Rave Reviewer: Kirsty on the Evolution of an Exhibition

My apologies for going completely dark; the closure season seemed to go past in the blink of an eye! We achieved a great deal over the winter, hand-cleaning all of Scott’s books, waxing all of the wooden fixtures and fittings (whilst being sensitive to Scott’s intended finishes), and deep cleaning at height in the Library, Chapel and Entrance Hall, alongside our annual artefact and furniture cleaning programmes.  I simply couldn’t have done it without my intrepid team of volunteers and I am indebted to them all the more as time goes by.

Delicate cleaning using fine brushes and cotton buds has made the detail in this gorgeous ebony armchair sing

A close up of the cuirassier's helmet in the Entrance Hall from the tower scaffolding

The Library in the final few days before reopening! 

The work in the house over the last three months isn’t the only thing that has been keeping me busy. We are in the final stages of preparing to launch Rave Reviewer: Scott on Frankenstein, Emma & Childe Harold, our 2016 season exhibition brought to visitors in partnership with the National Library of Scotland (NLS). Those of you keen to see the exhibition can do so with an Abbotsford house admission ticket from 2nd April 2016 and purchase exhibition catalogues in the shop with enhanced detail, transcriptions and photography of each display item (a steal at a mere £3 a copy!). In amongst the frantic activity that always defines the days leading up to the launch of any exhibition, I thought it was worth offering you a window on the process up until this point, particularly as creating displays such as this is a key part of the work of heritage teams across the country.

It was an unseasonably sunny day in November 2014 when I first sat down with David McClay to have a look at some of the jewels of the John Murray Archive at NLS, and to discuss how the material in their care might help us tell stories about the relationships between Scott and the literati of his day. Although I’d only been at Abbotsford for a couple of months at that point, as a keen consumer of classic literature I was particularly interested in the reading and writing community of the early nineteenth century; in part because of the phenomenal array of household names writing at the time also in the hope that fascinating stories might be told through examining their correspondence with one another.

Lord Byron's seal. Byron and Scott first met one another in April 1815 at John Murray's premises in London

 These days, for many, Walter Scott is not familiar name in the manner of Jane Austen or Lord Byron who seem to have transcended literature altogether (probably because of celluloid and sheer notoriety respectively!), although I do think Scott’s star is now in the ascendant and his achievements in literature and many other areas are being recognised once again.  Despite the difficulties some have with Scott’s prose and the blank faces others give you when you mention his name, we must never forget that these sentiments would be completely alien to the reading public of the nineteenth century to which he would have been nothing less than an institution. My thought process was very much that the manner in which other famous writers pay homage to Scott in their own writings might help cement this idea, and give visitors a way in to understanding Scott’s mass appeal as an author and poet. I came away from that November meeting with ideas flitting around in my head, having been introduced to a novel concept by David McClay – that this complex world of authors in dialogue might be brought to life by exploring a key cultural feature of this period: the review periodicals.

A wonderful image of Scott's son-in-law, J.G. Lockhart as editor of the Quarterly Review

I am indebted to David for signposting me towards this lesser-known story about Scott, because consequently I have found myself spirited away by the intrigue and crafty manoeuvring of Walter the reviewer whilst we have been working hard on the co-curation of the exhibition. In a nutshell, we are focussing on his career as a prolific contributor to the periodicals, a thread of activity that runs in tandem with his two legal appointments in Edinburgh and Selkirk and the blossoming of his own writing career. We have cherry-picked moments within this twenty-year period during which Scott engages with significant writers as an anonymous reviewer, including mercilessly reviewing the first part of his own series, Tales of My Landlord, which was attributed to a fictional pseudonym when published. 

Title page of Tales of My Landlord, 1816, complete with mention of the fictional editor Jedediah Cleishbotham

We have by no means covered everything and this is the challenge of small-scale exhibitions where you want to inspire and enthuse your audience to find out more without trying to cover too much ground and sacrificing the detail, which is often where the charm is to be found. And this is precisely what we have tried to do here, particularly in selecting the items going on display from the John Murray Archive. You’ll see a tactful letter from Mary Shelley to Scott, correcting his assumption that the author of Frankenstein is male, manuscript reviews of articles on Byron’s poetry and Southey’s edition of Pilgrim’s Progress that reveal something of the process of writing and publishing a review, not to mention rare first editions from the Abbotsford Library of the works sent to Scott to elicit articles for John Murray’s Quarterly Review. Even just comparing the handwriting of Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Scott is electrifying if you are a lover of classic literature.

The signature of Mary Shelley. The exhibition showcases a letter in her hand. 

If I was asked what the appeal is of an exhibition about reviewing culture, particularly in relation to Scott, I would say this; Scott sometimes has a somewhat unwarranted reputation for being dry, both as a man and as a writer. To me, in everything I’ve read either by him or about him and everything I understand about his home, he is anything but this; he is warm, affectionate, compassionate and exceptionally quick-witted. This comes across in his anonymous reviews just as much as it does in the Waverley Novels, where the presumed stuffy, cautious and conservative Scott pens the only sympathetic, even progressive review of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a review that went very much against the grain but stands alone as being the one that still resonates with us today.

Scott's review of Frankenstein, published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine

Yes, he presumed the author was Percy B. Shelley, but I think this more likely to be a blunder of speed-reading a letter rather than a comment on the shortcomings of female authors. He lauded Jane Austen’s ability to capture and distil the rhythms and interactions of life with the skill of a Flemish painter, and hailed Ann Radcliffe as a pioneer of the Gothic. In his review of Austen’s Emma he makes a stand for novel reading and writing, attempting to erode some of the distaste for the medium still prevalent in high society at the time.

Portrait of Jane Austen

 Scott is also a complex character, ever sidestepping and evading ownership of his own words, partly for the sheer fun of it and partly because he detested a fuss being made when it was in his honour. This is brought vividly to life when you see his anonymous review of his own anonymous work in Rave Reviewer, proclaiming the tale to be ‘unoriginal’ and ‘impotent in its conclusion’.

Sometimes when the philosophical mood takes me, I think the ‘tangled web’ Scott weaves is a deeper comment on the nature of history itself. Whose story is it? History is a cacophony of voices and stories which may find their way on to the page through one man’s wizardry, but this strange genre of historical fiction that finds its mouthpiece in Scott is a strange beast. The writer of historical fiction attempts to weave a narrative from original source material, anecdotes of a first-hand or often, a second-hand nature and perhaps even folkloric tradition. In Scott’s case, this material was often reaching him through antiquarian friends with their ears to the ground. Perhaps after all of this is taken into account he felt as if these historical novels simply could not belong to one man. A similar effect was created through re-imagining Cartley Hole Farm as Abbotsford, creating a fascinating conglomeration (or ‘strange jumble’) of other buildings, design ideas and relics from sources both genuine and spurious – a place where stories come together and clamour to be heard and you’re never quite sure which one is true!

If you were then to ask me what the challenge is with an exhibition like this, where fantastic manuscripts, books and letters are going on display, I would say quite simply that any exhibition of a literary ilk can struggle with visual appeal, purely because the displays consist of the paper-based ephemera that tells the story and light levels need to be relatively low to protect the original documents from deterioration. 

We’ve tried hard with Rave Reviewer to create visual interest elsewhere in the interpretation panels, captions and catalogue, giving it its own visual identity. This is Abbotsford’s first truly collaborative exhibition and we do hope it will be the start of many more to come, so do help us spread the word and encourage people to come and dip their toe in to the waters of early nineteenth-century literary criticism.  We want to capture some of the intrigue of this world of presumptions and guesswork, and will be asking visitors to review the exhibition under a pseudonym of their choice. You can help us here by visiting the exhibition and reviewing your own thoughts using the hashtag #RaveReviewer2016, and by following it in turn to see what others have to say.

 Let’s create another community of rave reviewers!

Thanks for reading. I shan’t leave it so long next time.

Kirsty Archer-Thompson
Collections and Interpretation Manager

Things that go Bump in the Night

‘The ghost nowhere makes his appearance so well as with you.’

So declared the first Englishman to translate Leonore, Gottfried August Bürger’s blood-curdling tale of a bereaved fiancée inadvertently lured to her end by the phantom of her beloved. William Taylor’s praise was directed at the young Walter Scott who had been inspired by Taylor’s work to produce his own translation from the German as soon as he was able to secure a copy of the original text. 

An 1896 Kirchbach illustration of Leonore

The Chase and William and Helen was Scott’s first publication, and how fitting that the subject matter echos the supernatural ballads about fairies, witches and ghosts that he would go on to collect and publish in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and later invoke in various guises in many of the Waverley Novels. Consider the supernatural tales from the days of the Covenanters ringing in the ears of Jeanie Deans as she clambers up Salisbury Crags to meet Effie’s captor in Heart of Midlothian, or the gypsy incantations and prophecies of Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering, or the visitations of the spectral White Lady in The Monastery.  

In the bottom right of the illustration is the toadstone amulet at Abbotsford. The stone, thought to grow inside the toad, was believed to ward off evil spirits and protect the vulnerable, particularly infants, from being kidnapped by fairies. 

That Scott had a lifelong passion for the history and evolution of folk beliefs is beyond dispute. The Abbotsford Library contains around 250 works on sorcery, witchcraft and demonology dating from 1477 to 1832, from the infamous witch-hunting manual Malleus maleficarum to Bowdler’s The Devil’s Cloven Foot. His own beliefs are far trickier to pin down. Certainly he is careful not to demonstrate contempt or disregard for belief systems in a post-enlightenment world, and regards the bathos sometimes apparent in the conclusions of Gothic stories as insulting to the reader.    

A stealthy step behind the arras, may doubtless, in some situations, and when the nerves are tuned to a certain pitch, have no small influence upon the imagination; but if the if the conscious listener discovers it to be only the noise made by the cat, the solemnity of the feeling is gone, and the visionary is at once angry with his senses for having been cheated…’

This particular critique appears in his prefatory memoir to the collected works of Ann Radcliffe, one of the most influential early pioneers of Gothic literature. This collection was printed posthumously by Ballantynes in 1824. This castigation seems to be directed as much towards other unnamed writers of the Gothic tradition as to Radcliffe herself, whom Scott believed for the most part to be a ‘genius’ and ‘mistress of her art.’

The novelist Ann Radcliffe

For Scott, musing over the difficulty of concluding a tale of wonder in a way that satisfies the reader, he draws attention to the conundrum facing a writer of supernatural tales: the consumer is always torn between the childlike impulse to account for all unnatural occurrences, and the sheer delight of an enduring mystery, allowing the imagination to explore what remains unsaid. The phrase he uses is beautiful, so much so that it deserves to stand apart. These imaginative revellers are described as:

‘men that walk for pleasure through a moonlight landscape.’

Melrose Abbey by moonlight by J. M. W Turner

So, which appetite did Scott decide to appease in his own ghost story, ‘"The Tapestried Chamber,” one of three short stories in The Keepsake of 1829, a literary annual published for Christmas? You can read the full text of the story here. The appearance of the apparition in the chamber, slowly advancing towards the General’s bed, ghoulishly grinning all the while, really does make your skin crawl. The assessment of the night’s events in the cold light of day is particularly interesting:

Strange as the General's tale was, he spoke with such a deep air of conviction that it cut short all the usual commentaries which are made on such stories. Lord Woodville never once asked him if he was sure he did not dream of the apparition, or suggested any of the possibilities by which it is fashionable to explain supernatural appearances as wild vagaries of the fancy, or deceptions of the optic nerves, On the contrary, he seemed deeply impressed with the truth and reality of what he had heard; and, after a considerable pause regretted, with much appearance of sincerity, that his early friend should in his house have suffered so severely.

Here, there are no aspersions cast on the eyewitness testimony of the General. After subsequently recognising the old hag in a late seventeenth century portrait, we learn that the phantom is a ‘wretched ancestress,’ responsible for ‘infanticide and unnatural murder,’ very much a real entity in all her decomposing glory. I should imagine insomnia would become a common affliction in the Woodville pile after this upsetting turn of events...(!)    

Outwith the literature, there are two tales of supernatural occurrences here at Abbotsford during Scott’s lifetime that are worth exploring in the light of this discussion. The first is relatively well-known and goes some way to explaining why Abbotsford often sneaks on to the lower rungs of the ‘most haunted’ lists in Scotland.

In April 1818, work was still underway with the first extension to the Cartley Hole farmhouse, creating the original Study, Armoury, Dining Room and Conservatory (now lost). The cabinet-maker George Bullock had been engaged to create the fixtures and fittings, and indeed it was Bullock who had persuaded Scott to fit up one of these new rooms as a dedicated Armoury for his ever-growing collection of armour, weaponry and ethnographic objects from around the world. 

Section of the Abbotsford Armoury

On two consecutive nights at the end of April that year, Mr and Mrs Scott were woken at 2am by what sounded like heavy furniture being dragged across the floor in the Armoury below their sleeping quarters. On the second night, Scott crept downstairs, brandishing the Killiecrankie broadsword of his great-grandfather, Beardie, to find nothing amiss. In his letter to Daniel Terry of April 30th, 1818, he recounts events of the nights before and dismisses ghostly interventions in light of the fact that the house is 'exposed' during the period of building work. Scott was as yet unaware that as his letter landed with the Terrys in London, news was breaking of Bullock's sudden death in the early hours of the morning. From this point onwards the presence of the cabinet-maker's spirit at Abbotsford will be felt, making itself heard during periods of renovation and restoration. At least we don't have a malevolent ghost; at least not one that we know of... 

The second incident is related in the memoranda of Mr. J. L Adolphus, English lawyer, author and a friend of Scott, and interestingly it is a story that J. G. Lockhart suggests Scott did not encourage bringing up in conversation. When he does recall the episode of encountering Byron's ghost in the medium of print during the course of his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, he uses the thin veil of writing in the third person although the setting is unmistakably Abbotsford: 

 " Not long after the death of a late illustrious poet who had filled, while living, a great station in the eye of the public, a literary friend, to whom the deceased had been well known, was engaged during the darkening twilight of an autumn evening in perusing one of the publications which professed to detail the habits and opinions of the distinguished individual who was now no more. As the reader had enjoyed the intimacy of the deceased to a considerable degree, he was deeply interested in the publication, which contained some particulars relating to himself and other friends. A visitor was sitting in the apartment who was also engaged in reading. Their sitting-room opened into an entrance -hall, rather fantastically fitted up with articles of armour, skins of wild animals, and the like. It was when laying down his book, and passing into this hall, through which the moon was beginning to shine, that the individual of whom I speak saw, right before him, and in a standing posture, the exact representation of his departed friend, whose recollection had been so strongly brought to his imagination. He stopped for a single moment, so as to notice the wonderful accuracy with which fancy had impressed upon the bodily eye the peculiarities of dress and posture of the illustrious poet. Sensible, however, of the delusion, he felt no sentiment save that of wonder at the extraordinary accuracy of the resemblance, and stepped onwards towards the figure, which resolved itself, as he approached, into the various materials of which it was composed. These were merely a screen, occupied by great-coats, shawls, plaids, and such other articles as usually are found in a country entrance-hall. The spectator returned to the spot from which he had seen the illusion, and endeavoured with all his power to recall the image which had been so singularly vivid. But this was beyond his capacity ; and the person who had witnessed the apparition, or, more properly, whose excited state had been the means of raising it, had only to return into the apartment, and tell his young friend under what a striking hallucination he had for a moment laboured." 

Portrait of Lord Byron. He died in 1824 aged only 36, probably of septicaemia.

The rationale here is that the phantom is nothing more than a figment of the imagination, summoned up through our very own literary's friend's choice of highly suggestive reading material on that dusky autumnal evening. Scott was no stranger to the concept of optical illusion and will discuss this at length elsewhere in the Letters, his rational study of the occult published in 1831.  He was an associate and neighbour of Sir David Brewster, author of Letters on Natural Magic, a treatise on how science had been manipulated by religious and political authorities to delude and scaremonger.

Brewster was also the inventor of the kaleidoscope and an authority on the trickeries possible through light and false perspective. However, the eyes remain easier to trick than the ears. I wonder if Scott attributed the same rational explanation to the hammering and thumping he heard during the witching hour of April 28th and 29th 1818. Something tells me otherwise...

I hope you all have a thoroughly horrible Hallowe'en. 

Thanks for reading!

Kirsty Archer-Thompson

Collections and Interpretation Manager