Rob Roy (novel) - Background

Background

Rob Roy was written from the spring of 1817 and published on Hogmanay of that year. Like Scott's novel Waverley, it was published anonymously and came in three volumes. The demand for the novel was huge and a whole ship from Leith to London contained nothing but an entire edition of it. Furthermore, Rob Roy was written at a time when many Europeans started regretting colonialism and imperialism, as reports circulated back of horrendous atrocities towards indigenous cultures. It was also a time when debates raged about the slave trade, the British occupation of India, and, more relevant to the novel, the disastrous effect of the Highland Clearances. During this era, William Wordsworth wrote The Conventions of Cintra, praising Spanish and Portuguese resistance to Napoleonic force; Lord Byron would go on to praise Amazonian women in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, inverting the "polite" norms of femininity that the modern "civilized" world placed on them; and, finally, Scott would write about similar events in The Visions of Don Roderick. The term "guerrilla" came about during this period, due to the influence of the Peninsular War.