SOURCE: Orr, Marilyn. “Real and Narrative Time: Waverley and the Education of Memory.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 31, no. 4 (autumn 1991): 715-34.

In the following essay, Orr examines Scott's representation of time, imagination, history, and memory in Waverley.

Beginning in Waverley, Scott the novelist sets himself “the task of tracing the evanescent manners” of the traditional culture of Scotland, for “there is no European nation which, within the course of half a century or little more, has undergone so complete a change as the little kingdom of Scotland.”¹ Conscious of the completeness of this change, he writes in order to make readers “aware of the progress we have made” but also of the loss that this progress has entailed; and his novel is meant to help focus this change for the “we” who “fix our eye on the now distant point from which we have been drifted” (W, 72:364).² Scott...