ABSTRACT
The debt Victorian novelists owe to Scott is a heavy one, as has frequently been recognised. 1 However, the ways in which they develop his techniques of multiple discourses vary, as the emphases of their developments of the novel vary. Some continue along the paths of Romance, whether contemporary or historical, while others develop a new and grimmer realist concern with the depiction of the lives of the poor, especially the new urban proletariat, as an uneasy social conscience aligns itself with the instinct for self-preservation. Writing at either the romance or the realist end of the continuum might be supported by the apparatus of references and notes. As well as notes there are quotes, put to the same multifarious uses as we find in Scott, whichever class the novel focuses on. There was still a thriving trade in self-penned false intertexts. The most important of the emphases to which allusion to folk song and popular culture contribute are these:
1. a Romantic sense of the alienation of the individual, 2. pastoral nostalgia, often tinged with a socially conservative
W ordsworthianism, 3. mediaevalist nostalgia, with similar implications, 4. the historian's impulse to record the past, 5. the evangelical social worker's concern to inform about the present, 6. the provision of a socially subversive subtext, 7. the manipulation or invention of 'intertexts' to suppress subversive
implications.
