ABSTRACT
The father of the great German novelist Theodor Fontane (1819-98) lived through the heroic age of German literature, the age of Schiller, Goethe and Hegel. Yet his library consisted of only one author’s works, which he re-read incessantly. The writer was Walter Scott, and the apothecary of Swinemunde, though an extreme case, was not alone in his enthusiasm. Goethe, re-reading Waverley towards the end of his life, reportedly said that it must be placed ‘alongside the best things that have ever been written in the world’.2 In the great age of literary nationalism, Scott’s direct European influence was to extend from Balzac to Manzoni, from Strindberg to Mickiewicz in Poland, Gogol and Pushkin in Russia.
