Abstract
Walter Scott and Charles Lamb are two authors whose prose experiments respond incisively to the politics of character and characterisation in reform-era literature and culture. By 1820, Scott was ‘widely identified as “the Great Unknown”, “the author ofWaverley”’, and although it was not until 1827 that financial pressures forced him to reveal his identity, an August 1814 review ofWaverleyhad already supposed that Scott had written it.¹ Anyone who has read the introductory sections to, say,Old Mortality(1816) can safely conclude with Duncan that ‘Scott’s prose resists the dynamics of transparency and identification we have come to