Graham Tulloch

Walter Scott, born on 15 August 1771, turns 250 in 2021. This event has been celebrated in Scotland with events such as a ScottFest at ‘Abbotsford’, his home, and a major international conference. But Scott, almost certainly the most popular and widely known author in the world in the nineteenth century, fell disastrously in public and critical esteem, to the point that E.M. Forster, in his influential Aspects of the Novel (1927), could sum him up with the wearily dismissive question ‘Who shall tell us a story?’ and the equally dismissive answer ‘Sir Walter Scott of course’. For Forster, Scott had ‘a trivial mind and a heavy style’.

This is a remarkable book – not so much for its subject matter as for the intensity of the passionate involvement of one writer with another. From the beginning, it is clear that this is not a conventional biography or book of criticism. A.N. Wilson approaches Charles Dickens through seven different mysteries about his life. The principal one, which underlies the whole book, is the mystery of what makes Dickens such an utterly compelling writer.

The prospect of discovering another work by a favourite author is always a pleasing one, even if the reality, when it is actually encountered, is sometimes disappointing. With a writer like Jane Austen, with only six published novels, who would not wish for some further delights to be unveiled? When Austen died, her sister, Cassandra, was left with the unpublished manuscripts of a number of juvenile writings and later works. After Cassandra’s death, members of her family had them in their hands (or perhaps one should say ‘on their hands’, given their subsequent feeling that the possession entailed a level of somewhat burdensome responsibility).

The Enlightenment gave birth to our modern world. Within this broad movement, spread over many countries, the contribution of Scotland was of pre-eminent importance. We all know the names of Adam Smith and David Hume, and we recognise their influence today, but how did their ideas get out into the wider world? Of course, there were books, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) and Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) amongst the best known. But where were their books published? Who printed them? Who published them? How were they marketed? These are questions which we have probably never posed to ourselves, but they are vital to our understanding of how writers from a small country on the edge of Europe came to play such an important part in this international movement. As Richard B. Sher points out, we know the writers but we don’t know the publishers and printers without whom their books would never have reached the public. In this book he sets out, amongst other things, to redress the balance.