The third of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, The Antiquary was published in 1816 and set in 1794. It was Scott’s favorite among his novels and of them all displays the most playful consciousness of itself as a fiction. Historic struggles elsewhere in the series are fought to a close by characters who, according to Lukács, engage in them as types of whole contending classes. Here some of the same conflicts appear in a belated and oddly inconsequential staging—Marx might say, as farce—with characters whose enactments of political struggle the novel tends to expose as fantasy. “In The Antiquary,” as Ian Duncan writes, “Scott undertakes what might be called the Shandyfication of historical romance, glossing his earlier fiction and its cultural themes in a self-reflexive and metafictional novel in which ‘nothing happens’” (Scott’s Shadow 139).

The conflict of the Stewart and Hanoverian monarchies thus dwindles into the after-dinner quarrels of Jonathan Oldbuck, the antiquary of the title, and his neighbor, Sir Arthur Wardour.

Their respective descents, from a German Protestant printer and refugee and from a Norman knight, establish their figural relation to the rival parties of 1688, 1715, and 1745. In spite of Wardour and Oldbuck’s quarrels, the novel’s topic is historical closure; it argues that the struggles these characters seem to represent are actually concluded, and that both are in practice loyal subjects of a united Britain, who share a single class position as members of the landed gentry. The differences between them are mere remainders and are appropriately staged by their disagreements about the value of old coins, curiosities, and other relics. These disagreements arise, in their most elementary form, from the absence of single standard of price, which thus functions in the novel as the belated afterimage of a century-long absence in Scotland of a single accepted monarch.

Since Lukács first read Scott in this way, much of the best criticism of his fiction has adopted his conception of its characters as types, even when putting it in service of political and historiographic arguments that differ widely from his.

In the first section of this essay, however, we will discuss problems of identifying and representing money that do not operate in The Antiquary only at the level of character. Individual characters disagree about what counts as money, or show irrational preferences for one representative of money over another. The novel itself embraces difference and mediation in the money form; money proper—in the form of silver, which in 1794 still provided the legal standard for British money—appears in it only as an alien and unintelligible intruder. Standard money, moreover, proves alien not only to the historical setting the novel represents, but also to its own diegetic conventions. Its appearance produces a crux, not only in the novel’s historical representation, but also in its text.

Jonathan Oldbuck’s collecting mania is an object of mild satire throughout the novel; the major vehicle for this satire is the beggar Edie Ochiltree. Ochiltree is the novel’s principal truth-teller, repository of secrets, and returner of persons and things to their proper places. One of his running jokes at Oldbuck’s expense concerns the antiquary’s exchange of “siller” with a packman for an artifact he believed to be an old coin. Twice in the novel Ochiltree reminds him of this transaction, tormenting him with the fact that the supposed “auld coin” had actually proved only to be a “bodle” (Antiquary chs. 4, 44; WN 2: 42, 400). This joke is odder than it at first seems, since the bodle was a copper two penny piece of the old Scots coinage, which had nominally been superseded at the Act of Union in 1707.

The bodle itself was last minted in 1697 (Stewart 117); since the old Scots currency was converted into Sterling at the rate of twelve to one, it might after the Union be said to have the value of one sixth of a penny—though legally it had no monetary value at all. In 1794 a bodle would thus have to be at least 97 years old; it would also have been a relic of Scotland’s former status as an independent state with its own mint. Why does Edie Ochiltree, apparently with the novel’s endorsement, take it for granted that a bodle is not an “auld coin”?

The effects of Scott’s representation of money as a materialized gap in the Symbolic, however, are not confined within the frame of his novel. The impossibility of accounting for the silver’s appearance in Dousterswivel’s excavations is a problem that the novel shares with its own characters. The sentences from chapter 45 (WN 3: 408-09) that provide the narrative summarized above are, like the novel’s protagonist, of dubious legitimacy. They are uttered by “Lovel” himself, and, as we have seen, they explain that the silver’s ultimate source was his father the Earl of Glenallan. At this point in the novel, however, “Lovel” does not yet know his true descent—that discovery is reserved for the following paragraph. His explanation of the silver’s source thus assumes information he does not yet possess. The novel’s latest editor, David Hewitt, has discovered that this error in its diegesis was introduced into the novel as an authorial revision. Scott originally had “Lovel” explain that he bought the silver from a bank that had recently imported it, and it is this version that Hewitt prints in his 1995 Edinburgh edition. Scott changed the story on the verso of his original manuscript before the relevant passage had been set up in type, though, and it was the revised version that appeared in print, both in the first edition and in each of the two or three subsequent editions that he oversaw.

This fault does not arise from the divided political allegiance of eighteenth-century Scots, but from divided allegiance among Scott’s modern editors with respect to the authority of manuscript and print.

The reason for this divided allegiance lies in the social process by which Scott and others produced the historical phenomenon that was the Waverley Novels. That The Antiquary sets its representation of money as such in this crux suggests that, rather than reading its blank money and nameless hero as types of a crisis of political authority in eighteenth-century Scotland, we should take all of these representations out of the historical setting in which Scott placed them, and consider them as allegorical presentations of a nineteenth-century crisis in the process of literary production.

Marx’s elementary formula for capital in Vol. 1 of Capital, M-C-M, designates the exchange of money for a commodity that is once more sold as money. For our purposes, the central point of this formula is that it locates the identity of capital in the money form. Though capital may and indeed must repeatedly assume the form of commodities, these commodities’ identity as capital depends upon their eventual retransformation into money. The commodity is capital’s “disguised” mode of existence, while money is its “general” one; capital’s “identity with itself” can be affirmed only by its repeated re-embodiment of itself in money (Marx 255).

The project of Capital is to dissolve this appearance of capital’s identity. In discussing Scott, we are concerned with an historical moment at which that appearance has scarcely yet been constituted. If money is the medium in which capital identifies itself, Scott wrote at a time and in a place where the money supply was in practice extremely heterogeneous and monetary theory was a hotly debated topic in political economy. As we have seen, in Scotland throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the circulating currency mostly comprised notes of Scottish joint-stock banks and dilapidated token coin. Legal tender coin minted in England was rarely found there. Between 1797 and 1817, moreover, all of Britain was in the anomalous position of having no legal tender in circulation. Owing to the exigencies of wartime, the government prohibited the Bank of England from paying out gold and allowed issues of small-denomination bank notes to circulate in its place.

Gold and silver rapidly became scarce throughout Britain, but the government decided that they would remain the only legal tender. During this period, adjudicating the value of different representatives of money was an everyday problem for Britons of all classes.

It is my main theoretical claim in this essay that the indeterminate form in which Scott sold the labor embodied in his novels is allegorized in traits of the novels themselves. The most important of these for my purpose is their anonymity.

Waverley, the first novel of the series, was published anonymously in 1814; upon its success, the next two were published as by “the Author of Waverley.” Subsequent novels either appeared under this signature, or were presented by “editors” under obviously fictitious names as works deriving from oral or manuscript traditions. Very soon, this kind of elaborate disguise of the author’s identity was recognized as itself a trait of what came to be known as the Waverley novels. Though I am afraid that at this point the analogy will seem fanciful, the identity of the Author of Waverley, like that of capital itself in Marx’s account, becomes an effect of serial self-reference and self-disguise.

Scott himself seems to have half believed that there was an uncanny connection between the anonymity of his work as a writer of fiction and the historically unprecedented sums he made by it. In writing about his earnings, he tends to describe them as if they had been gained by a deception, or else by magic. Consider the following, published in a retrospect of his career written well after insolvency had forced Scott to give up his incognito. Looking back at his the period of his anonymity, he writes that “in the pen of this nameless romancer, I seemed to possess something like the secret fountain of coined gold and pearls vouchsafed to the traveller of the Eastern Tale " (Chronicles of the Canongate, Introduction; WN 19: 321). One striking point about this figure is that even as Scott in a signed preface acknowledges his identity as author of the Waverley novels, he disavows it, referring in the third person to “the nameless romancer” who held the pen that composed them. Another is that the figure’s identification of the pen and the fountain is founded as much on the fact that they are both secret as on their apparently limitless flow. Taken as a whole, the figure aligns the authorship of the Waverley novels with possession of the money for which they were sold, both the money and the novels being tokens of an identity that is constitutively secret and fated to vanish when revealed.

Precisely because it recurs from novel to novel, the protagonist’s narrative of self-discovery is a central topic in criticism of Scott’s fiction;

among the effects of its recurrence is to undermine the closure that it also guarantees. At the opening of The Antiquary the protagonist presents himself to the novel’s title character under the name of Lovel. It emerges however that the name is a disguise which he has been using to conceal the name under which he was raised, that of Neville. Finally, at the novel’s close, the antiquary learns that he himself possesses the information necessary to discover the truth about his friend’s birth, and is able to inform him that his name is no more Neville than it is Lovel, but is rather William Geraldin. In this last reversal the dupe and the subject of knowledge change places with a symmetrical neatness that provides the novel’s final cadence. The effect of closure is however undermined by the traits that The Antiquary’s protagonist shares with those of other novels. These traits liken him for instance to Waverley, to Harry Bertram, to Frank Osbaldistone, and to others from other novels in the series.

The truth of the protagonist’s identity and filiation was only apparently contained within a single text; as soon as this appearance is breached, so too are the borders of the text itself.

In some of the paratexts with which Scott increasingly surrounded his novels as the series developed, he dramatizes the permeability of their borders by putting characters from different novels together in a single scene and even allowing them encounters with the anonymous Author who invented them. The most elaborate such paratext is the introduction to Tales of the Crusaders, published in 1825; it presents itself as the transcript of a meeting between the still-anonymous Author of Waverley and a miscellaneous collection of characters from the novels—or, where this would violate chronology, of their descendants. Present therefore are Jonathan Oldbuck of The Antiquary, Josiah Cargill of St. Ronan’s Well, Lawrence Templeton, the purported editor of Ivanhoe, Captain Clutterbuck of The Monastery and The Fortunes of Nigel, the son of Dandie Dinmont of Guy Mannering and so forth. The introduction’s conceit is that the characters, along with the Author, have produced the Waverley novels already in print collectively, in accordance with “the doctrine so well laid down by the immortal Adam Smith, concerning the division of labour” (Tales of the Crusaders, Introduction; WN 19: 11).

They meet here as joint proprietors of what the Author of Waverley describes as “the valuable property which has accumulated under our common labour” (Tales of the Crusaders, Introduction; WN 19: 11). By the late twentieth century characters could be a form of intellectual property, and a text representing in a single scene characters from divers sources is thus in our own day not only an example of the intertextual citation of character but also of the social circulation of value.

For Scott, the assembly of the characters is more ambiguous: they appear as proprietors as well as property, and even the Author of Waverley himself, when he becomes a character in a Waverley novel, becomes a part of the property of which he is also the proprietor. The breaching of the novelistic border effected by paratext here generates an incoherence or internal differentiation in the notion of property as such.

These disagreements, however, remain unresolved at the novel’s close. Moreover, the botched or disputed purchase of the curiosity is one of the forms in which it presents en travesti the exchange of money for money. This exchange, which Marx was to identify as the elementary form of capital, appears in The Antiquary only as a mistake or a deception. The exchange M->M in Marx enables an identification; in The Antiquary, quite the contrary, it is structured by difference and masquerade. The novel’s insistence on the problem of relating money to money, indeed on the problem of identifying money, leads me to propose that in its allegorical dimension, as is necessarily the case with allegory, it has more than one point of historical reference. Though the topic of money’s indeterminacy appears in The Antiquary’s representation of 1794 as an after-image of historic struggles that the novel regards as closed, it also falls on it as a shadow of the future in which the novel itself will be written and published.

James Ballantyne’s press was thus the medium in which the work of Scott’s hand was transmuted into the anonymous Authorship of the Waverley novels. It was not, however, only as a producer and seller of fiction that Scott’s identity was hidden by the Ballantynes. Much more closely held than the secret of his authorship was the further secret that Scott himself owned more than half of Ballantyne’s printing office and was in fact the dominant partner.

All Scott’s contracts for his novels stipulated that they be printed at Ballantyne’s; he was moreover paid for them through Ballantyne’s, in such a way that the distinction between the payment for the right to print a specified number of copies of a work and the payment for the printed copies themselves is far from explicit. Using the Ballantynes as intermediaries, Scott confronts his publishers at once and—on my reading of the contracts—indistinguishably as the seller of a copyright and as the seller of printed volumes.

The mystification of Scott’s identity as an author is thus inseparable from the mystification of the commodity form into which his written work was absorbed when it was sold and became capital. This mystification is in part due to the relatively recent appearance of copyright as a commodity form in its own right.

But its fundamental determinant in Scott’s case is as a reflection of the money-form in which the value of Scott’s labor was realized. No more in Scotland in 1815 than at other times and places could transactions on the scale of Scott’s and Constable’s have conveniently been carried out in cash. David Hewitt estimates Scott’s share of the profits from the first 5000 copies of The Antiquary at about £1682 (364), independent of his share of the profits from the printing-office. In England during the period of the Bank Restriction Act (1797-1821), and in Scotland at any time since the early eighteenth century, the payment of such a sum in legal tender coin would have been almost unthinkable. The actually circulating currency, as we have seen, comprised a regionally variable combination of token silver used as change and of different kinds of locally-issued paper instruments that served as money-substitutes. Legal tender was at this period effectively unavailable throughout Britain, and especially so in Scotland.

The bill extended credit by deferring payment: if a retailer bought commodities from a producer, the latter would draw a bill on the former, payable at a date when the commodities could be expected to have sold, enabling the retailer to pay it with the proceeds. Normally, the drawer of the bill, wanting ready money, would take it at once to a bank, which would give cash for it at a discounted rate, taking interest for the time until it fell due. This was broadly the system by which Scott received payment for his fiction. Thus, contracting for The Antiquary in January of 1815 he drew bills dated at six, twelve, and eighteen months on the publishers, Constable and Co. in Edinburgh and Longmans in London. Acting through James Ballantyne, Scott would at once have discounted the bills, thus obtaining—at the cost of some interest—his half of the profits for the first 5000 copies before he even began to write the novel. As The Antiquary was slated for publication in early June, the publishers expected it to be bringing in revenue before they had to pay even the first set of bills—though in the event Scott was more than a year late with it, causing some anxious correspondence between Longmans and Constable.

When he sold his fiction, then, Scott encountered a capital whose identity, like his own identity as an author, was mediated and hedged about with substitutes. The capital into which his labor was incorporated could appear to him only in the dispersed form of the bills of exchange that served as its representatives. This form of appearance necessarily obscured from him its borders and indeed its mode of existence as property. The example of The Antiquary has shown us how a publishing house—or any other business—could operate without investing money in an undertaking at the outset. In negotiating for an advance, then, Scott would consider not the actual assets of his publishers, but the ease with which he would be able to discount their bills—a question decided by the general state of their credit, and more specifically by the number of their bills already outstanding and in the hands of the banks. Scott insisted that Longmans be brought in as the London co-publisher of his second novel, Guy Mannering, and then of The Antiquary, precisely because fewer of their bills were in the Edinburgh market than of Constable’s, and he wanted to give Constable’s credit a rest.

The market value of a bill thus depended on the state of an entire circulation of bills on which the acceptor’s name appeared. For this reason, it represented a capital only visible in dispersal, having been at no time in the immediate possession of any single individual.

In taking payment for his fiction by means of bills, therefore, Scott legally made himself liable to pay again the very payment he took. The reason why the hazards of trade were so notorious throughout the eighteenth century, and why book-keeping was so difficult, was that neither the acceptance of a payment nor the discharge of a debt could be considered final until the bill involved had finally been paid by its original acceptor—possibly years after many of the transactions in which it had played a part.

In the crash of 1826, many of the debts of Constable that Scott was required to pay were thus debts which had originally been due to him in return for novels promised or actually written.

To be paid by bill was thus for Scott invariably to sign; and since after Waverley itself he always had an advance on his share of the profits, Scott wrote his novels to make sure that the bills he had signed were retired. Scott wrote, in short, to withdraw his signature from circulation. And we recall that in mentioning his signature, we are in fact referring to a hand that was until 1826 concealed behind those of James and John Ballantyne—far more so in entering into bill transactions than it was in producing fiction. The major reason for Scott’s employment of a literary agent and for his secret ownership of a printing works was not to conceal his identity as the Author of Waverley, but to conceal the extent of his potential liability in the bill market and so extend his ability, using his proxies, to discount new bills. Scott increased his liabilities by personal expenditure, but the fundamental cause of his exposure in the bill market and eventual insolvency was the historical necessity that dictated the mode of his payment. The phenomenon of the Waverley novels could not have been financed by a capital embodied in a retail bookselling establishment or in a printing shop, as publishing ordinarily had been hitherto.

Constable could not have paid Scott the unprecedented sums he received, nor financed the publication of the novels in the size and variety of editions that he did, without mobilizing bank capital through loans secured by the signatures on his bills.

Their staging in what appears to be a single text of different and contradictory versions of the author-function is one of the Waverley novels’ cardinal features, and it has determined my use of the text of Scott’s final edition of the novels, which he termed his Magnum Opus, as the source for citations in this essay.

In the Magnum text, Scott appears as the no longer-anonymous author, as editor and annotator, and also as a character and as proprietor. This multiple self-inscription is an extension of the internally differentiated representations of authorship that appeared in the novels and their paratexts from the very outset, which are my topic here.

By far and away the most fully documented and carefully edited version of Scott’s fiction ever to appear is the recently completed Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (EEWN). Though this edition will be invaluable to future scholarship on Scott, as it has been to my own, the texts it establishes must be used with some caution, as its editorial procedures do not take sufficient account of the novels’ social origin. The general editor states that the EEWN aims to produce an “ideal text” of the novels’ first editions (Hewitt xv),

rectifying errors that were the result of haste and pressure in the production process. As we have seen, however, this process was irreducibly social. No more than any of their successors were the first editions of the Waverley novels the sole product of the historical Sir Walter Scott; yet the EEWN announces that integral to its project is “a return to the authentic Scott ” (Hewitt xii), to be achieved by stripping away from the first edition texts “mistakes” introduced there by those whom the editors characterize as “intermediaries”—James Ballantyne and other copyists, compositors, and copyeditors.

3) Most egregious is the case of The Bride of Lammermoor. The dating of this novel’s action has long been a matter of dispute;

in every edition Scott published there are indications that point to dates in the eighteenth century both before and after the crucial year of 1707, when the Act of Union ended Scotland’s existence as an independent kingdom. The historical events on which Scott based his story, moreover, belong in the seventeenth century, and traces of this setting also made their way into the novel. The editor of The Bride for EEWN, J. H. Alexander, follows Jane Millgate in the view that the action of the novel in its first edition can best be dated just before the Act, between 1702 and 1707. This dating is perhaps more plausible than any other; nonetheless, it requires a distinctly tendentious editorial note explaining away passages that seem to refer to a date after the union (Alexander 333-35). Worse yet, to prevent the date from slipping the other way, to before 1702 when Queen Anne ascended the English throne, it requires the explaining away of several references to the reigning monarch as male and in one passage the outright emendation of the word “King” to read “Queen” instead (Alexander 209, 334 and 337n. 9). Alexander makes this emendation without warrant from any prior printed or manuscript version of the text.