ABSTRACT
It used to be customary for Scott enthusiasts to say to reluctant beginners, 'Leave out the first chapter or two and plunge in where the story starts'. This is not bad advice but the reader who returns to the beginning, once hooked by the story, often finds added enlightenment there. For example, the early chapters of Waverley dealing with the hero's education and upbringing, help to account for and prepare us for the vacillation suggested by his name. Angus Calder, in his admirable 1975 edition of the Penguin Old Mortality, suggests that the newcomer should 'vault over' not only his own Introduction but' the rather tedious Cleishbotham and perhaps even the interesting Pattieson, and begin at once with Chapter 2' , from which 'the narrative which follows ... is one of the leanest, swiftest and starkest constructions in the whole of fiction' . So it is, illustrating, as Calder brilliantly expresses it, 'the sustained pain of persistent moral choice in an amoral environment' , surely a pattern for our times. But the method by which this is achieved is one of ubiquitous irony, particularly in the mismatch between what the characters think they are doing and what they are really doing. It is a matter of point of view.
