Is Walter Scott a nostalgic author? What is the point of the past in his work?

Scott uses the past to stage the present changes in Scottish national identity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, brought about originally by the Union of 1707. In The Heart of Midlothian, the author embeds within the wider socio-historical context of the 1736 Porteous Riots the domestic fiction of the Deans family, a story loosely based on an original communication by a certain ‘Mrs Goldie.’ Merging the historical ‘event’ with the historical ‘case’ of the individual, the novelist shows the ‘moral’ and ‘material’ worlds moving in tandem, promoting moderate acceptance of change and modernity so as to overcome ‘destruction’ through social harmony. Scott turns to history in order to explore, recontextualise, and perhaps to recover a specifically Scottish identity that has been liable to change; this essay will argue that he does so through his fictional treatment of Scottish law, religion, and landscape. As such, Walter Scott is neither reactionary nor nostalgic, but an author who goes beyond the boundaries of his place and time to mediate the contemporary issues of a contingent identity and morality.