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Sir Walter Scott, the Angel of Hadley, and American Historical Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

George Dekker
George Dekker
Affiliation:
George Dekker is Professor of English, Stanford University, Stanford CA 94305. This essay is based on a paper first presented at the University of East Anglia on 11 February 1982. It incorporates material from a forthcoming book-length study of the American historical romance.
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Extract

From 1815 until about 1840 Sir Walter Scott was America's favorite novelist and much the most important model for her own budding fictionalists – Irving, Cooper, Paulding, Simms, Kennedy, Hawthorne, and others. Yet although fairly accurate estimates of Scott's American sales and circulation have been available for several decades, our understanding of his impact on American fiction has made only modest advances since the 1930s. While echoes of the Waverley novels can be discovered everywhere in American Romantic fiction, usually the louder they sound the more they signal merely the borrower's failure of inspiration or nerve. Scott's example was most fruitful where it was comparatively unobtrusive – partly because the best writers were best able thoroughly to adapt Scott's European scenes, characters, and conflicts to American experience, but also because at its best Scott's influence was of the self-effacing kind that helped Cooper, Hawthorne, and their contemporaries find their own true bent as American writers.

On one occasion, however, Scott provoked a more revealing response by invading American home territory.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , August 1983 , pp. 211 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

1 For a good general description of Scott's American vogue, see Hart, James D., The Popular Book: A History of America's Literary Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 67–84Google Scholar. Important critical studies of Scott's American influence are Davie, Donald, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961)Google Scholar; Pearce, Roy Harvey, Historicism Once More: Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 163–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Doubleday, Neal F., Hawthorne's Early Tales: A Critical Study (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1972), pp. 14–18Google Scholar. My own James Fenimore Cooper the Novelist: The American Scott (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967)Google Scholar is the fullest study of Scott's importance for Cooper.

2 The pioneer descriptive account of the literary versions of the story is Orians, G. Harrison, “The Angel of Hadley in Fiction: A Study of the Sources of Hawthorne's ‘The Gray Champion,’” American Literature, 4 (11 1932), 257–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Valuable interpretative studies, mainly of Hawthorne's rendering of the story, are by Bell, Michael Davitt, Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 27–33 and 47–53Google Scholar; Doubleday, pp. 22–23 and 85–92; and Brumm, Ursula, “A Regicide Judge as ‘Champion’ of American Independence,” Amerikastudien, 21 (1976), 177–86Google Scholar.

3 Hutchinson, Thomas, The History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1764), 1, 294, 219Google Scholar.

4 Stiles, Ezra, History of the Judges of Charles I (Hartford, 1794), quoted by Orians, p. 258Google Scholar.

5 Dwight, Timothy, Travels in New-England and New-York (1821; British edn., London, 1823), pp. 317–18Google Scholar.

6 Janson, Charles William, The Stranger in America (London, 1807), p. 51Google Scholar, quoted in The Edinburgh Review, 10 (April 1807), 107. I owe this reference to Scott's bibliographer, Dr. J. C Corson.

7 Orians, p. 262.

8 Washington Irving: Letters, 1802–1823, ed. Aderman, Ralph M., Kleinfeld, Herbert L., and Banks, Jennifer S. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 1, 469Google Scholar.

9 The Letters of Sir Walter Scott 1821–1823, ed. Grierson, H. J. C. (London: Constable, 1934), p. 81Google Scholar.

10 SirScott, Walter, Peveril of the Peak, ed. Lang, Andrew (London, 1899), p. 223Google Scholar.

11 Yvor Winters, “Maule's Curse, or Hawthorne and the Problem of Allegory” (1938), rpt. in In Defense of Reason (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 170–72Google Scholar.

12 Sir Walter Scott, “Mrs. Ann Radcliffe” (1824), rpt. in Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction, ed. Williams, Ioan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), pp. 115–16Google Scholar.

13 SirScott, Walter, “Romance” (1824), The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (Edinburgh, 1834), 6, 129Google Scholar.

14 Melville, Herman, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), ed. Stern, Milton R. (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1975), p. 57Google Scholar.

15 Brumm, Ursula was the first to examine the “King in the Mountain” motif in Peveril (Brumm, pp. 181–83)Google Scholar. She notes Irving's allusion to the Barbarossa legend in a note to “Rip Van Winkle” – an allusion which may seem the more significant in view of Irving's possible role in bringing the Angel of Hadley legend to Scott's attention and of what seems an “anachronistic” reference to Rip in “The Gray Champion” (discussed later).

16 It seems likely that Cooper had also seen or read a stage version of The Angel of Hadley incident, obviously inspired by Peveril, in Thomas Barker's Superstition (1824). The best general discussion to date of Cooper's stadialism is in Smith, Henry Nash's Virgin Land: The American West as symbol and Myth (1950; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1957), pp. 253–60Google Scholar. Richly suggestive for the study of Cooper is Duncan Forbes' seminal article on the influence of stadialist thought on Scott's historicism, “The Rationalism of Sir Walter Scott”, Cambridge Journal, 7 (10 1953), 20–35Google Scholar.

17 I quote from the British first edn., entitled The Borderers (London, 1829), 3, 23Google Scholar. I am responsible for the italics.

17 Hawthorne was certainly familiar with Scott's and Hutchinson's versions of the Angel of Hadley story, and it seems probable that his interest in the subject would have caused him to follow up references to The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish and Dwight's Travels which Scott added in a note to Peveril in 1832. Dwight's discussion of the Hadley legend is cheek by jowl with a chapter on the Revolution of 1689: a suggestive juxtaposition which might have caught Hawthorne's eye.

18 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “The Gray Champion,” Twice-Told Tales, ed. Crowley, J. Donald (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), p. 18Google Scholar.

19 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Scarlet Letter, ed. Charvat, William et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962), p. 64Google Scholar.