Redgauntlet, the novel in which "Wandering Willie's Tale" first appeared, was not an immediate success when it came out in 1824. One reviewer complained that there were too many villains in the novel and that the heroes were too passive. Others complained that Scott was repeating himself by writing again about the eighteenth-century Jacobites (a group who wanted to return the throne of England to the heirs of James II). However, though the novel as a whole did not win praise, Wandering Willie's story within it did. The Westminster Review called Willie's tale the best thing in the book, and Scott's friend Lady Louisa Stuart (quoted in W.M. Parker's preface to the Everyman edition of the novel) wrote Scott to say that "the legend of Steenie Steenson . . . [was] in the author's very best manner." She added that she wished there had been more of Willie...