring him that by winning at cards he can finance his own lordly lifestyle), Margaret Ramsay, the alchemist’s beautiful young daughter, falls in love with him, a hopeless infatuation since she is a commoner, and helps him in various ways. When Nigel realises that Dalgarno is a bad-’un he picks a quarrel with the manipulative lord, striking him with the flat of his sword. Because this happens in the royal precincts at St James’s Park Nigel must flee — the law says his hand is to be struck off in punishment for violating the peacability of the location— and he goes into hiding in the rookeries down by the river, in an old usurer’s house in Whitefriars where villains and scofflaws hole-up and lurk. Richie Moniplies, his servant, has by this point in the story left Nigel’s service (his Calvinist scruples objected to Nigel’s gambling) so our hero is alone.

For the first time in his life he confronts his reliance on other people, on friends and servants, as a failing. It is a cold morning and he wishes a fire lit in his room. So he goes about the house looking for a servant to perform this task. His landlord, Trapbois, elderly and senile, mistakes him for a robber (“Martha! — thieves, thieves — ugh, ugh, ugh!”) and the sharp-featured Martha, his daughter (who really runs the show) sends Nigel back to his room.

“You will do well,” said Martha; “and as you seem thankful for advice, I, though I am no professed counsellor of others, will give you more. Make no intimacy with any one in Whitefriars — borrow no money, on any score, especially from my father, for, dotard as he seems, he will make an ass of you. Last, and best of all, stay here not an instant longer than you can help it. Farewell, sir.”

“A gnarled tree may bear good fruit, and a harsh nature may give good counsel,” thought the Lord of Glenvarloch, as he retreated to his own apartment, where the same reflection occurred to him again and again, while, unable as yet to reconcile himself to the thoughts of becoming his own fire-maker, he walked up and down his bedroom, to warm himself by exercise.

At length his meditations arranged themselves in the following soliloquy — by which expression I beg leave to observe once for all, that I do not mean that Nigel literally said aloud with his bodily organs, the words which follow in inverted commas, (while pacing the room by himself,) but that I myself choose to present to my dearest reader the picture of my hero’s mind, his reflections and resolutions, in the form of a speech, rather than in that of a narrative. In other words, I have put his thoughts into language; and this I conceive to be the purpose of the soliloquy upon the stage as well as in the closet, being at once the most natural, and perhaps the only way of communicating to the spectator what is supposed to be passing in the bosom of the scenic personage. There are no such soliloquies in nature, it is true, but unless they were received as a conventional medium of communication betwixt the poet and the audience, we should reduce dramatic authors to the recipe of Master Puff, who makes Lord Burleigh intimate a long train of political reasoning to the audience, by one comprehensive shake of his noddle. In narrative, no doubt, the writer has the alternative of telling that his personages thought so and so, inferred thus and thus, and arrived at such and such a conclusion; but the soliloquy is a more concise and spirited mode of communicating the same information; and therefore thus communed, or thus might have communed, the Lord of Glenvarloch with his own mind.

“She is right, and has taught me a lesson I will profit by. I have been, through my whole life, one who leant upon others for that assistance, which it is more truly noble to derive from my own exertions. I am ashamed of feeling the paltry inconvenience which long habit had led me to annex to the want of a servant’s assistance — I am ashamed of that; but far, far more am I ashamed to have suffered the same habit of throwing my own burden on others, to render me, since I came to this city, a mere victim of those events, which I have never even attempted to influence — a thing never acting, but perpetually acted upon — protected by one friend, deceived by another; but in the advantage which I received from the one, and the evil I have sustained from the other, as passive and helpless as a boat that drifts without oar or rudder at the mercy of the winds and waves. I became a courtier, because Heriot so advised it — a gamester, because Dalgarno so contrived it — an Alsatian [ie, someone hiding out in Whitefriars], because Lowestoffe so willed it. Whatever of good or bad has befallen me, has arisen out of the agency of others, not from my own. My father’s son must no longer hold this facile and puerile course. Live or die, sink or swim, Nigel Olifaunt, from this moment, shall owe his safety, success, and honour, to his own exertions, or shall fall with the credit of having at least exerted his own free agency. I will write it down in my tablets, in her very words, — ‘The wise man is his own best assistant.’” [Nigel, ch 22]

That last nod towards Hamlet — another character fond of written memoranda (‘my tablets! Quick my tablets! ’tis meet that I put it down’)— reinforces the sheer oddness of Scott’s apologetic intrusion into his own narrative. Nigel is monologuing, as characters do on stage, but rather than trusting his readers to accept the convention as a convention, Scott spools-out an interruptive monologue of his own: a kind of meta-monologue: ‘I beg leave to observe once for all, that I do not mean that Nigel literally said aloud with his bodily organs, the words which follow in inverted commas …’ One reaction to this might be: Dude: really? Do you truly have such little faith in our ability as readers to navigate literary convention? But another, I think more interesting reaction could be to ask: why does Scott take this moment to estrange his own narrative? He is, in effect, saying: what is history? If it is the story of what happens, how is that story staged?

The Shakespearian or Jacobean soliloquy is, ‘at once the most natural, and perhaps the only way of communicating to the spectator what is supposed to be passing in the bosom of the scenic personage’. But if it’s so very natural, so intuitive and comprehensible, then why does Scott need to interrupt his narrative to say so? Why does he need to offer such elaborated excuses for introducing this feature into his story? One answer would be: because he’s writing a novel, not a drama. But I don’t think that’s it. I think the real logic here is: he is writing history, and the processes of history are as subterranean to individual subjectivity as self-dialogue, stream-of-consciousness — in a word, interiority — are to narrative representation. The subject of the monologue is Nigel’s slow realisation that he is a modern individual, who ought to cultivate self-reliance and self-determination; not the older-style status-person embedded in hierarchies and networks of service and obligation. The subject, in other words, is his realisation that he is moving with history: it is the great subject of all Scott’s novels. That the form of that realisation straddles the older Jacobean-theatrical and the newer Scottian-novelistic, as this authorial intervention foregrouns, is entirely apropos.

We are obviously aware that Nigel is a fictional character: that nobody with his name stood in a room and had the thoughts Scott here ascribes to him (although we’re also aware that James 1st, David Ramsay and George Heriot were actual people). But rather than making the obvious point ‘history is not like a stage-play’ Scott is making the less intuitive but more profound point: ‘history is a kind of unselfconscious staging of human; its conventions are textual conventions, although they are unconventional ones.’

The awkwardness of this process, so splendidly owned by Scott in this paragraph, is not formal, so much as it is an acknowledgement that the author is here presenting to his readers a character, Nigel, interiorising when the nature of the character as he has hitherto figured in the story is that of a figure entirely without an interior. For although Nigel is a pasteboard hero, honest and noble though ingenuous enough to be worth our rooting for, and caring about, he is also the hinge point about which Scott’s larger historical narrative turns. ‘The soliloquy,’ Scott confides, ‘is a more concise and spirited mode of communicating information’ — the Weltgeist talks to itself!

Scott is ‘staging’ history and, at the same time, announcing that he is not staging history — that we are not to assume that the things he describes happened as he describes them. He is, in other words, drawing attention to the friction of history, to its obstruction. In other words what’s being challenged here, what’s being reconfigured, is the idea of ‘history’ as something that happens, as it might be, surreptitiously: organically, automatically, subconsciously (or collectively-subconsciously). That’s not it, says Scott. History happens in a way that is awkward, that interrupts, that calls attention to itself. It’s not just ‘shit happening’; it is people both living their lives and reflecting upon the idiom that is ‘their lives’. It’s not a naturalness but a strangeness, a — to invoke Lukacs again — dialectic of unselfconsciousness and self-consciousness that works through to a synthesis that is neither. We live history. The historical novel observes ‘us’ living history, but Scott is also saying we do something more. We eavesdrop on ourselves living history — history, actually, is us observing ourselves living history. Later Nigel’s fortunes lead to him being locked up in the royal dungeon, suspected (unjustly of course) of conspiring against the life of the king. A boy is locked-up with Nigel, and for a while he refuses to give his name — but Nigel, and we, see through ‘his’ disguise: it’s actually Margaret Ramsay (James Ramsay’s daughter) in disguise, following Nigel into adversity because of her love for him. This is Shakespearian again of course: all those girls dressed as boys (or actor-boys dressed as girls dressed as boys), and it primps-up the novel’s cross-class love story. We as readers, eavesdrop upon the interactions between Nigel and Margaret in the privacy of this prison cell; but so does King James, as we later learn.

“And know, my lords,” [said the king] “that we have, by a shrewd device and gift of our own, already sounded the very depth of this Lord Glenvarloch’s disposition. I remembered me of having read of that Dionysius, King of Syracuse … Now this Dionysius of Syracuse caused cunning workmen to build for himself a lugg — D’ye ken what that is, my Lord Bishop?”

“A cathedral, I presume to guess,” answered the Bishop.

“What the deil, man — I crave your lordship’s pardon for swearing — but it was no cathedral — only a lurking-place called the king’s lugg, or ear, where he could sit undescried, and hear the converse of his prisoners. Now, sirs, in imitation of this Dionysius — I have caused them to make a lugg up at the state-prison of the Tower yonder, more like a pulpit than a cathedral, my Lord Bishop — and communicating with the arras behind the Lieutenant’s chamber, where we may sit and privily hear the discourse of such prisoners as are pent up there for state-offences, and so creep into the very secrets of our enemies.” [Nigel, ch 33]

The lugg is Scott’s novel, and we are the king. (I wish I understood what joke Scott is making with the Bishop’s misunderstanding, but I don’t). It’s Foucault’s panopticon, and Miller’s The Novel and the Police; it’s the form of the novel itself as surveillance, as overhearing — something more intimate and interiorised than the stage-whisper notional overhearing of a theatrical soliloquy. It’s us, tucked away, watching History reveal itself.

**

I don’t mean to over-praise The Fortunes of Nigel. Not all of it works. The main throughline story depends on Nigel’s Scottish estate, but no scenes are set there, and it never takes its place in the balance of the plot as a meaningful stake. Lord Dalgarno’s wickedness, and especially his hatred of Nigel, are both underdetermined and feel arbitrary. The legal mechanism by which Nigel is obliged to redeem the debts against his family estate by noon on a certain day — which he does in the nick, at a quarter to twelve, when Richie Moniplies rocks-up at Dalgarno’s lawyer’s office with actual moneybags — aims for a tension the novel doesn’t actually deliver. Having set-up David Ramsay with his horological and unwordly numerological obsession as a character at the beginning, Scott simply doesn’t know what to do with him, so he pops up from time to time in plot-irrelevant ways, to mouth an abstruse numerological catchphrase or two and then disappear. Of Ramsay’s two apprentices, Jenkin Vincent (‘Jin Vin’) and Francis Tunstall, the latter has no work to do in the story at all, and the former, too little. Scott goes quite a long way along the road of characterising Nigel in terms of a bildungsroman-y development, a coming into self-knowledge of a spoiled young man; but having reached a climacteric in the scene in the rookery in Whitehall, Scott back-pedals, and by the end of the novel Nigel has reverted to her earlier mode. A wasted opportunity, really. Scott’s James is a splendid, lively piece of characterisation: querulous, wordy, by turns a pedantic Latinist and a vulgar lowland Scot, an unpredictable mix of venality and nobility. But there’s too much of him. Scott clearly fell in love with his own work here, and overindulged himself. George Heriot plays a major part in the first half of the story, but during the second half he is spirited away to Paris, over-conveniently getting him out of the way so Nigel’s fortunes can collapse (were he still in London, Heriot would surely have intervened). A twist at the end sees Nigel’s manservant Richie marrying the usurer’s daughter Martha Trapbois, although it beggars belief that Richie’s Calvanist ‘precision’ of Christian morality and judgment would countenance marrying a woman whose wealth (the ostensible reason given for him taking an elderly and ugly woman to wife) was obtained by dubious or downright illegal means, and who is presumably (though Scott doesn’t spell this out) a Jew. I could go on.

But, see, here’s the thing: the more I nitpick, the more nitpicks I find. It’s a misunderstanding of what makes Scott a great novelist to get into these sorts of particularities. There is in this novel a sweep of something grand, compelling and brilliant. You should be making plans for reading Nigel.