|
"REDGAUNTLET AND CHANGE"
Prof. Ian Campbell
Scott was very sensitive to change in the Borders, and possibly finds his finest discussion in that great novel of 1824 just before his affairs took a bad turn and he became a writing machine.
Prof. Campbell's lecture is a discussion of how Scott's sympathies for Scotland, Scottish culture and politics faced both ways. Scott obviously had a strong attraction to a glorious and independent past and admiration for the Jacobites who were prepared to fight for that past; at the same time he was a man of business who lived in the present and had known wartime and revolution and the conflict. The lecture will suggest this is worked out in the final passages of REDGAUNTLET where Scott looks to the future rather than to the past.
Prof. Campbell retired at the end of September 2009 from the chair of Scottish and Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where he had been since 1964. He is a past president of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club, and is active in the preservation of Scott's library at Abbotsford.
|
|
