The Black Dwarf Reviewed by the Author

Walter Scott is curiously neglected these days, having once been more popular that Jane Austen. His earliest works are tales of Scotland around the time of its unification with England. Scott published the novels anonymously. The first novel was Waverly, and the next few were published as coming from “the author of Waverly,” so the whole run of Scottish novels is now dubbed the Waverly Novels. The Black Dwarf was Scott’s first attempt to pretend it was by a different author, but apparently everyone knew it was by the same author and lots of people suspected said author was Scott.

The authorial background here is interesting because of one of those marvelous things that could only happen once upon a time. Most of the reviews of The Black Dwarf were negative. Two of the harshest were published anonymously; it turns out Scott himself wrote those two reviews. Try to imagine that happening today.

The novel is indeed quite weak compared to what we know Scott was capable of doing. The misanthropic Scottish dwarf is amusing, but the relatively short novel has the dwarf surrounded by too many undeveloped characters. The bulk of the story sets up a mystery of wondering who this dwarf is and why he hates people so much, and then the whole mystery is explained in a hurried two pages by a character who just so happens to know the entire back story and suddenly decides it is a good time to relate it. It is like a condensed version of that chapter in Agatha Christie where Poirot revels the solution to the mystery, except this time there were absolutely no clues beforehand which gave even a hint of a suggestion about the solution to the mystery. Then the novel ends.

Is the book worth reading? Sure, if you love reading Walter Scott, it has that charm that you love so much. But if you haven’t read Scott before, this is not the place to begin.

So, let turn back to Scott’s own reviews, because they are a marvel to read.

The first was in Critical Review in December 1816. Given that we now know who wrote the review, it begins rather humorously with a discussion of how the novel was obviously by the same author as the Waverly novels, but all those rumors that were often repeated and just as often refuted that the author was Walter Scott were just pointless musings. He then notes that the story in The Black Dwarf is thoroughly unsatisfying first because of the absurd number of characters in such a short novel and then by the overuse of the Scottish dialect.

[The] author becomes a little careless as he gains confidence by approbation; and for merely English readers, too much of the Scottish dialect is introduced into the speeches. It is sometimes employed, however, with admirable effect; according to the character of the individual who speaks, it seems to add characteristic ferocity to the ruffian, or simplicity to the innocence of youth, and tenderness to effusions of love. On other occasions it not a little lightens the comic effect of rustic humor.

That is actually not a bad summary of the Scottish dialogue. Scott uses that trick often in the Waverly novels to good effect. But there are sections of The Black Dwarf which descend to the being nearly impenetrable for both Scott’s contemporaries and a 21^st century American reader. A little Scottish brogue goes a long way.

This review closes with another criticism of the book, which Scott deftly converts into an intriguing comment on English letters.

While exhibiting the manners, the author has endeavored also to employ something of the language of the times: he describes, but he has now and then gone too far back into antiquity, and has brought forward words that had even then been long obsolete. The error was, however on the right side, and it would be advantageous, if, instead of the prevailing fashion of importing French terms, we resorted more to the wells of undefiled English, afforded by our elder writers.

That was the nicer of the two anonymous reviews Scott wrote about his own book. The second was published in Quarterly Review in January 1817.

The summary: “It contains some striking scenes, but it is even more than usually deficient in the requisite of a luminous and interesting narrative” and “the narrative is the worst part of The Black Dwarf.”

Such is the brief abstract of a tale of which the narrative is unusually artificial. Neither hero nor heroine exact interest of any sort, being just that sort of pattern people whom nobody cares a farthing about. The explanation of the dwarf’s real circumstances in character, too long delayed from an obvious wish to protract the mystery, is at length huddled up so hastily that, for our parts, we cannot say we are able to comprehend more of the motives of this principle personage then that he was a mad man, and acted like one—an easy and summary mode of settling all difficulties. As for the hurry and military bustle of the conclusion, it is only worthy of the farce of the Miller and his Men, or any other modern melodrama, ending with a front crowded with soldiers and scene-shifters, and a back scene in a state of conflagration.

Again, Scott is not wrong in his assessment.

(There is a fascinating edited volume waiting to be created: Anonymous reviews written by the author of the book.)

As noted above, it is truly strange to me that Scott is so much out of favor.  His best books are still in print with professional publishers. But, as far as I can tell, the only editions of The Black Dwarf in print right now are the fly-by-night print-on-demand versions in which you roll the dice and hope they are actually proofread and not sloppy OCR scans of a library book. Why doesn’t, say, Oxford World Classics or Penguin have the complete works of Scott?  Obviously they don’t think there is a demand for it. And so, unfortunately, Dear Reader if you want to read the tale of a Misanthropic Scottish Dwarf, unless your mother once gave you a beautiful late 19^th century set of the complete works of Scott, your best bet is a free Kindle version.

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