The Country of Sir Walter Scott — Reading Notes

From Feckless Fannie to Madge Wildfire

Olcott grounds Scott's most vivid characters in documented originals. The mad vagrant Madge Wildfire of The Heart of Midlothian was based on a real woman known as Feckless Fannie, who traveled Scotland and England at the head of a flock of sheep. According to Olcott, the sheep recognized their names and obeyed her commands; one polite old ram named Charlie would help her rise by lowering his head so she could grasp his horns. This anecdote, supplied to Scott by his friend Joseph Train, shows how local folklore and eccentric personalities were woven into fiction.

Tragedy and the Law in The Bride of Lammermoor

Olcott traces the novel's tragic plot to a real calamity in the family of James Dalrymple, first Lord Stair, a prominent Scottish lawyer and judge. Dalrymple's wife, Margaret Ross, was the heiress of a large Galloway estate, and their private misfortune—which Olcott does not detail—became the basis for the story's dramatic close. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Olcott notes, compared the novel to Aeschylean tragedy, calling it 'a painting of Fate.' The author is careful to distinguish the historical Dalrymple from the 'tricky and mean-spirited' fictional Sir William Ashton, emphasizing that Scott did not intend a direct portrait.

Contemporary Reception and National Character

Olcott documents the immense popularity of The Heart of Midlothian through contemporary testimony. Lady Louisa Stuart reported that in her house 'everybody is tearing it out of each other's hands,' while Lockhart recalled 'all-engrossing enthusiasm' in Edinburgh. Andrew Lang later declared the novel 'second to none' of the Waverley Novels for its picture of Scottish life circa 1730–40. Olcott quotes Lockhart's assessment that Scott's secret lay in canonizing 'really noble features of the national character' through a 'homely heroine' and a contrast between lowly virtues and 'bolder shadows of terror, guilt, crime, remorse, madness.'

Olcott's method—moving from text to terrain, from fictional character to historical source—makes this book a useful companion for readers who want to see the physical remains of Scott's world. The photographs, taken by the author himself, add a documentary layer that literary criticism rarely supplies. Readers should treat Olcott's claims about real-life models as suggestive rather than definitive, since the excerpts do not reveal how thoroughly he documents each connection.

I kept thinking of Olcott’s quiet photographs—how a place can hold a story’s echo long after the characters have faded. It reminded me of a winter I spent tracing an 1830 journal of the American Northwest, where each river bend felt equally haunted. There’s a similar patience in Tour of the American Lakes, and Among the Indians of the North-West Territory, in 1830, Volume 1 (of 2) Disclosing the Character and Prospects of the Indian Race — Reading Companion, that same slow wonder at what the land remembers.