The History of Matthew Wald
The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Works of John Gibson Lockhart
The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Works of John Gibson Lockhart
The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Works of John Gibson Lockhart
Series Editor: Thomas C. Richardson Advisory Board
The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Works of John Gibson Lockhart
Series Editor: Thomas C. Richardson
Dr Ian Campbell (University of Edinburgh)
Series Editor: Thomas C. Richardson Advisory Board
Advisory Board
Dr Peter Garside (University of Edinburgh)
Series Editor: Thomas C. Richardson
Dr Ian Campbell (University of Edinburgh)
Dr Gillian Hughes (Independent Scholar)
Dr Ian Campbell (University of Edinburgh)
Dr Peter Garside (University of Edinburgh)
Dr Peter Garside (University of Edinburgh)
Dr Caroline McCracken-Flesher (University of Wyoming)
Dr Kirsteen McCue (University of Glasgow)
Advisory Board
Dr Gillian Hughes (Independent Scholar)
Dr Gillian Hughes (Independent Scholar)
Dr Caroline McCracken-Flesher (University of Wyoming)
Published:
Dr Robert Morrison (Bath Spa University)
Dr Caroline McCracken-Flesher (University of Wyoming)
Dr Ian Campbell (University of Edinburgh)
Dr Kirsteen McCue (University of Glasgow)
Dr Kirsteen McCue (University of Glasgow)
Dr Peter Garside (University of Edinburgh)
Dr Robert Morrison (Bath Spa University)
Dr Robert Morrison (Bath Spa University)
Dr Gillian Hughes (Independent Scholar)
Dr Caroline McCracken-Flesher (University of Wyoming)
Published:
Some Passages in the Life of Mr Adam Blair, edited by Thomas C. Richardson
Published:
Dr Kirsteen McCue (University of Glasgow)
Dr Robert Morrison (Bath Spa University)
Some Passages in the Life of Mr Adam Blair, edited by Thomas C. Richardson
Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, edited by Peter Garside and Gillian Hughes
Some Passages in the Life of Mr Adam Blair, edited by Thomas C. Richardson
Published:
Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, edited by Peter Garside and Gillian Hughes
The History of Matthew Wald, edited by Thomas C. Richardson
Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, edited by Peter Garside and Gillian Hughes
The History of Matthew Wald, edited by Thomas C. Richardson
Some Passages in the Life of Mr Adam Blair, edited by Thomas C. Richardson
The History of Matthew Wald, edited by Thomas C. Richardson
In preparation:
Valerius, A Roman Story, edited by Kristian Kerr
In preparation:
Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, edited by Peter Garside and Gillian Hughes
In preparation:
Selected Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, edited by Thomas C. Richardson and Gillian Hughes
Valerius, A Roman Story, edited by Kristian Kerr
The History of Matthew Wald, edited by Thomas C. Richardson
Valerius, A Roman Story, edited by Kristian Kerr
Reginald Dalton, edited by Caroline McCracken-Flesher
The Life of Robert Burns, edited by Kirsteen McCue
Selected Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, edited by Thomas C. Richardson and Gillian Hughes
In preparation:
Selected Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, edited by Thomas C. Richardson and Gillian Hughes
Reginald Dalton, edited by Caroline McCracken-Flesher
The Life of Sir Walter Scott, edited by Peter Garside
Valerius, A Roman Story, edited by Kristian Kerr
Reginald Dalton, edited by Caroline McCracken-Flesher
The Life of Robert Burns, edited by Kirsteen McCue
The Life of Robert Burns, edited by Kirsteen McCue
The Life of Sir Walter Scott, edited by Peter Garside
The Life of Sir Walter Scott, edited by Peter Garside
Selected Letters of John Gibson Lockhart, edited by Thomas C. Richardson and Gillian Hughes
Reginald Dalton, edited by Caroline McCracken-Flesher
The Life of Robert Burns, edited by Kirsteen McCue
The Life of Sir Walter Scott, edited by Peter Garside
Introduction
1. Genesis of the Novel
The History of Matthew Wald was first published anonymously late in March 1824 by William Blackwood in Edinburgh and T. Cadell in London, the last of John Gibson Lockhart’s four novels in as many years and, according to early reviews, ‘superior in point of writing’ to, and at the same time, ‘rich with the highest merits’ of, his other novels: Valerius, A Roman Story (1821), Some Passages in the Life of Mr Adam Blair, Minister of the Gospel at Cross-Meikle (1822; 2nd edn 1824), and Reginald Dalton (1823). 1 Matthew Wald was republished in 1843 together with Adam Blair in the Blackwood’s Standard Novels series and was reprinted multiple times in that series. Lockhart did not revise Matthew Wald for the Blackwood’s Standard Novels edition beyond, perhaps, a very small number of words, but the edition also includes minor changes to spelling and punctuation that can be attributed largely to the printer’s preferences. The first edition of 1824, then, serves as the copy text for the present edition with minor emendations to correct printing errors, to provide textual consistency, and to include the word changes of the 1843 edition. 2
Lockhart had an early interest in novel writing, and in 1814, at age twenty, he wrote to his friend Jonathan Christie of his intention to write a Scottish novel that would be ‘a receptacle of an immense quantity of anecdotes and observations I have made concerning the state of the Scotch, chiefly their clergy and elders. It is to me wonderful how the Scotch character has been neglected’. 3 By November 1814 he had made sufficient progress to think of contacting the London publisher, John Murray, about publishing ‘two volumes of nonsense’, as he explained to Christie:
My novel comes on wondrously I mean as to bulk. My fears are many first, of false taste creeping in from the want of any censor; secondly, of too much Scotch from the circumstance of
my writing in the midst of the ‘low Lanerickshire’—&c., &c., &c. But I think I have written a great many graphical scenes [...]. Once again let me ask you for any little odd tags, rags, and bobtails of good incidents, &c., for which you have no immediate use. They may do me great service. 4
In December Lockhart wrote to the Edinburgh publisher, Archibald Constable, instead of Murray, as perhaps more likely to be interested in Lockhart’s ‘observations’ on Scottish society:
I am sensible that much has been done of late years in the description of our national manners, but there are still, I apprehend, many important classes of Scotch society quite untouched. The Hero is one John Todd, a true-blue who undertakes a journey to London in a Berwick Smack, & is present in the metropolis at the same time w. the Emperor of Russia & other illustrious visitors in June last. I think “The Romance of the Thistle” might do for a Title’. 5
However, after reading Walter Scott’s Waverley, which had been published in July 1814, Lockhart put aside his work in progress, undoubtedly recognising that his ‘odd tags, rags, and bobtails’ did not rise to the standard set by ‘the author of Waverley’. He wrote to Christie again in February 1815: ‘Most of my novel was written before I read “Waverley,” but I fear the rush upon Scotland consequent to that popular work is such that mine is likely to be crushed among the row. I intend letting it sleep a year or two and making use of it as a drawable for some more extensive thing’. 6
Lockhart’s letters to Christie suggest that his novel-in-progress was a work of loose structure and unsophisticated plot not at all like the novels he would come to write. Lockhart’s manuscripts for his first attempts at novel writing have not been preserved, and it is not known if Lockhart actually saved any of that early material or if he used any of it in his later published novels or even in the earlier Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819) which, while not a novel, uses a fictional structure with fictional narrator to convey his character sketches and descriptions of Scottish culture. 7 However, Lockhart learned much about the art of the novel—from his experience both
as a reader and as a literary critic in the six years between his reading of Waverley, which alerted him to his own immaturity as a writer, and the publication of his first novel, Valerius, the year after he became Walter Scott’s son-in-law. 8 Lockhart read the fiction of Scott, but he also read widely in the works of British, European, and American authors. He travelled in Germany for the publisher William Blackwood and translated (then reviewed) Frederick Schlegel’s History of Literature, Ancient and Modern. 9 He read Goethe, whom he regarded as having ‘indisputably exerted more influence upon the literature of his age, than any other author of our time’. 10 He met Walter Scott and had the benefit of his encouragement and direction in writing Peter’s Letters. For Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine he reviewed writings of Madame de Staël, the Americans Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving, and especially important for Matthew Wald, reviewed William Godwin’s novel Mandeville. 11 By the time he published Valerius he had come to understand, as he later wrote in a review of Robert Ward’s novel De Vere; or, the Man of Independence , that ‘A note - book of reminiscences and anecdotes, however rich, will no more enable a man of feeble imagination to make a novel, than a collection of statepapers and annual registers will enable a man who has no philosophical grasp and scope of intellect, to produce a history’. 12
Over this period of literary maturity Lockhart’s focus in his fiction also properly shifted from ‘anecdotes and observations’ to ‘character’; he embraced the novel as the literary genre most suited to character portrayal. Lockhart, a Classics scholar, in a later essay argues that the novel provided for modern, educated readers what the drama had provided for previous ages the ‘exhibition of human character under every light and shade which could result from the conflicting influence of principle and passion on every possible variety of temperament and constitution’. 13 The purpose of a novel, he continues, is above all to excel in the ‘conception and delineation of character’. 14 As the titles of Lockhart’s novels suggest, each focuses on a specific and fresh—character, each of whom in its own way is struggling with the ‘conflicting influence of principle and passion’. Lockhart’s efforts to shape a philosophy of fiction, then, clearly underpinned his approach to novel writing.
Additionally, by the time he wrote Matthew Wald, Lockhart had the experience of three published novels and, importantly, the benefit of Henry Mackenzie’s guidance on matters of style. Mackenzie published an essay of stylistic advice, addressed to the author of Adam Blair, in the April 1822 number of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine: ‘Hints to a Young Author, from a Very Old One’. Mackenzie called Adam Blair ‘a work of real genius’ by a talented writer, but he went on to add that ‘it is not enough to possess genius or invention, without cultivating the one, or regulating the other’. Mackenzie addresses specific areas of stylistic concerns, such as inconsistency of verisimilitude, wordiness, the obtrusiveness of the narrator, and the relevance of descriptions, including those of natural scenery: ‘In description, whether of natural scenery, or of other objects, let him be aware, that though particularity is highly pleasing, yet prolixity fatigues the reader’. 15 Lockhart revised Adam Blair following Mackenzie’s ‘Hints’ and published a second edition in 1824. There can be little doubt that Mackenzie’s advice also affected Lockhart’s stylistic success with Matthew Wald. Matthew Wald appeared about two months after the second edition of Adam Blair, so Lockhart must have written Matthew Wald while revising Adam Blair, or if he did not work on the two novels simultaneously, then certainly he did so in close proximity. In Matthew Wald Lockhart avoids the stylistic weaknesses of the first edition of Adam Blair, and he seems to acknowledge Matthew Wald’s indebtedness to Mackenzie in his own review of the novel in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Lockhart emphasises the unity of the story and how the action of the novel is tied together through the focus on the character of Wald: ‘It is indeed a story not only abounding in, but overflowing with, variety of highly interesting incident and adventure; but throughout the whole of its tenor, everything is decidedly and entirely subordinate to the minute and anxious, although easy and unaffected, anatomy of one man’s mind’. 16 Furthermore, Lockhart addresses specifically the language of Mackenzie’s review of Adam Blair, as if to say that he has learned from his earlier mistakes: ‘The style of Matthew Wald exhibits prodigious improvement as to harmony of tone: it is quite free from the faults of prolixity and turgidity, and bears the impress not merely of great but of uniform power’. 17
The History of Matthew Wald is structured in two parts The first part (372 pages in the first edition) is Matthew’s own narrative, addressed internally to John, the grandson of Matthew’s aunt, the sister of Matthew’s father. The second part (ten pages in the first edition) is a brief account of the end of Wald’s life in the form of a letter from ‘J. W. R.’ (presumably the ‘John’ to whom Matthew’s memoir is addressed), to ‘P. R.’, enclosing Wald’s narrative. Like the title character of Valerius, Matthew writes his own history. It is written late in Matthew’s life, and not only narrates the family background and the events of his life to a particular point, but also throughout the memoir Matthew reflects on his own character, commenting on his behavioral flaws and personal failings, as well as the strengths of his character and his achievements, resulting in a tragic but sympathetic character. John Galt wrote to William Blackwood on 14 March 1822 after having finished reading Adam Blair , praising Lockhart for his ‘extraordinary power’ but questioning the author for not writing in the first person: ‘why did the author not write in the character of Adam Blair himself? Why did he make those vivid sketches of passion, instead of doing what would have been infinitely more striking, express the actions of the passions themselves?’ 18 Galt was wrong about the narrative voice of Adam Blair: the voices of the other characters and the narrator’s community voice were essential to understanding Blair’s character, and the significance and impact of Blair’s behaviour could not have been so effectively represented solely by his own point of view. But the circumstances are different for Matthew Wald. It is likely that Blackwood communicated Galt’s comments to Lockhart, although it is unlikely that Galt’s view influenced Lockhart’s approach to Matthew Wald; however, Lockhart clearly believed that the most effective way to develop the character of Wald was to have Wald tell his own story Lockhart explains his theory of first-person narration and its application to Matthew Wald in his Blackwood’s review of his novel.
Lockhart argues that while ‘a great variety of long-winded discussions have been written’ about the merits of first-person and third-person narration, the choice of the point of view from which to write is relatively simple: when the focus of the narration is primarily on ‘the incidents themselves’, the third person is the better
perspective; when the ‘chief object is the developement of character’, the first person provides the more-effective option, especially ‘where the writer’s purpose is to bind the reader’s attention and sympathy on the progress of thought and feeling in one human mind’. Lockhart goes on to suggest that the ‘autobiographic tone’ is the most effective method ‘even when the operation of external events’ is a significant focus of the novel, provided the reader is asked ‘to sympathize solely or chiefly with one human being’. 19 And just as Lockhart’s review offers what seems to be an acknowledgement of Mackenzie’s advice, Lockhart also includes what might be seen as a subtle, if mildly derogatory, response to Galt’s criticism of Adam Blair, referencing the first-person narrative voices of Galt’s Annals of the Parish and The Provost, respectively:
But whenever the depths of the heart and the soul are to be laid bare, let us have the knife of the self-anatomist—nay, without saying anything about depths, since many human minds may be very shallow things, and yet highly amusing as well as instructive in their display, whenever the secret peculiarities of one man are the principal object, let that man tell his own story yea, even if that man be a Reverend Mr Balquhidder, or a Provost Pawkie. 20
Following the general comments about first-person narration, Lockhart specifically addresses the point of view of Matthew Wald, while at the same time offering insights into what he believes he achieves in the characterisation of Wald. Lockhart calls the novel a ‘remarkable volume’ and argues that ‘every person who reads it must admit that it is a story eminently unfit for being told by any one but its hero’. Lockhart underscores the significance of the ‘great variety of adventures’ with which Wald is involved and that offer the reader ‘glimpses into a great many widely different fields of human life and action’, but he emphasises that ‘everything is decidedly and entirely subordinate to the minute and anxious, although easy and unaffected, anatomy of one man’s mind’ . Lockhart describes the ‘main elements’ of Wald’s ‘mind’ as a ‘ haughty, scornful, sarcastic, shrewd, bitter spirit, blended with some tempestuous passions, and softened by a few feelings of the purest and most tender depth’. Wald’s character ‘command[s] our sympathies’ because he is ‘a
strong-minded, independent, and self-relying human being’. Lockhart suggests that the achievement and significance of the novel lie in the fact that it is ‘both interesting and instructive’, ‘the more interesting because it is written in the first person, where we are reminded at every step […] that he, of whose fortunes we are reading, possessed not only a powerful intellect, but a high and imaginative genius ’. The novel’s ‘ instructiveness ’ important ly reminds the reader ‘how incapable are even the highest powers and accomplishments of intellect of atoning for the want of that moral equilibrium in which the true happiness of man consists, in the absence of which the noblest gifts of our Creator serve not more surely to embellish the narrative, than to deepen the substance of human misery’. 21
The language of Lockhart’s review of Matthew Wald in many respects echoes Lockhart’s reviews of William Godwin’s Mandeville and the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving and suggests that Lockhart was trying to achieve a Godwinian character although uniquely Scottish—in Matthew Wald. Lockhart compares the character of Mandeville to earlier Godwin characters, Caleb Williams and St Leon:
Like them he possesses a lofty intellect and many natural capacities for enjoyment. Like them his heart is originally filled with kindly and benignant feelings; and, like them, by a strange perverseness of circumstances and temper, he is afflicted with intolerable sufferings, in which we can scarcely fear that we ourselves ever shall partake, and which nevertheless command the most powerful of our human sympathies. He is more essentially and entirely a madman than either of his brethren. 22
Lockhart admired ‘the energy of the language’ with which Mandeville tells his story so that the readers become ‘partakers in the very follies whereof we feel and pity the existence in the narrator’. He also praised the art of the storytelling that took ‘no ordinary degree of management in the author to produce this mixture of apparently irreconcileable effects, to make us sympathize in the emotions without being deceived by the speciousness of his hero’. 23
Lockhart later argues that Charles Brockden Brown, although admired by Godwin, ‘was not indeed a Godwin’ in terms of artistic achievement but that like Godwin’s works, Brown’s novels are characterised by ‘dark, mysterious power of imagination,’ ‘deep and pathetic knowledge of the human heart’, and ‘bold sweeping flood of impassioned eloquence’ 24 terms that could also describe Lockhart’s achievements in Matthew Wald. There is little doubt that Lockhart was influenced by Godwin, especially Mandeville, and in the characterisation of Matthew Wald Lockhart succeeded in achieving a Godwinian character, effectively capturing the fragility, mystery, complexity, and competing passions of the human mind. His depiction of Wald is sympathetic and much less intensely dramatic than Godwin’s Mandeville, however, and although Wald experiences a breakdown, a temporary bout of ‘madness’ from which he recovers, he is not the ‘complete madman’ that Lockhart sees in Mandeville Lockhart attempts to depict a character whose experience is more representative of humanity at large; Lockhart’s novel is grounded in realism, presenting a personal story set firmly within the context of, and reflecting the complexities of, Scottish history, culture, and traditions.
Lockhart also suggests a Wordsworthian influence on the characterisation of Wald. Lockhart includes on the title page as an epigraph to the novel the opening stanza of William Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Fountain, A Conversation’, which was first published in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads. Three more stanzas, the tenth through the twelfth of the poem’s eighteen stanzas, are quoted as an epigraph to J. W. R.’s ‘Letter to P. R. Esq (Enclosing the Foregoing Memoirs)’. 25 J. W. R.’s ‘Letter’ also refers to Wald as the ‘greyhaired man of glee’ (p. 180), quoting the poem’s ‘young’ speaker’s description of the character Matthew in ‘The Fountain’ (l. 20). ‘The Fountain’ is structured as a dialogue between ‘Matthew’, age seventy-two, and the poem’s younger persona; the ages of the poem’s characters are comparable to those of Wald and J. W. R. Lockhart’s strategic selection and placement of quotations from ‘The Fountain’ invite the reader of Matthew Wald to consider possible thematic connections with Wordsworth’s work. Lockhart also seems to suggest that the reader should pay careful attention to the novel’s second narrative, that J. W. R.’s ‘Letter’ is more important than for
just wrapping up details of Wald’s later life and his death, and that the reader should consider the seriousness of what is perhaps taken too lightly by J. W. R.’s and P. R.’s efforts to understand Wald’s character and conflicting images and assessments of his identity. Sources for Lockhart’s characters extend beyond the literary, however; they are also derived from or modelled after Lockhart’s acquaintances, especially from his practice as a lawyer, as well as fictionali sed representations of historical figures. Lockhart ’s experience as an Advocate for the Circuit Court also provided inspiration and sources for some of his characters. Mammy Baird, one of the most endearing characters of the novel, seems to have been based on a woman Lockhart met at Arndilly House while serving as a lawyer for the Circuit Court. Lockhart wrote to his wife, Sophia:
I wish you had come hither if it were but for the sake of the old Highland Nurse of the house. She is about 94 years old is privileged completely drinks tea & punch every night in the Drawing Room & tells stories & sings ballads that rival your own & Miss Anna James in length if not in melody. The old girl dances everything from reel to Quadrille and is indeed a very charming person & much need she has to be so for we were all obliged to kiss her as well as to dance w her. How your papa wd delight in such a specimen. 26
Arndilly House, on the River Spey in Moray, was the seat of the Macdowall Grants, and William Macdowall Grant (1796-1849) was an acquaintance of Lockhart’s. It is likely that the character of judge Thirleton is based on George Fergusson, Lord Hermand (17431827), judge and a Lord of Justiciary. Lockhart knew Lord Hermand from his time on the Circuit Court, and Sir Walter Scott had served as Clerk of the Court of Session under Judge Hermand. Lockhart devoted several pages of Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk to descriptions and anecdotes of the judge. 27 In the letter to Sophia in which he describes the ‘Mammy Baird’ figure, he also mentions his connection to Lord Hermand: ‘I spent three days gaily at Aberdeen and have now spent two very pleasantly at this fine place for it really is one of the finest I have ever seen The young Laird is my
acquaintance Macdowall Grant a nephew to Mrs Hermand who is here with her old Lord’. 28
Wald’s description of the ‘Justice-ayre march’ at the conclusion of a session of the Circuit Court at Stirling, presided over by Judge Thirleton, also comes from Lockhart’s experience with the Court. Wald, while waiting to meet with Judge Thirleton, observes the traditional parade that concludes the day’s session:
my ears were at length gratified with the well-known “Justice-ayre march,” performed upon a couple of cracked trumpets in the street below me, and accompanied with a sufficient buzz of “the Lords!!!—the Lords!!!” and, throwing up my window, I could soon distinguish the principal feature of the advancing procession. His lordship held in his right hand an umbrella, for the protection of his wig and cocked hat; and his left being, with equal propriety, occupied in tucking up the skirts of his robe, his short bandy-legs were seen stumping vigorously through the mud the bailies and trumpeters in advance, on each side a waiter or two with tallowcandles in paper-lanterns, and the usual rabble in the rear. (p. 144)
This scene in the novel is probably based on Lockhart’s own experience in the Court in Glasgow in 1820, although David Monypenny, Lord Pitmilly (1769-1850), was presiding rather than Lord Hermand. Lockhart sketched a caricature of the scene, which fellow lawyer Henry Cockburn, Lord Cockburn (1779-1854), recorded in his journal: ‘It was a wet day, and I have a view which John Lockhart, a master in the art of caricature, drew of Lord Pitmilly, with his umbrella over his wig, and his gown tucked up out of the mud, to the exposure of his Lordship’s odd and well-known legs. It is the very man. Lockhart and I were behind him. I forget who his colleague was’. 29
Lockhart turns to a traditional Border story for the character of Joanne Barr. Lockhart imagines Joanne as the illegitimate child of Jean (or Jeanne), the lover of Sir Robert Stuart (1643-1707), first Baronet of Allanbank in Berwickshire. Jean, or ‘Pearling Jean’ as she came to be known, was ultimately rejected by Sir Robert and died tragically in his presence and perhaps at his direction. In the novel Joanne is the daughter of Sir Claud Barr and a beautiful young
woman he had met in Flanders and persuaded to run away with him to Scotland. Sir Claud’s lover is referred to by the servants as ‘Perling Joan’ because of the lace decorations on her dress like ‘Pearling Jean’. The story, or stories, of ‘Pearling Jean’ seem to have been widely known, and several versions of the tradition have survived. The antiquarian Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe recounts his terror as a child at stories of the ghost of Jean—stories that he heard from his nurse, who had been a servant at Allanbank. In Sharpe’s version, Jean had been deliberately run over by Stuart’s carriage on Stuart’s order to drive on, and this took place in Paris, not Scotland. 30 The Reverend John Marriott turned the story into a ballad, dated September 1805, which he sent to Sharpe in a letter of 7 March 1807. Marriott’s version is similar to Sharpe’s, although embellished with details appropriate to a traditional Scottish ballad. In Marriott’s ballad ‘Sir John’ meets with justice; on returning to his estate, the ghost of Jean greets him and ‘Old Nick’s own coach-and-six’ grinds the bones of Sir John ‘to powder.’ 31 Marriott claims that ‘the present Sir John of Allanbank’ had seen Marriott’s ballad and ‘bears witness to its authenticity in all important respects’. 32
The version of the ‘Pearling Jean’ story that Lockhart follows, as told by Mammy Baird to Matthew, apparently was the version subscribed to by Sir Walter Scott. Scott thought Lockhart’s source for the story must have been either himself or his daughter, Sophia, who was Lockhart’s wife. Scott is defensive about Lockhart’s use of the story in the novel, and he wrote to Sir James Stuart (1779-1849), fifth Baronet of Allanbank, on 7 July 1827 with an implied apology:
I do not remember having told Lockhart the story of your Castle [?] Spectre pearling Jean but he must have heard it from me or his wife for it is decidedly the same legend but in my opinion spoild by his way of telling it. I dont think we ever spoke about that curious tradition or whether I ever askd you whether there was any foundation for the common report. If I recollect there was a picture which hung on the Staircase at Allanbank supposed to represent Pearlin’ Jane a ghostly looking personage I have further some idea that the picture was said to be a prepotention [?] of the restless spirit. 33
Of the extant versions, Lockhart’s telling most closely aligns with that recorded by Andrew and John Lang in Highways and Byways of the Border, and presumably this is the version with which Scott was most familiar. While travelling in Europe, Sir Robert met Jeanne, the beautiful young daughter of a Flemish Jew, and he persuaded her to return with him to Scotland. When Sir Robert arrived home with Jeanne, ‘a vision all in lace and ribbons’, the servants were told to regard Jeanne as their mistress. After a time Jeanne gave birth to a daughter, and Sir Robert became more distant in the relationship. Sir Robert went away for several months on ‘business’, but before returning sent word that he was marrying someone appropriate to his social rank. Jeanne left home and did not return until the day Sir Robert brought his bride to Allanbank. As the carriage arrived at the estate, Jeanne ‘darted from a clump of shrubbery’ in front of the carriage and was trampled to death. The infant remained at Allanbank, as did a portrait of Jeanne. However, the ghost of Jeanne was also said to roam the house, and no one would enter what had been her room, especially after Sir Robert’s distressing encounter with the spirit of his betrayed mistress. 34
While there is little effort by Lockhart to disguise the source of Joanne Barr, in the character of George Whitefield he introduces the historical figure under his real name. George Whitefield (1714-1770) was an itinerant Methodist minister and evangelist. In the novel Matthew sees Whitefield as a negative influence on Joanne, who by the time she encounters the evangelist had become Matthew’s wife. The historical Whitefield visited Scotland for services fourteen times between 1741 and 1768. He was known for his ‘impassioned oratory’, and his services were often attended by several thousand.35 J. H. S. Burleigh notes that in 1742 Whitefield preached to an estimated 30,000 people during the revival known as the ‘Cambuslang Wark’. 36 Whitefield was a controversial figure in the Church of Scotland parishes. As a Calvinist and a man of gracious personality, he was favourably received by the masses, but as a ‘prelatic priest of the Church of England’ his work was considered by the stricter Presbyterians as ‘a delusion of the devil’. 37 Joanne was drawn to Whitefield’s preaching, but Matthew was disturbed by what he considered the damaging effects of Whitefield’s emotional appeal. Wald describes Whitefield’s skills as an orator in terms that
are historically appropriate: ‘The fervor, the passion, the storm of enthusiasm, spoke in every awful, yet melodious vibration of by far the finest human voice I have ever heard’ (p. 112). Yet, Wald considered him ‘dangerous’ (p. 112) for inspiring a preference for ‘the romance of earthly things to their truth’, leading to what Matthew observed in Joanne as ‘a dark and almost despairing gloom’ (p. 113).
After Joanne acquires the Barr estate, she increasingly becomes a target of the appeals of religious organisations, and Wald becomes increasingly frustrated with what he regards as predatory tactics and questionable motives for their work. The negative consequences of Whitefield’s popularity, and the support and encouragement of Scottish ministers, such as the Reverend William McCulloch of the Cambuslang Wark, are given voice by Lockhart in Wald’s concerns about the popularity of Whitefield’s itinerant preaching:
The eternal visitations of wandering fanatics, some of them men of strong talents, and respectable acquirements, the far greater part ignorant, uninformed, wild, raving mechanics, the enormous assemblages of people which the harangues of these persons never failed to command, even in the wildest and most thinly peopled districts of the country, the scenes of, literally speaking, mere madness, which their enthusiastic and often impious declamations excited, and in which even the most eminent of them condescended to triumph, as the sure tests of the divinity of the peculiar dogmas which they enunciated […] all these things spread and flourished in a style of which you can happily form but a slender conception. (p. 126)
To Matthew , Joanne w as ‘decidedly tinged with this enthusiasm’ (p. 113), and Matthew took Joanne’s religious enthusiasm as a personal affront. But ‘e nthusiasm’ is also a term at the heart of broader religious controversies of the eighteenth century . ‘Enthusiasm’ was associated with Covenanting zeal and with the conservative biblical preaching of Evangelicals in the Church of Scotland. By the second half of the eighteenth century, the Moderate movement of the Church, which emphasised ‘rational’ religion and ‘morality’, was in the majority and growing. The Moderates,
according to J. H. S. Burleigh, rejected enthusiasm as the ‘deadly sin of the eighteenth century’. 38
It is not known if The Reverend Mather and The Reverend Meikle are based on specific individuals, but as the son of a Church of Scotland minister Lockhart would have known, or known stories of, various ministers who could have served as models for these contrasting characters. Lockhart’s father, Dr John Lockhart, was minister of the Parish Kirk of Cambusnethan in Lanarkshire at the time of Lockhart’s birth but was called to the College Kirk of Blackfriars in Glasgow in 1796; it was from his father that Lockhart heard the story that became the basis for his novel Adam Blair. Lockhart might also have drawn on a collection of primarily satirical vignettes of Glasgow personalities attributed to the poet John Finlay, Northern Sketches, or Characters of G****** [i. e. Glasgow], which includes sketches that provide contrasting views of ministers with characteristics applicable to both Mather and Meikle.
Although the novel’s focus is not on religion, nevertheless Matthew’s circumstances and character are influenced, for good and for bad, by the religious figures in his life. Following the death of Matthew’s uncle from injuries sustained at Culloden, Matthew’s father is awarded his brother’s estate, Blackford, and invites his brother’s wife and young daughter to return to the family estate. Matthew says that Mr Wald becomes a father to his cousin, Katharine, but Matthew, whose mother is deceased, does not find a mother in his aunt. Mr Wald dies suddenly when Matthew is ten years old, leaving Matthew parentless psychologically as well as actually. Furthermore, surprisingly, Mr Wald leaves the estate to Katharine, not Matthew, and Matthew receives only his father’s original patrimony. In due time Matthew’s aunt marries The Reverend Mather, a Presbyterian minister and son of a barber who had been Matthew and Katharine’s tutor. Following a chastisement from the minister for the cousins’ tardiness in returning home from one of their youthful wanderings, Matthew challenges Mather’s authority to punish him. Mather brutally whips Matthew for daring to ‘brave’ him (p. 14), and Matthew retaliates by causing the minister to have an accident while driving his new whiskey, injuring Mather. After this incident the Mathers poisoned the minds o f their younger children against Matthew and interfered with
Matthew and Katharine’s efforts to be together. Matthew became obsessed with his hatred of Mather:
conceive how I grinded my teeth, as I lay counting hour after hour through the night, upon the sweet idea that I was trodden under foot by the spawn of a village shaver—that he had whipped me— that I had the marks of him upon my back! Conceive the intense perceptions I now had of his ineradicable baseness. […] His fine large white teeth seemed to me as if they belonged to some overgrown unclean beast some great monstrous rat. […] I can never make you comprehend the five millionth part of what I suffered during this period […] loathed! That is my word that was my feeling. I was under this man. […] I used to dream of seeing him planted chin-deep in mud pelted with filth and vermin! […] Yes, I once laughed myself awake at seeing him spinning round under a gibbet,—gown, bands, and all! (p. 18)
Matthew’s hatred of Mather becomes a part of his very being and only intensifies as Mather’s interference continues to cause Matthew to suffer alienation from the people and places that were important to him.
There are two characters in Northern Sketches that might have served as models for Mather: The Reverend A. Maskwell, possibly based on John MacLeod, who served as minister of North Albion Street Chapel from 1782, and The Reverend Dr Grovel, possibly based on Dr William Taylor, who served St Mungo’s (Glasgow Cathedral) from 1780 and was Principal of Glasgow University from 1803 to 1823. 39 The author comments on Maskwell’s choice of a wife: ‘it is no doubt a happy circumstance when an estate as well as a wife can be obtained’. 40 The more likely satirical example is The Reverend Dr Grovel who, like Mather, gained a principalship: ‘By a fawning and wily mode of conduct, by a cautious attention to opportunity, and by a steady regard to his personal interest, he has pushed himself forward in society, and usurped situations of honour and trust, which ought to have been the rewards of merit and virtue […] His services have been ever at the command of wealth and power’. 41 Mather, too, was highly dependent upon his patron for his advancement. The Moderate wing of the Church of Scotland in the
eighteenth century supported the patronage system because, they argued, it was good for the Church: ‘Patrons being men of position and education, they held, were better judges of the qualities of ministers than the unlettered folk who formed the bulk of the congregations’. 42 While the patronage system was well intentioned, the system could be abused, with the minister serving the interests of the patron in exchange for personal benefits. In Mather’s case, according to Wald, he was ‘beholden mainly, if not entirely, for all his chances of success’ (p. 37) to Lord Lascelyne, including the Principalship. Mather gained position and influence; Lord Lascelyne gained Katharine and Blackford, the Wald family estate.
Matthew meets The Reverend Meikle at a low point early in his independent life. Against his better judgment Matthew agrees to let Nathaniel Todd, an opportunistic and perhaps unscrupulous lawyer, file a lawsuit to try to recover the Blackford estate for Matthew. Wald loses, and the suit costs him almost his entire patrimony. Out of money, he aspires to a position in the army, but he is unfit because he fails to meet the minimum height requirement. After a convivial evening with a friend and a party of medical students, he joins the group on a grave-robbing expedition to a neighbouring village. When the students are set upon by the villagers, Matthew is severely injured and nearly drowns. The Reverend Meikle (Scots for great) saves Matthew from drowning and cares for him for three weeks until he has recovered from his injury.
Mr Meikle was a poor but generous and kind-hearted man who had struggled to get to his position and who knew personal loss. He had suffered the deaths of a wife and son and was looking after his sickly grandson, the illegitimate offspring of his deceased son and Peggy Brown, a local servant. Meikle had worked diligently and patiently towards the kirk, serving as a tutor and a teacher for nearly twenty years before being called to his own church. Out of his own hardships, Meikle is able to offer Wald compassion and support. He is responsible for connecting Wald with the tutoring position for Sir Claud Barr’s son, and he provides Wald with encouragement and positive, practical life advice. He also declines to accept Wald’s sense of despair, telling Matthew ‘Despondency is not for your years’ (p. 70). The kindness of Meikle represents more nearly Lockhart’s own experience at home. The one portrait in Northern
Sketches that is not satirical is that of Dr L*******, 43 Lockhart’s father. The circumstances of Dr Lockhart’s upbringing were much more advantageous than those Mr Meikle describes, but in terms of their values and compassion their characters were similar. Northern Sketches describes Dr Lockhart as ‘an example of virtue, which is seldom equaled in the circle of the world’ and praises ‘the beneficence of this excellent man’ for its generosity and its ‘purity of sentiment’. 44 Dr Lockhart, like Mr Meikle, was sympathetic to the lapses of moral standards in humanity: ‘Sensible of the imperfections of human nature, he is ever disposed to make allowance for its errors’. 45 Matthew was grateful for the time spent with Mr Meikle, and as he writes in his memoir, he fondly recalls that time: ‘I could linger with pleasure on the memory of the three weeks that I spent under this good old man’s roof. That time, that brief time, appears to me like a spot of shaded green in the midst of a wild moorland’ (p. 74). Meikle, at least for a time, redeems the Church of Scotland ministry for Wald after Mather’s cruel and self-serving behaviour. The English and Scottish speech of Lockhart’s characters was also important to their identity. Lockhart, like other of his contemporary novelists, including Walter Scott, John Galt, and James Hogg, was interested in the changing attitudes towards the Scottish language (or Scotch or Scots), the social and cultural implications of Scots in the post-Union United Kingdom, and the question of how to use the Scots language in character portrayal. Samuel Johnson in 1773 noted that ‘the great, the learned, the ambitious, the vain all cultivate the English phrases and the English pronunciation’ . 46 Nearly two decades before Samuel Johnson’s pronouncement about the attitude of the Scottish people towards language, David Hume noted that the Scottish people are ‘unhappy, in our Accent & Pronunciation’ and referred to Scots as a ‘very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of’.’ 47 He encouraged John Hume to send his son to England for his education in order to educate the Scottish language out of him: ‘There are several advantages of a Scots Education; but the Question is whether that of the Language does not counterbalance them, and determine the Preference to the English. He is now of an Age to learn it perfectly; but if a few Years elapse, he may acquire such an Accent, as he will never be able to cure of’. 48 This sense of language inferiority and the desire to avoid ridicule led to
something of an industry in Scotland in instruction in ‘the correct pronunciation and elegant delivery of the English language’.49 Numerous advertisements appeared in the Scottish newspapers in the second half of the eighteenth century promoting lectures, lessons, and publications on ‘correct’ English. In Edinburgh in 1761 the Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language sponsored a very popular series of lectures on speaking English, given, perhaps with a touch of irony, by the Irish actor, Thomas Sheridan. In the 6 January 1776 issue of the newspaper The Caledonian Mercury, a Mr Scott advertised for a free public lecture to ‘give the public an opportunity of judging Mr Scott’s abilities for teaching English’. 50 Mr Scott’s advertisements appeared frequently through 1785, and he published a book, Lessons in Elocution, in 1780.
This attitude of the Scottish people towards their speech is partly attributable to the post-Union experiences of the Scottish Members of Parliament, who joined the Parliament in London and who found themselves not only being misunderstood by their fellow English Members, but also being ridiculed for their manner of speech. What was true of the Members of Parliament was also true of leaders of agriculture, manufacturing, business, and culture, and even of the general traveller to England. In The Heart of Mid-Lothian Walter Scott comments on Jeanie Deans’s experience travelling through England on her journey to London: Jeanie’s ‘accent and language drew down on her so many jests and gibes, couched in a worse patois by far than her own, that she soon found it was in her interest to speak as little and as seldom as possible’. 51
Wald’s experience as a Member of Parliament reflects a common experience. Wald was sent to Parliament with a mission from the Marquess of N—— to see through the passage of a fisheries bill for Scotland. Wald feels elated when a Scottish fisheries bill easily passes after his speech promoting it, but he also qualifies the success of his speech, implying an underlying sense of inadequacy: ‘I did make a very respectable appearance, (for a Scotch Member,) and we carried our bill by a triumphant majority’ (p. 151). He soon comes to understand that the bill is approved because it is of no consequence to the English, that matters of national interest seem to mean ‘English’ rather than ‘United Kingdom’. In the flush of his success,
Wald enters the debates about politics of the American colonies. The Members soon became impatient with Wald’s speech on the subject; ‘the House had no notion of listening to my Sawney brogue in relation to a theme of this sort’ (p. 152). His speech is greeted with boredom, disdain, and finally mockery. The intolerance for Wald’s ‘Sawney brogue’ led to a more general disregard for Wald’s ideas. He is not taken seriously on subjects of serious concern to the English; he became the subject of ridicule, even within the House itself, as one Member who replied to Wald chose ‘to mimic one or two of the tones of my voice, and not a few of my improvements on the pronunciation of the English tongue’ (p. 152). Wald responded unprofessionally, and later violently, and then withdrew into further isolation.
Interestingly, in spite of Lockhart’s negative representation of the Scottish Members’ experiences in Parliament, he considered standing himself after he moved to London to become editor of the Quarterly Review. He wrote to Sir Walter Scott on 17 May 1830:
You will be glad to hear that I have begun at least to make a little money. During the last twelvemonths I have one way & another cleared upwards of £5000; and do not perceive any reason that it shd be otherwise next. Under these circumstances do you think I shd be justified in aspiring to a seat in the next H. of Commons? One can hardly live so continually among those gamesters as I have been doing without wishing to take a hand sometimes. But I should feel no gratification in coming in otherwise that [sic] at liberty to play for myself. 52
In the end Lockhart did not pursue the idea.
Although Wald speaks with a ‘Sawney brogue’, his speech within the novel is represented as standard English, not Scots, so the reader is left to imagine Wald’s pronunciation of English words and perhaps his use of Scottish rather than English idioms. There are, however, several speakers of Scots in the novel whose language is important to character identities. Lockhart’s Scots speakers typically are clever and dignified, and in addition to underscoring the legitimacy of the Scots language, the characters usually embody some Scottish nationalist association. Robin Keir, Matthew’s servant, for example,
has a minor role in the novel, but in a humorous scene in which he challenges and spars with the Court’s messenger, he becomes a subtle representative of a Scottish nationalistic spirit. Robin bests the authority figure, who, although himself in a servant role, is represented as a speaker of English. Mammy Baird, also a Scots speaker, although in a servant role in Sir Claud Barr’s family, is ‘treated with much respect by everybody’ (p. 79). She is depicted as dignified and wise, and she is a source of stability in an otherwise chaotic household. As a storehouse of traditional ballads and stories, Mammy, too, is a positive representation of Scottishness.
While a medical student in Glasgow, Wald rents a room from John M‘Ewan a poor, hardworking, and apparently devout shoemaker and his wife, Jean. John is described by Matthew as a ‘rigid Cameronian’, a throwback to some of the most zealous of the Covenanters, and Matthew notes that ‘everything about his manners spoke the world-despising pride of his sect’ (p. 98). M‘Ewan speaks Scots, but his speech is also mixed with biblical language, straight from the Authorised Version of the Bible, and flows as naturally from him as his Scots. Matthew is sympathetic to the M‘Ewans at first, but one day John kills and robs his friend, Andrew Bell, in M‘Ewan’s own house, walks out of the house, lies about where he is going, and leaves Jean and Matthew to discover the body. When M‘Ewan is caught, he assumes the attitude of a justified sinner. Lockhart effectively blends M‘Ewan’s Scots with the biblical language in which M‘Ewan was steeped:
You need not tell me your errand I am he you seek I am John M‘Ewan, that murdered Andrew Bell. I surrender myself your prisoner.—God told me but at this moment that ye would come and find me; for I opened his word, and the first text that my eye fell on was this […] Do you see the Lord’s own blessed decree? ‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall blood be shed.’—And there … there, friends, is Andrew Bell’s siller ye’ll find the haill o’t there, an be not three half-crowns and a sixpence. Seven-andthirty pounds was the sum for which I yielded up my soul to the temptations of the Prince of the Power of the Air […] I thought that I stood fast, and behold ye all how I am fallen. (pp. 101-02)
As another manifestation of the ‘deadly sin’ of enthusiasm, M‘Ewan represents another aspect of Scottish history, although one not embraced with admiration by Wald—nor by Lockhart.
Lockhart was also interested in the generational attitudes towards and acceptance of speakers of Scots. In Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, Peter Morris, Lockhart’s fictional Welsh author of Peter’s Letters, comments on the language and position of the lawyer John Clerk (1757-1832):
As might be expected from a man of his standing in years and in talent, this great advocate disdains to speak any other than the language of his own country. I am not sure, indeed, but there may be some little tinge of affectation in this pertinacious adherence to both the words and the music of his Doric dialect. […] there is an impression quite the reverse of vulgarity produced by the mode of his speaking; and, in this respect, he is certainly quite in a different situation from some of his younger brethren, who have not the excuse of age for the breadth of their utterance, nor, what is perhaps of greater importance, the same truly antique style in its breadth. Of this, indeed, I could not pretend to be a judge; but some of my friends assured me, that nothing could be more marked than the difference between the Scotch of those who learned it sixty years ago, and that of this younger generation. These last, they observed, have few opportunities of hearing Scotch spoken, but among servants, &c. so that there clings to all their own expressions, when they make use of the neglected dialect, a rich flavor of the hall, or the stable. 53
Lord Thirleton, another important representation of a speaker of Scots in Matthew Wald , seems to be modelled on the Clerk generation. Thirleton, a judge, is in a professional position rather than from the poor or servant classes Lord Thirleton’s ‘adherence to both the words and the music’ of the Scots language underscores the passion with which he addresses the impact of the Union on the law and how the Union has disrupted the stability and diminished the effectiveness of Scotland’s laws. For example, Matthew approaches Lord Thirleton to inquire about a letter Sir Claud Barr had written to the mother of Joanne, addressing her as his spouse. Matthew wanted
an opinion about the law of Scotland regarding marriage and the letter’s implications for Joanne’s status in the Barr family:
“The law of Scotland!” cried he, interrupting me: “the law of Scotland, Doctor Waldie! Gude faith, my worthy friend, it’s eneugh to gar a horse laugh to hear you The law o’ Scotland! I wonder ye’re no speaking about the crown o’ Scotland too; for I’m sure ye might as weel speir after the ane frae the Bullers o’ Buchan, as the other frae their Woolsacks. They might hae gaen on lang eneugh for me, if they had been content wi’ their auld impruvements o’ ca’ing a flae a flea, and a puinding a poinding but now, tapsal-teirie’s the word But wheesht, wheesht, we maun e’en keep a calm sough, my lad.”
“I am afraid,” said I, “your lordship conceives the law to be very unsettled, then, as to these matters?”
“The law was settled enough, Doctor Waldie,” he replied; “but what signifies speaking? I suppose, ere long, we shall be Englified, shoulder and croupe.” (p. 120)
Lord Thirleton, as a jurist, a speaker of Scots, and a voice of Scottish nationalism, is sympathetically portrayed, and as Mr Meikle does for religion, Judge Thirleton redeems Scottish law from the exploits of the likes of Nathaniel Todd and provides Wald with an opportunity for unselfish action on behalf of his wife and a moment of personal redemption.
Francis Russell Hart describes The History of Matthew Wald as ‘a skillfully designed panorama of eighteenth - century Scottish manners’. 54 The novel is the story of a young man growing up in eighteenth-century Scotland, an individual history set against the backdrop of significant cultural, political, and historical events. The opening paragraphs review the ‘antiquity’ of the Wald family, summarising the family history in terms of the family’s connection with the greater history of Scotland: their immigration to Scotland during ‘the Anglo-Saxon colonization’; their relationship with King Robert I; their roles in the religious conflicts of the Reformation, the Covenanting wars, and the Glorious Revolution; their responses to the Union of Parliaments; and finally their sides in the Jacobite rebellion that ended in ‘the catastrophe at Culloden’ (pp. 1-3).
