ABSTRACT

Scott's characters may be divided into two main types: those who are dominated by some kind of idiosyncrasy, comic or otherwise, and those who reveal no markedly extreme traits of personality, but may be said to embody a moderate, rational norm of human behaviour. To leave the classification like that, however, is not to point to anything obviously peculiar to Scott, for the same broad division might be made between the characters of the two authors just mentioned, Dickens and Hardy. Hardy's comic yokels, or a person such as Miss Flite in Bleak House, plainly belong to the idiosyncratic category, whilst a Gabriel Oak or an Esther Summerson represent the other side of the coin.