Waverley Novels

Waverley invented the historical novel as a commercial form in 1814, and Cooper is the most direct of its inheritors: he was called the American Scott in his own lifetime and did not object to it. The borrowed machinery is specific. A young man of the settled world is taken into an older one and has to learn it; the older culture is rendered with sympathy and is shown to be finished; history is carried by invented minor characters while the famous figures pass through; and the landscape is described at a length that asserts the place is a subject in its own right. Scott's Highlanders after the 'Forty-five and Cooper's Delaware in the Seven Years' War occupy the same structural position, and both writers were criticised in the same terms for it.

Manzoni read Scott closely, met him in 1827, and built I promessi sposi on the Waverley model: a historical crisis seen from below, through two people with no power in it. The debt is in the frame as much as the plot. Manzoni opens with a discovered seventeenth-century manuscript which he claims to be modernising, which is Scott's antiquarian apparatus used straight, and the novel's set pieces, the bread riot, the plague and the lazaretto, are researched from documents in the way Scott had made standard. Scott is reported to have said, after the meeting, that it was the finest book he had ever read, which is the exchange usually cited when the two are discussed together.