Abstract: “Credibility and Truth-Value in the Late-Romantic Historical Novel: Scott and Galt”
The conjunction of Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century and John Galt’s Rothelan: A Romance of the English Histories, both published in 1824, highlights questions of credibility and truth-value. With counterfactual interventions into British history and metafictional references to the contemporary literary landscape, these novels thematize credibility in their plot trajectories and their relationship with readers. In Redgauntlet, latter-day Scottish adherents to the Stuart cause seek to inspire support for an uprising when the “Pretender” Charles Edward Stuart returns to Britain in 1765 – an event that never happened in real-world history. Galt’s Rothelan, set in mid-fourteenth-century England, centres on a question of credibility as a widowed Italian lady, aided by a sympathetic Jewish moneylender, seeks to prove the identity of her teenaged son Rothelan, who was kidnapped as an infant by his usurping uncle. Since Rothelan’s rich inheritance depends on obtaining credible evidence of his legitimate birth, there is an especially direct correlation in Galt’s novel between truth-value and monetary value.
“Credit” also comes into play with respect to narrative authority as Scott and Galt adapt the “found manuscript” convention and experiment with the genre of the historical novel. Redgauntlet claims to draw information from letters, journals, newspapers and archival documents collected by the researcher Dr. Dryasdust, while the editor/narrator of Rothelan purports to be redacting a medieval manuscript called “The BOOK OF BEAUTY.” Both novels make strong (yet ironic) claims for the authenticity of first-person, eyewitness perspectives. Redgauntlet presents the first of its three volumes in the form of letters exchanged by the two protagonists, and afterwards quotes extensively from the private journal of one of them; Rothelan claims (in a marvellous example of circular reasoning) that its fictional characters are the eyewitness sources who guarantee the truth of the medieval “BOOK OF BEAUTY” from which the nineteenth-century editor/narrator derives the facts of their history. Even the gorgeous material form of that medieval “BOOK” is enlisted to support the narrator’s claim to authority, as if in a sidelong glance at Keats’s formulation “Beauty is truth.” Finally, the comparative truth-value of historical romances is invoked by Scott’s implication that the counterfactual Redgauntlet has equal credibility with his previous historical novels, and by Galt’s presentation of Rothelan as a direct challenge to a scene in Redgauntlet, whereby he asserts that his fictional world is more truthful than Scott’s fictional world.
By developing these themes, I aim to formulate questions such as: are the standards for credibility subjective (e.g., private eyewitness testimony) or objective (e.g., printed public documents)? How is truth related to form (either genre or aesthetic form)? And what would it mean to compare the relative truth-value of different fictional worlds? If speculative, these questions nevertheless have interesting implications for late-Romantic narrative and print culture.
Bio: University of Toronto, Canada
Angela Esterhammer, Professor of English at the University of Toronto, works in the areas of British, German, and European Romanticism and nineteenth-century culture, from perspectives that emphasize performativity and performance. Her books Creating States (1994) and The Romantic Performative (2000) approach literary texts from the viewpoint of verbal performativity, speech acts, and philosophies of language. Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750-1850 (2008) uncovers the popularity of on-stage poetic improvisers during the “Romantic century,” tracing the influence of improvisational poetry across Europe and showing how improvisation interacts with Romantic ideas about genius, spontaneity, orality, gender, and national identity. Her most recent monograph, Print and Performance in the 1820s: Improvisation, Speculation, Identity (2020), concerns experimental uses of textual, visual, and performative media during the 1820s. As the General Editor of The Works of John Galt, Professor Esterhammer leads an international project to publish a 20-volume critical edition of Galt’s prose. She is a Founding Member and Senior Advisor of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR); past holder of the Distinguished University Professorship at Western University and a Chair in English Literature at the University of Zurich; a member of the Academia Europaea and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.