Waverley Novels, New Chapbooks, and Histories of Reading

Walter Scott’s historical novels were written for the middle-class, but downmarket readers were no less interested in popular new novels. New forms of the chapbook made upmarket novels available to a spectrum of readers who could not afford to buy the latest novels or rent them from a circulating library. This essay shows that even at the lowest prices, chapbook versions of the Waverley novels varied considerably. Ultimately, I argue that description of the social production of chapbooks should be the basis of a revaluation of chapbook reading in terms of community interests. The essay concludes with a practical consideration of how critical multimedia histories of reading might change classroom encounters with canonical novels such as Waverley and Ivanhoe.