Guy Mannering by Walter Scott
Posted in Reading Reviewed, Scottish Fiction, Scottish Literature at 12:00 on 15 March 2025
Or: The Astrologer. Edited by P D Garside.
The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, 356 p plus 53 p Essay on the Text, 50 p Emendation list, 2 p list of end-of-line “hard” hyphens, 16 p Historical Note, 67 p Explanatory Notes, 20 p Glossary, i p Foreword, i p Contents vi p General Introduction to the Edinburgh Edition, and iii p Acknowledgements. Guy Mannering first published 1815.
Reading Scott these days is an exercise in completion or in acknowledging roots. The roots of long-form fiction, of Scottish story-telling, of the historical novel as a genre.
For time has not been good to novels like this. First there is the author’s prolixity, words thrown about with abandon, then there is the long outmoded practice of addresses to the reader, not to mention direct statements of what will come next, all of which are now passé. More problematically, from very early on the reader has no doubt in which direction this is going, since the plot here is that of the long-lost heir (with a touch of Romeo and Juliet thrown in.) When Scott wrote it, most likely such a story was fresh and new, but in the intervening 210 years it has become all too familiar. And story-telling itself has changed.
The Guy Mannering of the title comes to the estate and house of Ellangowan in Galloway on the night the lady of the house is to give birth to her first child. Mannering casts a horoscope for the boy which predicts misfortunes when he will be aged five and ten plus a further significant event at twenty-two. As well as the laird, Godfrey Bertram, Mannering meets the taciturn dominie Abel Sampson (who however is prone to uttering the word pro-dig-i-ous, in that elongated fashion, when over-excited) and the – kenspeckle, since she is very tall for a woman – gipsy Meg Merrilies. At this point Scott digresses into a discourse on the history in Scotland of what some at the time termed Egyptians, who had been rendered by law to be common and habitual thieves. His sympathies are with Meg however as she is to some extent the heroine (if one there be) of his tale. Five years later, as Mrs Bertram is in labour with a daughter, a murder occurs on the estate, blamed on smugglers, and the son of the house is kidnapped. Bertram, meanwhile, is not a good guardian of the estate’s fortunes and by seventeen further years’ time the estate, in the absence of a male heir, is to be sold by roup.
Mannering, who has been soldiering in India, where his own daughter Julia formed an attachment to one of his subordinates whom Mannering thought unsuitable and whose death he thinks he caused, has now returned and attempts to buy Ellangowan but is too late due to dealing with a concern of the friend with whom Julia is staying, and so takes another house nearby. That subordinate, of the name Vanbeest Brown from a sojourn in Holland, is still alive and in communication with Mannering’s daughter Julia.
On his way to Galloway, Brown saves a local farmer, Andrew (known as Dandie) Dinmont, who breeds terriers, from robbery by two ruffians. Dinmont becomes a fast friend and is instrumental in aiding Brown when he meets difficulties later on.
Even from this short summary it is perhaps obvious who is the lost heir and what part of the resolution will be.
The novel is not without its moments, though, and there are incidents aplenty, as how could there not be in a tale involving smugglers, gipsies, a murder, abduction and thwarted inheritances? Gilbert Glossin, who actually bought Ellangowan, is as slippery a character as you might wish, and the lawyer Pleydell – along with Dinmont – larger than life, but the women, Meg Merrilies apart, tend to be ciphers. In the end the tale is more Brown’s than Guy Mannering’s though and the astrology aspect falls by the wayside. Perhaps as his plot developed Scott lost (fore?)sight of it.
Pedant’s corner:- early nineteenth century spellings, chuse, exstacy, eve’sdropper, paralytick, etc, etc; “the place from whence he came” (since whence means ‘from where’ then ‘from whence’ incorporates a repetition; ‘the place whence he came’.) “None …. were present” (None … was present. Several more examples of ‘none’ with a plural verb,) whiskey (whisky,) a full stop at the end of a question, “from thence” (again repetitious, thence = ‘from where’,) “Meg Merrilies’ wound” (Merrilies’s.) In the essay on the text; miniscule (minuscule.)
Just in from 
Insecure academic Roland Michell finds in a pile of unsifted-through papers relating to Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash unfinished drafts of a letter from Ash to a hitherto unknown possible female lover, a relationship which would overturn the prevailing view of Ash’s life. For reasons obscure even to himself Michell removes the drafts from the pile and resolves to investigate further. He begins to suspect the intended recipient was the female poet Christabel LaMotte and enlists the help of LaMotte expert Dr Maud Bailey to delve into the mystery. With her help he comes across a complete set of letters between the two poets which reveal the extent of their affair.
