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.)

Edited by Douglas S Mack, Scottish Academic Press, 1976, 170 p; plus i p Acknowledgements, xi p Introduction, viii p Notes on the Text, x p Appendices, i p Select Bibliography, xvi p Explanatory and Textual Notes and xvii p Glossary. First published 1818.

The novel is set in Hogg’s country of southwest Scotland, the Dumfries and Galloway of Covenanting times, some years after the Battle of Bothwell Bridge. The defeated Covenanters were forced to scatter and hide, holding their prayer meetings in conventicles and taking cover where they might, in danger of being chased down by Government trooops. At times the air was filled with the eerie sound of their singing as if some unnatural creature were haunting the hills.

Despite not being of their persuasion and of the concomitant danger of arrest and execution, Walter Laidlaw, a farmer at Chapelhope, takes to giving some of the fugitives succour and shelter. As a result of her ministrations in this regard his daughter Katharine is in danger of being thought – even by her mother – a witch, and of consorting with the Brownie of Bodsbeck, a deformed supernatural creature believed to haunt Chapelhope. In the glossary a brownie is defined as a “benevolent household sprite, usually shaggy and of peculiar shape, who haunted houses, particularly farmhouses, and, if the servants treated him well, performed many tasks of drudgery for them while they were asleep.” (I mentioned this definition to the good lady who immediately reflected on how this assignation of drudgery to the name conformed with the junior arm of the Girl Guides.) The brownie is alternatively described as a goblin or evil spirit.

The plot gears up when soldiers under the commend of John Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount (“Bonnie”) Dundee, come to the area. Laidlaw is arrested, barely escapes being shot and is taken to Edinburgh for trial. In the meantime a local minister convinces Katharine’s mother to allow him to spend the night with the girl in the farm’s outshot to exorcise the evil she is thought to embody and not to open the door no matter what she might hear. (The only evil truly at hand is the minister’s intention of forcing himself on Katharine.) Katharine persuades him to hold off for a few hours and is rescued by apparitions coming out of the dark.

The behaviour and attitude of Claverhouse as shown here place him in a harsh, unforgiving light, a point over which he clashed with Walter Scott, but are in accord with Hogg’s memories of the stories told to him in his youth about the time.

The text is in the main in English but Hogg’s characters speak broad Scots, laden with the dialect of that area of the Borders. A difficulty in comprehension some may find is that a Highland sergeant’s soft sibilants are represented as in “pe” (for “be,”) “poy” (for “boy”) and “petween” (for “between”) plus the typical aspirations of his vowels are delightfully captured as in “couhnsel” for “counsel” and “tisgrhace” for disgrace.

The glossary is worth perusing on its own. Old Scots was a language very much concerned with agriculture and the land. I had heard of the dog breed whose name is derived from the fictional character in Scott’s Guy Mannering but hadn’t realised before reading it here that a dinmont is a castrated ram between the first and second shearing. (I later found a similar definition – but without the castrated bit – in my Chambers’ Dictionary.)

Hogg’s greatest literary accomplishment was The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which is perhaps the finest ever Scottish novel, the progenitor of so many since. It would be hard for this book – any book – to hold a candle to that.

However, The Brownie of Bodsbeck is entertaining enough – one of those Scots novels that illuminate the past – and refreshing in that it does not focus on the usual suspect of Jacobitism. At times, though, it feels like two stories jammed together. Laidlaw’s tribulations are distinct from those of Katharine and the Brownie and the two don’t really mesh.

Pedant’s corner:- Clavers’ (Clavers’s,) wofully (old spelling but later rendered as woefully,) “the family were crowded round” (the family was.) In the glossary: an opened parenthesis never closed.