I have, mistakenly, erased nearly all that I had to say about the novel. I cannot retrieve it and I simply cannot face re-doing it. So, for the first time, in this long trail of Blogs, I am simply going to say I enjoyed Woodstock - I approved of Scott's obvious partiality to the Cavaliers and the disguised Charles II; and the marked antipathy towards the Roundheads, particularly, the Fifth Monarchists and Independents, and to Cromwell. The latter, increasingly allowed a marked strain of hypocrisy and power-hunger to overtake any more laudable traits.
I have relented slightly, as I found John Buchan's commentary on Woodstock very helpful.
Woodstock was written in a time of anxiety (Due to the famous 'crash' involving Ballantyne and Constable, Scott's liabilities were £104,081 and the estate available for realization as £48,494, meaning he had to give up his Castle Street, Edinburgh residence after 28 years; the ill health of his grandson; and the death of his wife Charlotte in May 1826) yet the book bears no mark of this sad preoccupation...the opening words of the last chapter seem to be a cry wrung from the heart - "Years rush by us like the wind. We see not whence the eddy comes, nor whitherward it is tending, and we seem ourselves to witness their flight without a sense that we are changed; and yet Time is beguiling man of his strength, as the winds rob the woods of their foliage". But for the rest the book is amazingly light-hearted, and the narrative, hammered out with a perplexed mind, is notably compact. Woodstock ranks high among the novels for the architecture of its plot...is almost the best written of the novels...If it is not to be ranked with the greatest, that is only because it rarely touches the deeper springs of life.
If there was one word I would use about the book, it is warm; a strange word, perhaps, but Scott has a warmth for his characters which few of his contemporaries match. I bought this first edition on 13th February 1982, nearly 40 years ago. How time flies!
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