ABSTRACT
Scott's contemporaries Important as Scott was, he was but one of a host of early nineteenth-century prose writers who decided to write historical tales featuring characters from ordinary walks of life or to develop the pastoral. It is worth comparing his work with that of some of his contemporaries. To demonstrate widely differing developments I shall look briefly at the work of James Hogg (1770-1835), John Galt (1779-1839) and Mary Russell Mitford (1787-1855). The first two are Scots, often writing historical novels or romances, and the third English, writing what purports to be contemporary observation but is in fact transparently pastoral. Hogg and Galt are of particular interest in relation to Scott since both of them wrote works about the Covenanters which challenge and revise Scott's Old Mortality (1816): The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818) and Ringan Gilhaize (1823). Indeed, many readers meet these two authors in the course of comparing the novels. 1
Galt and Hogg
John Galt offers two contrasting kinds of continuity with Scott: domestic stories and historical tales. The son of a sea-captain, as a sickly child he read ballads and story books such as 'Chevy Chase' and 'Leper the Tailor' (the latter was among the prose chapbooks collected by the young Scott bound up in 1810) and he heard tales and legends from local old women. He, like Scott, is therefore an example of the cultural continuity between working class and middle class in Scotland? According to V. S. Pritchett, his Annals of the Parish (1821) was written before Waverley, but this account of social change in village life over the latter half of the eighteenth century had to wait twenty years for a publisher until Scott's work kindled interest in Scottish subjects. 3
Galt hoped that this and The Provost (1822) would be seen as 'local theoretical history' rather than as novels.4 The Entail (1822) is similar. Erik Frykman points out that 'Galt's factual, sober and humoristic tales of Scottish life were brought out just at the time when Scott had abandoned the more or less contemporary scene in his novels for remoter periods and more romantic themes.' 5
In these tales, reference to ballads and folk songs is casually used as the common currency of cultural life and as part of the vigorous Scots conversational style. In The Entail Claud Walkinshaw's choice of the
pragmatic over the heroic is seen entirely in terms of popular stories and songs: he
Nevertheless, Claud begins his rise to worldly prosperity as a pedlar with a pack of ballads. Leddy Grippy's idiolect is particularly dependent on the discourse of folk song, often using the same ones as Scott selects, indicating their quasiproverbial status. There is an elegiac cast to her liveliness, though, since the novel closes with her death.
