Walter Scott, Again

Further reflection on Scott: His anti-romanticism, as I suggested, is a common theme in early novel-writing. Defoe furnishes another example. Robinson Crusoe is warned by his father against running off to sea and seeking adventure, but Robin is unwilling to settle down to a boring middle-class life. Of course, when he gets to the island, he reproduces precisely the middle-class English life that he had been fleeing. And the whole book is a vindication of his father’s advice (though Robin does go on adventures afterwards, in Part 2). Were I a Marxist, I’d say that the early novelists’ antipathy to adventure and endorsement of the slow and settled life of the middle class was an insidious promotion of early capitalist ideology. Since I’m not a Marxist, I won’t say that, but I will say that the early novels spend an inordinate amount of time casting down the medieval romantic vision, the medieval obsession with “aventure.” Michael Nerlich ‘s intriguing book on medieval and early modern conceptions of adventure, The Ideology of Adventure , seems to be right at this point: Medieval questing adventures are transmuted into middle-class social and economic “ventures” in early modern fiction.

It is pretty striking, at least, that 19th-century novelists are still trying to remove the spell of medieval romance from their readers, so powerful is that spell. (Of course, it was not so distant as all that, since there were various movements of medieval revivalism in the 19th century ?EPugin, Ruskin, Tennyson, and so on.)