![]() First edition cover (2008) | |
Author | Sir Walter Scott |
---|---|
Cover artist | Sir Henry Raeburn |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Series | Waverley Novels |
Genre | Historical novel |
Publisher | Edinburgh University Press, Columbia University Press |
Publication date | 25 June 2008 |
Media type | Print (hardback) and CD-ROM |
Pages | 158 |
ISBN | 0748624872 |
Preceded by | The Monastery |
Followed by | The Abbot |
The Siege of Malta is a historical novel by Walter Scott written from 1831 to 1832 and first published posthumously in 2008. It tells the story of events surrounding the Great Siege of Malta by the Ottoman Turks in 1565.
An official of the Order of the Knights of St. John arrives in Spain to summon one of their Knights Commander, Don Manuel de Vilheyna, to Malta, the headquarters of the Order, which is threatened by the Turks. He returns to Malta with Vilheyna's nephew, Francisco, and a Servant-at-Arms of the Order, Juan Ramegas. Vilheyna's niece, Angelica, secretly in love with Francisco, is left to pine for him. Vilheyna himself visits the king of Spain to ask for his support in the Order's cause, then follows the others to Malta. He is involved in a naval skirmish with the Turks, who are now attacking the island, but makes harbour and is welcomed by the Grand Master of the Order, Jean Parisot de Valette.
The scene shifts to the enemy camp where we see Mustapha and Piali, the commanders of the Turkish army and navy respectively, each scheming to gain an advantage over the other. On the Maltese side a full Council of the Order considers strategies for the defence of the island. News arrives that Vilheyna's old enemy, Dragut, has arrived in command of a force of Algerian and Tunisian corsairs. Renewed Turkish attacks are repulsed, partly as a result of Ramegas' exploit in destroying a new secret weapon of the Turks, a giant elevating cannon.
From this point on all of the original Spanish characters, apart from Ramegas, are silently dropped from the story, and Scott begins to turn his novel into a simple military chronicle of the siege. The Turkish armies, reinforced by Dragut's corsairs, launch an amphibious attack, which is again thrown back. Dragut dies of wounds received in battle, Mustapha's attempts to break through are frustrated, and he eventually abandons the siege. The Knights are joined by fresh forces from Sicily, and the remaining Turks are defeated. The novel ends with the prospect of a new Malta rising from the rubble of the old as work begins on the building and fortification of the city of Valletta.
Walter Scott's last years were blighted firstly by a series of strokes which greatly impaired his physical and mental powers, and secondly by enormous debts, which he attempted to pay off by writing novels with all the exertion and diligence he could still muster. In October 1831, he set sail for the Mediterranean in an attempt to recover his health, and, after spending three weeks in Malta, went on to Naples. [1]
On 24 October 1831, shortly before leaving England, Scott mentioned in a letter to his publisher that he proposed to write a novel, at that stage called The Knight of Malta. [2] His main source for this project was the Abbé de Vertot's History of the Knights of Malta, a book which he had read as a boy, and which he took with him on the voyage. [3] [4]
Progress, as usual with Scott, was rapid. Writing several hours every morning, he was after two months able to report that a quarter of it had been written, and on 26 January 1832, he claimed it was nearly done. On 6 March 1832, he wrote to confess that he had burned half of it by mistake, but he rewrote the destroyed section in a manner that pleased him better than the original version. [5] [6] Scott was well pleased with his work, predicting that it would be far superior to his two previous novels, and altogether one of the best he had ever written. [7]
By the middle of April 1832, the novel was finished, and the manuscript was dispatched to his publisher Robert Cadell. [8]
Scott's manuscript consists of 150 quarto sheets, with numerous insets giving corrections and additions, written in the appalling handwriting common to all the works Scott wrote in his final period of bad health. The novel amounts to about 77,000 words. [9]
No steps were taken to publish the novel during the few months that remained of Scott's life, and J. G. Lockhart, Scott's son-in-law and literary executor, expressed his hope that The Siege of Malta would never see the light of day, since it was of such poor quality that it could only harm Scott's reputation. [10] [11] The manuscript was kept by Scott's descendants at Abbotsford, and several pages of it were given away to souvenir-hunters. A highly unreliable copy was made in 1878, which, with all its faults, can be used to fill up most of these gaps, and a typescript copy of the 1878 copy was made in 1932 by a Maltese journalist. [12]
According to his 1906 biography, Sir Walter Scott, Andrew Lang had been told that "many passages are full of the old spirit".
In 1928, an anonymous contributor to The Scotsman pressed for publication to be considered, and the following year the Scott scholar Sir Herbert Grierson read The Siege of Malta with that end in view, but in the event he advised a publisher against bringing it out.
In 1932, another biographer of Scott, John Buchan, expressed the hope that "no literary resurrectionist will ever be guilty of the crime of giving [it] to the world". Some years later a minor English novelist, S. Fowler Wright, also read the manuscript or one of its copies, and then published his own Siege of Malta, which he claimed was "Based on an unfinished romance by Sir Walter Scott". [13] This novel was published in 1942 when, coincidentally Malta was going through another siege, this time during World War II.
In 1977, it at last became possible for the reading public to form an accurate idea of the novel's plot and style when Donald E. Sultana published his The Siege of Malta Rediscovered, a biographical account of the writing of the novel together with an extended abstract of its plot and a large number of lengthy quotations from it. A reliable typewritten transcript of the novel was also made by Jane Millgate and deposited in the New York Public Library. [14]
In 2008, the entire novel was finally published, together with Bizarro , another of Scott's suppressed stories, in an edition by J. H. Alexander, Judy King, and Graham Tulloch, published by Edinburgh University Press and Columbia University Press. This edition presents a literal transcript of the manuscripts together with a reading text in which the more obvious errors are corrected. It also includes a CD-ROM scan of the manuscript. [15]
The editors of Bizarro and The Siege of Malta have described them as "unique and moving texts by a master of resonant storytelling", but other assessments have been less enthusiastic. Stuart Kelly, literary editor of the newspaper Scotland on Sunday , called them "the ghost of genius wandering once its soul has left". The author Paul Scott said of The Siege of Malta that "It starts off as a very intelligent, very well written and interesting piece of work, but as it gets towards the end of his life, it begins to fall apart. There was no doubt that his mind weakened and his writing suffered as a result of this." [16] Scott's biographer John Sutherland made his point more bluntly when he told a journalist, "Most of it is incredibly chaotic. It does indicate a very wonderful mind, completely buggered up by explosions in the head." [17]
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish novelist, poet and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels Ivanhoe (1819), Rob Roy (1817), Waverley (1814), Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), along with the narrative poems Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810). He had a major impact on European and American literature.
John Gibson Lockhart was a Scottish writer and editor. He is best known as the author of the seminal, and much-admired, seven-volume biography of his father-in-law Sir Walter Scott: Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. He produced four novels in the early 1820s including Adam Blair and Reginald Dalton.
James Hogg was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both Scots and English. As a young man he worked as a shepherd and farmhand, and was largely self-educated through reading. He was a friend of many of the great writers of his day, including Sir Walter Scott, of whom he later wrote an unauthorised biography. He became widely known as the "Ettrick Shepherd", a nickname under which some of his works were published, and the character name he was given in the widely read series Noctes Ambrosianae, published in Blackwood's Magazine. He is best known today for his novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. His other works include the long poem The Queen's Wake (1813), his collection of songs Jacobite Relics (1819), and his two novels The Three Perils of Man (1822), and The Three Perils of Woman (1823).
The Great Siege of Malta occurred in 1565 when the Ottoman Empire attempted to conquer the island of Malta, then held by the Knights Hospitaller. The siege lasted nearly four months, from 18 May to 8 September 1565.
The Lymond Chronicles is a series of six historical novels written by Dorothy Dunnett and first published between 1961 and 1975. Set in mid-16th-century Europe and the Mediterranean area, the series tells the story of a young Scottish nobleman, Francis Crawford of Lymond, from 1547 until 1558.
The Waverley Novels are a long series of novels by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). For nearly a century, they were among the most popular and widely read novels in Europe.
Sydney Fowler Wright was a British editor, poet, science fiction author, writer of screenplays, mystery fiction and works in other genres, as well as being an accountant and a conservative political activist. He also wrote as Sydney Fowler and Anthony Wingrave.
Castle Dangerous (1831) was the last of Walter Scott's Waverley novels. It is part of Tales of My Landlord, 4th series, with Count Robert of Paris. The castle of the title is Douglas Castle in Lanarkshire, and the action, based on an episode in The Brus by John Barbour, is set in March 1307 against the background of the First War of Scottish Independence.
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is an anthology of Border ballads, together with some from north-east Scotland and a few modern literary ballads, edited by Walter Scott. It was first published by Archibald Constable in Edinburgh in 1802, but was expanded in several later editions, reaching its final state in 1830, two years before Scott's death. It includes many of the most famous Scottish ballads, such as Sir Patrick Spens, The Young Tamlane, The Twa Corbies, The Douglas Tragedy, Clerk Saunders, Kempion, The Wife of Usher's Well, The Cruel Sister, The Dæmon Lover, and Thomas the Rhymer. Scott enlisted the help of several collaborators, notably John Leyden, and found his ballads both by field research of his own and by consulting the manuscript collections of others. Controversially, in the editing of his texts he preferred literary quality over scholarly rigour, but Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border nevertheless attracted high praise from the first. It was influential both in Britain and on the Continent, and helped to decide the course of Scott's later career as a poet and novelist. In recent years it has been called "the most exciting collection of ballads ever to appear."
The siege of Tripoli occurred in 1551 when the Ottoman Turks and Barbary pirates besieged and vanquished the Knights of Malta in the Red Castle of Tripoli, modern Libya. The Spanish had established an outpost in Tripoli in 1510, and Charles V remitted it to the Knights in 1530. The siege culminated in a six-day bombardment and the surrender of the city on 15 August.
Dragut was an Ottoman corsair, naval commander, governor, and noble. Under his command, the Ottoman Empire's maritime power was extended across North Africa. Recognized for his military genius, and as being among "the most dangerous" of corsairs, Dragut has been referred to as "the greatest pirate warrior of all time", "undoubtedly the most able of all the Turkish leaders", and "the uncrowned king of the Mediterranean". He was nicknamed "the Drawn Sword of Islam". He was described by a French admiral as "a living chart of the Mediterranean, skillful enough on land to be compared to the finest generals of the time" and that "no one was more worthy than he to bear the name of king". Hayreddin Barbarossa, who was his mentor, stated that Dragut was ahead of him "both in fishing and bravery".
The Journal of Sir Walter Scott is a diary which the novelist and poet Walter Scott kept between 1825 and 1832. It records the financial disaster which overtook him at the beginning of 1826, and the efforts he made over the next seven years to pay off his debts by writing bestselling books. Since its first complete publication in 1890 it has attracted high praise, being considered by many critics one of the finest diaries in the language.
Sir John Liddell, KCB, FRS was a Scottish medical doctor who served as Director-General of the Medical Department of the Royal Navy, and senior medical officer of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich.
Bizarro is an unfinished novel or novella by Sir Walter Scott written in the spring of 1832 but not published until 2008. Scott came across the story of the brigand Francesco Moscato, known as "Il Bizarro" in the early nineteenth century, while he was travelling in Italy, trying to recruit his ruined health. It was told to him as true by an English apothecary, resident in Italy, whom Scott considered "a respectable authority".
Events from the year 1832 in Scotland.
Modern authors have attempted to capture the desperation and ferocity of the siege, with varying degrees of success.
Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Addressed to J. G. Lockhart, Esq. (1830) was a study of witchcraft and the supernatural by Sir Walter Scott. A lifelong student of folklore, Scott was able to draw on a wide-ranging collection of primary and secondary sources. His book found many readers throughout the 19th century, and exercised a significant influence in promoting the Victorian vogue for Gothic and ghostly fiction. Though on first publication it met with mixed reviews, it is now recognised as a pioneering work of scientific anthropology, treating of its subject in an acute and analytical way which prefigures later scholarship on the subject, as well as presenting a highly readable collection of supernatural anecdotes.
The letters of Sir Walter Scott, the novelist and poet, range in date from September 1788, when he was aged 17, to June 1832, a few weeks before his death. About 7000 letters from Scott are known, and about 6500 letters addressed to him. The major repository of both is the National Library of Scotland. H. J. C. Grierson's The Letters of Sir Walter Scott (1932–1937), though it includes only about 3500, remains the standard edition.
Walter Scott's "Memoirs", first published as "Memoir of the Early Life of Sir Walter Scott, Written by Himself" and also known as the Ashestiel fragment, is a short autobiographical work describing the author's ancestry, parentage, and life up to the age of 22. It is the most important source of information we have on Scott's early life. It was mainly written between 1808 and 1811, then revised and completed in 1826, and first published posthumously in 1837 as Chapter 1 of J. G. Lockhart's multi-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. It was re-edited in 1981 by David Hewitt.
"The Knight's Tomb" is a short poem of eleven lines written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and published by the author in 1834. The date of composition is uncertain, although an early version was quoted from in print as early as 1820.
one of the best novels he had ever written.