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Frank Osbaldistone is a young Londoner who loves poetry and hates his father's counting house, so his father sends him north to Scotland in disgrace. On the way he meets robbers, soldiers, a brave young woman named Diana Vernon, and the most famous outlaw in the Highlands, Rob Roy MacGregor. There are stolen papers to recover, a rebellion brewing, and danger on every road. Scott tells it like a fireside tale.
Rob Roy appeared at the end of 1817, while Walter Scott was still hiding behind anonymity as the Author of Waverley. Its hero of the title is a real man: Robert MacGregor, called Rob Roy for his red hair, a Highland cattle dealer turned outlaw who robbed the rich, defied the government, and was already a folk hero when Scott wrote.
But the story is told by Frank Osbaldistone, a merchant's son sent north in 1715, the year of the Jacobite rising. His cousin Rashleigh steals papers that could ruin the family firm, and Frank must recover them. His road runs through Glasgow, where the magistrate Bailie Nicol Jarvie steals every scene he enters, and up into the Highlands, where Rob Roy keeps appearing at the exact moment of greatest need.
Scott frames the tale as Frank's memoir, written in old age, and this text also carries Scott's own introduction of 1829, where he finally owns the authorship and tells what he knew of the real MacGregor. History, romance, comedy and a love story are all braided together. It is one of the warmest and funniest of the Waverley novels.
Walter Scott published Rob Roy in 1817, in the first blaze of the Waverley novels' fame. Frank Osbaldistone, a young London merchant's son who would rather write poetry, is sent north after a quarrel and a theft, and on the road to Glasgow and the Highlands he falls in with the outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor, cattle dealer, Jacobite, and legend in his own lifetime.
Rob Roy comes to us dressed as found papers: Scott's advertisement pretends the tale arrived from an unknown correspondent, though a footnote added in 1829 admits the communication was entirely imaginary. Frank Osbaldistone, looking back in old age, tells how a quarrel with his father and his cousin Rashleigh's treachery sent him north in the summer of 1715.
The journey is the pleasure: Osbaldistone Hall, the road to Glasgow, the Bailie's counting house wit, Diana Vernon in the library, and then the Highlands, Loch Lomond, and the clachan of Aberfoil, where Rob Roy's wife Helen MacGregor faces down soldiers in one of Scott's greatest scenes. Behind the adventure stands the rising of 1715, gathering like weather.
This text includes Scott's introduction of 1829, written for the collected edition, where he speaks on the square about the real Rob Roy and his own sources. Read the novel for the outlaw, stay for the Bailie: between them, Scott built the Scotland that the whole nineteenth century believed in, half history and half song.
Edition: Edition of 1829. Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 7025.
The first chapter
When the Editor of the following volumes published, about two years since, the work called the “Antiquary,” he announced that he was, for the last time, intruding upon the public in his present capacity. He might shelter himself under the plea that every anonymous writer is, like the celebrated Junius, only a phantom, and that therefore, although an apparition, of a more benign, as well as much meaner description, he cannot be bound to plead to a charge of inconsistency. A better apology may be found in the imitating the confession of honest Benedict, that, when he said he would die a bachelor, he did not think he should live to be married. The best of all would be, if, as has eminently happened in the case of some distinguished contemporaries, the merit of the work should, in the reader's estimation, form an excuse for the Author's breach of promise. Without presuming to hope that this may prove the case, it is only further necessary to mention, that his resolution, like that of Benedict, fell a sacrifice, to temptation at least, if not to stratagem.
It is now about six months since the Author, through the medium of his respectable Publishers, received a parcel of Papers, containing the Outlines of this narrative, with a permission, or rather with a request, couched in highly flattering terms, that they might be given to the Public, with such alterations as should be found suitable.*
* As it maybe necessary, in the present Edition(1829), to speak upon the square, the Author thinks it proper to own, that the communication alluded to is entirely imaginary.
These were of course so numerous, that, besides the suppression of names, and of incidents approaching too much to reality, the work may in a great measure be, said to be new written. Several anachronisms have probably crept in during the course of these changes; and the mottoes for the Chapters have been selected without any reference to the supposed date of the incidents. For these, of course, the Editor is responsible. Some others occurred in the original materials, but they are of little consequence. In point of minute accuracy, it may be stated, that the bridge over the Forth, or rather the Avondhu (or Black River), near the hamlet of Aberfoil, had not an existence thirty years ago. It does not, however, become the Editor to be the first to point out these errors; and he takes this public opportunity to thank the unknown and nameless correspondent, to whom the reader will owe the principal share of any amusement which he may derive from the following pages.
1st December 1817.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1817. Author died 1832. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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