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The Fortunes of Nigel: The Works of Sir Walter Scott

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Sir Walter Scott's 1822 novel THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL is vaguely set in London around 1623, certainly some time after Shakespeare's death in 1616 and before James I passed on in 1625. Nigel Olifaunt, Lord Glenvarloch, the book's nominal hero, is an impoverished young Scottish nobleman visiting the Capital after two years study in Leyden. His goal is to recover money owed his recently deceased father by a miserly King James Stuart, Sixth of Scotland, First of England. With that money, he will pay off a mortgage on his ancestral castle. But the Prince of Wales and his older mentor the Duke of Buckingham want Nigel's estate for themselves. And they make Nigel's life ruinous and miserable, chapter after chapter. This complex story revolves around greed for land, jewelry, artworks and the wiles used to take them from their owners.

The novel, Scott tells us, is a literary tribute to the memory of George Heriot, Scottish goldsmith and money-lender, who served King James first in Scotland and then in London. Dying without family, Heriot established a foundation for orphans in Edinburgh. Scott teased out early signs of his kindness to others in this novel.

Other striking features of THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL include the young Lord Nigel's successful pursuit by the beauteous Margret Ramsay, perky commoner daughter of the king's clockmaker, descriptions of the Thames, London fogs, the theater, a gaming establishment and the loose morals and brilliant wit of the Royal Court.

As in 1822 readers in 2007, however, will zero in on the quirks and dithering of the Royal James, "the wisest fool in Christendom." Scott portrays a "broad Lowlands" speaking monarch, who was timid, afraid of the sight of blood, increasingly in the hands of his cunning young heir, the future Charles I (nicknamed by his father "baby Charles") and the philandering George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, given the nickname "Steenie."

Cardinal John Henry Newman, who thought highly of Scott the writer, quoted more than once a passage toward the end of the novel, when Prince Charles and Buckingham on behalf of the Privy Council take to task for seducing and lying to a noble woman of Genoa a 25 year old Scottish nobleman, Malcolm Dalgarno. King James laments to goldsmith George Heriot:

"Jingling Geordie, it was grand to hear Baby Charles laying down the guilt of dissimulation, and Steenie lecturing on the turpitude of incontinence!" (Ch. 32).

We read Sir Walter Scott for his 27 historical novels, a half dozen grand narrative poems and much else besides.

But how does the ordinary reader select among very uneven editions of Scott's works? There are old sets of Waverley novels in small print inherited from a grandfather's library. Some are lavishly illustrated. Some have much needed glossaries of Walter Scott's Lowland Scots tongue. Others are typo-rich recent reproductions from on-line sources. A very few are contemporary critical editions with notes by experts in Edinburgh or Oxford.

In old age a no longer anonymous Walter Scott issued a Magnum Opus edition of earlier works, adding fascinating notes and comments on the origins of the first editions. It is almost impossible for the average reader to find within the covers of any one issue of a Scott novel or poem everything he or she needs. Fortunately for us, Amazon.com offers many choices.

How does this apply to readers deciding what edition to buy of THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL?

Take myself. Eight months ago I first read Scott's THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL. Mine was an undated Melrose Edition in smallish print from +/- 1890. I had to cut open the pages. I have now finished a second reading of NIGEL, in an undated but recent Aegypan Press paperback reprint (from Project Guggenheim, I think). Both editions have glossaries of the heady doses of Scots dialect scattered through the novel. The two glossaries are, however, slightly different in content and the later edition's list of Scots words is in BIG PRINT, hurrah! The Melrose edition has black and white illustrations but lacks important introductory essays by Scott provided by Aegypan. And neither is a modern critical edition.

No one claims that THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL is one of Scott's ten greatest novels. But it stuck in the memory of Scott-admirer, the future Cardinal John Henry Newman in THE GRAMMAR OF ASSENT and elsewhere.

No matter what edition you can lay your hands on, NIGEL is worth reading. It has little physical action but lays out a series of scenes in a pageant of what London was like when hordes of Scotsmen "came up to the Capital" from north of the River Tweed. James I was an uncharacteristically peaceable Stuart King, as he himself lovingly notes in the novel. Thus his assuming the crown of England when his cousin Elizabeth died in 1603 was a plus for England's peace abroad. -OOO-