SOURCE: Schmidgen, Wolfram. “Picturing Property: Waverley and the Common Law.” Studies in the Novel 29, no. 2 (summer 1997): 191-213.

In the following essay, Schmidgen studies the theme of property in Waverley, particularly as it relates to the legitimatization of Scotland's absorption by Great Britain.

In Sir Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), landed property functions as a register of political and cultural change. A number of critics have emphasized property's importance for Waverley. Ian Duncan, for example, persuasively argues that the Bradwardine estate is the “true secret place” of Scott's novel, a point of crystallization for its meaning. His claim, however, that Waverley's transformation of the Bradwardine property culminates in the “recovery” of some earlier state is inaccurate. Like other critics who have emphasized property, Duncan fails to recognize that, under the guise of recovery and continuity, the transformed Bradwardine estate articulates a fundamental break with the past.¹

The present essay seeks...