The Bonnie Prince of Waverly

Charles Edward Stuart
(Bonnie Prince Charlie)
Painted by Allan Ramsay

In Waverly, our hero Edward is taken captive by English forces. His family name, family history, association with known Jacobites, some papers he has on his person, and his outraged demeanor all work against him. He is put on trial for treason and is hustled away towards Stirling Castle. This is where things get interesting. Edward will need to pick sides between the English loyalists and the Jacobites. His newly found Scottish friends, like Mac Ivor and even Donald Bean Lean are certainly behind the ambush of the English troops that secures Edward’s freedom. They bring Edward to Holyrood in Edinburgh (where we will be) which was acting as the center of Jacobite military and political power and the court (illegitimate court the English would say) of Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie). Bonnie Prince Charlie has recently joined the cause, coming from France undercover to help lead the forces to restore the Stuart royal line. When Mc Ivor, who meets Edward at Holyrood, introduces Edward to the “bonnie” prince, Edward is taken with him.
    Bonnie Prince Charlie, born in Rome, and educated in French courts, is a model of aristocratic manners and refinement. Scott describes him in Waverly as “A young man, wearing his own fair hair, distinguished by the dignity of his mien and noble expression of his well-formed and regular features” (213). The prince is likewise taken with Edward, noting that there would be “no master of ceremonies necessary to present a Waverly to a Stuart” (213). It seems the prince is familiar with Waverly’s family history, and so when the prince asks Edward to join the Jacobite cause, he quickly agrees. In his “Review Essay: Sir Walter Scott,” (Romanticism 16.1, 2010 page 94-99) Christopher MacLachlan states: “Scott’s story, of how the sensitive but naive young Englishman Edward Waverley finds himself caught up in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and carried by a mixture of personal affections and political manipulation to Edinburgh, a meeting with Bonnie Prince Charlie, and participation in Jacobite victory at the battle of Prestonpans, . . . is told with a sureness and vitality that lifted the novel as a form to a new height. . . . . His perception that history can be told through characters and personal relationships transformed the idea of the past and opened it up to Romantic understanding. Edward Waverley himself is like a time-traveller, a proto-Wordsworthian avid for nature and the sublime, mediating between the reader and the period of the novel at the same time as he assures us that a new sensibility will triumph over the divisiveness of the past” (99). Like Waverly, we are seduced by Bonnie Prince Charlie, but Scott may also be telling the reader that his aristocratic ideas, like the divine right of kings, are archaic. Scott suggests it is time to look at these old divisions between the Stuart and Hanover line with reason, after all (as we are continually reminded) it has been “sixty years since.” 

 Scott, Sir Walter. Waverly; Or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2015.

Remembering the Olde Cheese

 

I’m thinking back on the last time I travelled with students in London.  We were in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, an old pub (a bit touristy, but an old pub) with an interesting literary history.  Dickens supposedly wrote there, and the story goes that Oliver Goldsmith and James Boswell frequented the place. (But then, what place didn’t they frequent, one wonders.)  Anyway, in the pub was a group of seven or eight male orderlies from the nearby hospital.  They were talking a break after work. Big, burly, middle-aged men in their scrubs.  They could tell we were Americans, of course, and so they struck up a conversation.  When they found out we were studying literature they began to question us.  “What are you reading?” and more to the point “what do you know?” What they wanted to know, really, was what could we recite.  One of them stood up with his pint in hand and began reciting Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”  The students were stunned.  Another man began on Milton’s “Lycidas” and another did some Wordsworth, of course.  Then they turned to us.  “What have you got.”  I was able to recite some T. S. Eliot, but it was rough going. These working-class men knew their poetry, and we did not.  It was an interesting lesson and part of the reason for travel.   In my African-American Literature class this term we are reading James Baldwin.  In his introduction to Nobody Knows My Name, 

he writes: “A European writer considers himself to be part of an old and honorable tradition – of intellectual activity, of letters – and his choice of a vocation does not cause him any uneasy wonder as to whether or not it will cost him all his friends.  But this tradition does not exist in America” (6-7).  Baldwin suggests that we feel differently about writers and writing in America.  We think differently about the arts and about vocations.  He leaves the U.S.A. for Paris at one point in his career to learn about himself.  He learns as much about his own country as he does about himself.  He says “The writer is meeting in Europe people who are not American, whose sense of reality is entirely different from his own. They may love or hate or admire or fear or envy this country [the U.S.A.] – they see it, in any case, from another point of view, and this forces the writer to reconsider many things he had always taken for granted. This reassessment, which can be very painful, is also very valuable” (9). I think that is one of the great values of study abroad.  We can learn much about other cultures, but we can learn just as much about our own culture, and indeed, about ourselves. I can’t wait to learn more about myself this time across the pond. Studying abroad is a transformational and enlightening experience.

Old Blog - New Name - (A Resurrection of Sorts)

 

Ah.  Here it is. Wakey wakey old blog. I’m going to resurrect you.  Rise up and come forth old friend - it has been a few years. Sorry dear reader, but this old fellow traveler (a blog once called Irish Hurst), that at one point seemed vibrant and significant, was buried and hidden away.  Indeed, I thought it was lost forever.  And yet here it is. What once was lost is now found.  And by golly, I am here as well.  Now, is it possible that we can be made ready to continue our travels together?  Well, as you, dear reader, can see on your screen, the evidence is unrefutably clear.  It...is...alive!  Amazing....... And, as this blog is reborn, I will christen it anew with a new name: Reed Roams.  And now that the blog is named and set, and now that I've got this silly intro done, let me re-introduce myself:

I’m Dr. Brian Reed. I’m the chair of the Department of English at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania. I’ve been at Mercyhurst for 22 years.  I’m currently teaching a class on African-American literature, a section of British Classics, a film class called Literary Hitchcock, and this class called Fiction of Capital Cities: Edinburgh, London, and Dublin. It is this class that has inspired me to blog again.  I do wish we had just called this class Capital Fictions because I think there is some wordplay in that title, as in “by golly, these novels are capital!”  I hope this blog is "capital." 

This blog will reflect on a study abroad experience with students to the capital cities of Dublin, Edinburgh, and London.  I’m delighted to be going on this trip.  There is much to look forward to. Here, I'll reflect on some of the reading we are doing for class and ponder what we might experience across the pond.