We should have been forewarned. J.G. Lockhart, Scott’s son-in-law and biographer, having seen the original manuscripts of the two works now lodged in the magnificent Berg Collection, in the equally magnificent New York Public Library, was forthright in his opinion: ‘Neither of these novels will ever, I hope, see the light.’ Similarly John Buchan, another distinguished biographer of Scott, wrote of the two stories that ‘both are still extant in manuscript, but it may be hoped that no literary resurrectionist will ever be guilty of the crime of giving them to the world’. Buchan, it seems, is the creator of the evocative phrase ‘literary resurrectionist’, but it is an almost irresistible notion given that we are dealing with a Scottish writer from the period of the notorious Burke and Hare – although these two actually murdered to provide corpses for the Edinburgh medical school, whereas the genuine ‘body-snatchers’ or ‘resurrectionists’ of the time obtained the corpses they sold by digging up freshly interred bodies.

The opinions of Lockhart and Buchan are still influential and are quoted by the newspapers. While the more strident claims of ‘grave-robbing’ occur in the headlines, various living authorities on Scott have also been called on to comment. Scotland on Sunday turns very sensibly to Paul Scott, a passionate advocate of the importance and value of Scott’s work to us today. As quoted in the newspaper, he suggests that it would be unfair to judge his namesake by the standards of these last works. Referring to Scott’s valiant efforts to pay off his debts, he notes that ‘with his decaying powers and this compulsion to keep writing, he produced these two final works. There is absolutely no doubt that they are below the standard of his best works.’ Stuart Kelly adopts a similar view: ‘It is the ghost of genius wandering once its soul has left.’ On the other hand, John Sutherland takes a different tack. While respecting Edinburgh University Press’s decision to publish The Siege of Malta to complete the record, he offers his own opinion: ‘I don’t believe that Scott would have wanted it published himself.’ He further suggests that the work was beyond redemption anyway, citing Donald Sultana’s attempt at reconstructing the text in The Siege of Malta Rediscovered: ‘[Sultana’s] view was that Scott’s brain was too clouded, and I think my personal feeling is that Sultana had done everything that could be done with the work, very reverently, after a huge amount of re- search.’ For Sutherland, ‘most of it is incredibly chaotic’, although ‘it does indicate a very wonderful mind, completely buggered up by explosions in the head’.

The posthumous publication of incomplete or otherwise defective works has happened before. Sometimes they are greeted with enthusiasm: critics have been happy to declare that the incomplete novels of both Scott Fitzgerald and Stevenson, The Last Tycoon and Weir of Hermiston, would have been their greatest, though this is surely an act of faith rather than a demonstrable truth. In other cases, the desire for a new novel by a favourite author has led other writers to finish the job: Quiller-Couch provided the last chapters of another incomplete Stevenson work, St Ives, and Joan Aiken wrote her own ending to Jane Austen’s unfinished Sanditon. However, not all such publications are welcomed. Between them the writers cited by the newspapers offer three common objections to the publication of works which were not published in the author’s lifetime: that they will do the author’s reputation harm; that the author would not have wanted them published; and that, since the manuscript was never finished or properly edited by the author, it is now too late to recover the author’s intentions.

But how justified are these objections? The circumstances in which Scott wrote the two works are pertinent here. In 1830 he suffered a series of three strokes, and thereafter he had some difficulty speaking and writing clearly. In Scotland he used an amanuensis, the faithful William Laidlaw, but this resource was denied to him after September 1831, when he had set sail for the Mediterranean in a ship provided by the government in an ultimately vain attempt to restore his health. On his way he read a favourite book of childhood, Vertot’s history of the Knights of St John, with its account of the Ottoman siege of Malta in 1565. Fittingly, in Malta, he began a novel about the siege which was completed in Naples. Then, in Naples, he heard the story of the brigand Francesco Moscato, known as ‘Il Bizzarro’, an extraordinarily brutal Calabrian brigand who had died only twenty years earlier. After recording the story briefly in his journal, Scott moved on to Rome where he began a novella he called Bizarro, a fictionalised account of Moscato’s life which remained unfinished when he left Rome. It was apparently never completed.

Back to the objections offered to publishing these novels. Firstly, quality and reputation. It is easy to allow a strong sense of the difficulty Scott had in writing these texts to become confused with our assessment of the quality of the writing. As editors, we certainly do not underestimate the difficulties of dealing with these texts. Some problems are mechanical, results of the strokes he had suffered: Scott com plains about his stuttering pen, and words in the manuscript often have extra letters or syllables producing readings like ‘vararious’ and ‘assossociations’. Conversely, many letters are persistently defective: ‘g’ appears as a single downstroke, especially in ‘ing’; ‘d’ looks like an uncrossed ‘t’. Other letters dis- appear altogether. All this makes the text extremely difficult to read; we have spent many hours examining individual words. However, in the end, we are pretty confident we have deciphered almost every- thing. Ultimately, of course, such mechanical difficulties have absolutely no impact on the quality of the writing. Other problems are mental. Scott loses track of his sentence structure and produces grammatically incomplete sentences or he writes a similar sounding word for the one required by the context, a particularly ludicrous case being the substitution of ‘cream’ for ‘crime’. These may seem like evidence of his declining mental powers, but in themselves are not. Scott had made these mistakes at the height of his powers. The only evidence for decline is their much greater frequency in these texts. Again, these defects are rectifiable and thus do not reduce the overall quality of his writing.

 Secondly, Scott’s wishes. Why should Scott’s wishes matter nearly two centuries after his death? Much of the responsibility lies with Lockhart. His seven-volume life created a powerful picture of Scott as a great, admirable and lovable man, a greater hero than all Scott’s many fictional ones. Recent criticism has exposed some of the personal bias and artistic craft of Lockhart’s work, but the picture remains largely intact and, for people like me, Scott is a man we love and admire with a deeply felt passion. No wonder we care about his wishes. However, interpreting the wishes of the dead is notoriously difficult. Presumably, those who argue that Scott would not have wanted these works published believe that Scott himself saw them as inferior. The evidence of his letters suggests they are wrong. Writing to his publisher from Naples, Scott tells him he has ‘a real good novel on the stocks about one fourth finished called the Siege of Malta which I think one of the best I have ever written and mean it for immediate publication’. Other similar comments followed as he continued writing. Quite simply, Scott did hope and indeed expect that the novel would be published.

Which brings us to the third objection, that the texts are so defective they are beyond recovery. Neither Lockhart, whom Scott had entrusted with preparing his previous two novels for publication, nor Cadell, his publisher, made any move to publish these two works.

Understandable in the case of the incomplete Bizarro, the original decision not to publish was possibly also justified with The Siege of Malta, since, towards the end, Scott lost sight of his fictional main characters and the novel transmuted into a history book. Even then the situation was not beyond repair; changing the names of some historical characters to make them fictional and providing a new ending would have returned the work to its original novelistic form. Scott himself thought this could be effected ‘easily’. Indeed, it is little more than Lockhart had done with the previous two novels, which he had changed substantially in pre- paring them for publication. The truth is that Lockhart and Cadell had already decided that there would be no more Waverley Novels. But can we do now what Lockhart and Cadell failed to do then? Sutherland cites Sultana’s opinion that The Siege is beyond recovery, but Sultana had not edited other Scott texts. By contrast, the editorial team for this edition includes very experienced editors of Scott’s work. If you have spent years editing Scott’s work, you know exactly the processes which were undertaken in his own time in transferring Scott’s manuscripts to print – filling in the punctuation, correcting the spelling, completing sentences, replacing repeated words. All these processes can be applied to these last texts. There are more mistakes, but they are of an entirely familiar kind. What we could not do is what Lockhart could have done: return The Siege of Malta to its novelistic form and perhaps even complete Bizarro. But, as regards what we have been able to do, we are confident we are only doing what would have been done at the time if the texts had been printed.

And what is the result? Those who take the plunge and read the texts will find Scott has not lost his touch. Scott’s splendid story of the defence of Malta by its knights is imbued with his profound understanding of the centuries of knighthood and chivalry which went before, while Bizarro returns to a long-standing fascination with outlaws and skilfully sets it against a region which had long attracted his attention. These are not Scott’s greatest works – the last is not the best. Still, they are well worth reading. So, if we are in the business of digging up a buried writer’s literary corpus, if not his corpse, who shall say if this is what he would have wanted? Surely it is the writer. In this case, I am certain that the writer would have approved – I oppose my own certainty to that of others. If I am a literary resurrectionist, I am an unrepentant one.