A Charlotte Mason education included the best novels the world had to offer. This episode is a lively discussion of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, a book Miss Mason referred to in all of her six volumes and one of the first English historical novels. To read it is to understand more about Miss Mason, and ourselves.
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“Waverley by name was wavering by nature, was ever the sport of circumstances because he had not learned in youth to direct his course. He blunders into many ( most interesting) misadventures because he had failed to get, through his studies, the alertness of mind and the self-restraint which should make a man of him. Many pleasant things befall him, but not one of them, unless we except Rose Bradwardine’s love – and when did woman study justice in the bestowal of her favours?–not one did he earn by his own wit or prowess; each advantage and success which came to him was the earnings of another man. The elder Waverley had not only fortune but force of character to make friends, so we are not made sad for the amiable young man for whom we must needs feel affection ; he does nothing to carve out a way for himself, and he does everything to his own hindrance out of pure want of the power of self-direction, but his uncle has fortune and friends, and all ends well. For the sake, no doubt, of young persons less happily situated, and of parents who are not able to play the part of bountiful Providence to sons and daughters whom they have failed to fit for the conduct of their own lives, the great novelist takes care to point out that Edward Waverley’s personal failure in life was the fault of his education. His abilities were even brilliant, but ‘ I ought’ had waited upon ‘ I like’ from his earliest days, and he had never learned to make himself do the thing he would.” (2/63-64)
“These things arrive to us after many readings of a book that is worth while ; and the absurdity of saying, ‘I have read’ Jane Austen or the Waverley novels should be realised.” (5/374)
