9 - ‘Utter indifference’?: the Anglo-Saxons in the nineteenth-century novel

Summary

‘What Englishman cares for Saxon or Norman, both brutal invaders, more than for Chinese and Cochine-Chinese’. So Coleridge wrote despondingly to his friend Thomas Allsop in April 1820 with reference to Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. He was attempting to contrast Scott's avowedly ‘English’ novel with the predominantly ‘Scottish’ fiction produced so far by the ‘author of Waverley’. The new novel, he insisted, would arouse ‘utter indifference’ in readers accustomed to subjects seemingly more relevant to the modern age than the feuds of the twelfth century. It was not that potential readers were at fault; the very subject of Ivanhoe, the conflict of Norman and Saxon, was, Coleridge held, ‘a mere conflict of indifferents… minim surges in a boiling fish kettle’. As the original sales and the continued, and sometimes vicarious, popularity of Ivanhoe have served to prove, Coleridge was mistaken. Scott had successfully shifted his focus from Scotland to England and from a nation violently maturing in the eighteenth century to one being forged in the twelfth. The impact of the novel was to be both pervasive and lasting. In his study of Scott, John Sutherland has justly, but nonetheless provocatively, written:

Ivanhoe … asks to be read as a treatise on nationality. There had been ‘national tales’ in plenty before Scott: but Ivanhoe was something more – a novel about the making of England. Intermingled with the novel's nationalist themes was an investigation of race. The author of Ivanhoe was largely responsible for injecting consciousness of race (and a sizeable dose of racism) into the popular British mind.