0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Rating: 5 out of 5
Guy Mannering is exciting melodrama by the pen of Sir Walter Scott, Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Guy Mannering is the second of the Waverly novels by Scotland's greatest novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). The novel was first published in 1815 cementing quondom poet Scott's best selling fame with the general public.
The novel begins on a dark and stormy night in southwest Scotland during the reign of George III. England and Scotland were united as Great Britain in 1707; one of Scott's motivation for penning the Waverly novels was to introduce English readers to their new fellow citizens north of the border.
Guy Mannering is a young Englishman who finds shelter from the storm at the estate of the Laird of Ellangowan. Mannering enjoys astronomy and astrology. He predicts to Mr. Bertram, owner of Ellangowan, that he will have a son who will face momentous events during his fifth, tenth and twenty-first year of life. That night is born Harry Bertram. A few years later Harry is stolen at the age of five by smugglers aided and abetted by the evil lawyer the odious Glisson.
Sixteen years pass. Mrs Betram has died and her husband the weak laird also sinks into the grave insolvent. The lawyer Glissin obtains the estate. Nothing has been heard of little Harry who had been abducted on the same night his protector on a mountain ride Mr. Frank Kennedy, a government revenue agent, was murdered. Harry Bertram (under the pseudonymn of Mr, Brown) returns to Scotland. He had been raised in Holland and became a British soldier in India serving under Colonel Guy Mannering. Mannering and Henry have quarreled. Henry is in love with Julia Mannering the high spirited daughter of the Colonel. While on his way back home to Ellengowan, Henry meets Mr. Dandie Dinmont a colorful farmer who is being beaten by thugs on a dark road. Henry befriends him spending a week at Charliehope the home of Dinmont. Dinmont raises terriers and a breed is named for him. Harry is captured by smugglers but is rescued by the sybil witch Meg Merrilies who stand over six feet tall
Meanwhile, Colonel Mannering has taken into his care Lucy Betram and Harry's eccentric clergical tutor named
Dominie Sampson. Lucy is in love with Charles Hazelwood a wealthy lawyer whose family does not want him to marry someone of a lower financial strata of society.
Harry shoot Hazelwood in an accident. He is imprisoned but eventually, through the help of his friends, is realeased. Mr. Pleynell, a lawyer, proves to the court that Harry is not an imposter but the real Harry Betram of Ellangowan. He weds Julia and inherits the estate. His sister Lucy becomes the bride of Hazelwood. The evil Glissin and the smugglers who stole Harry away end in grisly deaths.
Guy Mannering is more interesting that Waverly. Scott's dense Scottish dialect will slow you down but there is an excellent glossary of Scottish terms and historical footnotes to make the novel easier to digest for 21st century readers. Scott is an acquired taste but is important as the father of the historical romance in fiction. He induced men, not just women, to become devoted novel readers. His colorful characters influenced writers such as Dickens and he was admired by Jane Austen. I enjoyed this book and you will too!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Rating: 5 out of 5
A Very Good Read, Thursday, January 22, 2009

As a child I struggled with Ivanhoe (though my English teacher's advice to skip the first 30 pages certainly did help). As an adult, I enjoyed Waverly but still found it rather hard going. With this background I approached Guy Mannering with some trepidation but ended up enjoying the book thoroughly. This edition is excellent and the notes and glossary are very helpful. The story moves fairly slowly compared with modern novels but the richness of detail, the topographic descriptions and especially the humor make it memorable. Read it when you have time to enjoy it and don't be put off by the rather archaic Scottish dialect (I was brought up close to the Scottish border but many words and phrases were completely unknown to me)

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Rating: 5 out of 5
"Prodigious, prodigious, pro-di-gi-ous," exclaimed Dominie Abel Sampson., Sunday, November 18, 2007

Sir Walter Scott's second novel GUY MANNERING; OR, THE ASTROLOGER is built around three sets of incidents spread out between +/- 1760 and +/- 1782.

--First incidents: around 1760 Guy Mannering, English, fresh out of Oxford University and on a walking and painting tour, finds shelter from the elements in a manor house called Ellangowan in Galloway in Southwestern Scotland. There he is hosted by its Laird, Godfrey Bertram, who is dining with his companion, the absent-minded, taciturn Presbyterian non-pulpited divine, Dominie Abel Sampson. The night of Mannering's arrival, Lady Bertram gives birth to her first child, a son, Henry, later usually styled Harry.

As a joke, Guy Mannering draws on now passe astrological lore he had picked up from an early mentor. Mannering casts young Harry's horoscope. He had once before cast a horoscope: his girl friend's, and foreseen that that 18 year old would either die or be imprisoned at age 38. He now foresees a similar negative rhythm for the infant Harry: big trouble or great danger at ages 4, 10 and 20. Mannering's horoscope is wrapped up and hung around the infant's neck. It is still there to identify him 20 or 21 years later.

On that birthing occasion we also meet a six-feet tall, broad Lowland Scots-speaking gypsy woman, Meg Merrilies. Meg is come to keep away evil spirits from the first-born son of a family that has allowed loyal Meg's tribe to squat on Bertram land for centuries. Her first words are a chant:

"Canny moment, lucky fit;
Is the lady lighter yet?
Be it lad, or be it lass,
Sign wi' cross, and sain wi' mass." (Book I. Ch. 3)

Meg foresees that young Harry will live a full 70 years but with three major breaks in his upward course, followed by three re-stitchings of his predestined path. We also overhear a meeting between the gypsy woman and a smuggling German sea captain, Dirk Hattaraick.

--Second set of incidents: four years later, around 1764, the ambitious but impoverished Laird Bertram was appointed a justice of the peace. His devious estate manager and lawyer Gilbert Glossin was made a minor justice official. Good natured Bertram's new self-image required him to crack down uncharacteristically both on smugglers from the nearby Isle of Man and on the gypsies whose presence both his ancestors for centuries and he had tolerated. The Laird became great chums with revenue agent Frank Kennedy. Months later Kennedy snatched away from the boy's tutor, Dominie Sampson, four-year old Harry Bertram to let the youngster enjoy watching the arrest of Captain Hattaraick and his crew of smugglers run aground by a British warship.

Witnesses who arrived later found evidence of a scuffle. Kennedy was dead, the boy Harry Bertram had disappeared. The County sheriff (not named) did a thorough investigation and ruled murder. Meg Merrilies was suspected and spent some time in prison before being released. The boy was never found. Shocked by the news, his mother gave birth prematurely to a girl (not named) and died. The murder remained unsolved 17 or more years later. And we have read through the tenth chapter of Volume One of this Three Volume novel.

--Third Set of incidents: 17 years later or so, toward the end of the American Revolution, say 1782, the story resumes. Guy Mannering had married his sweetheart and become Colonel of his regiment in India, winning military fame. His teenage daughter Julia Mannering was wooed in India by a young recruit from Holland named Vanbeest Brown. Guy Mannering erroneously suspected this subordinate of wooing his wife, not his daughter. They fight a duel in which Brown is wounded. But bandits fall upon them and the combatants are separated. Mrs Mannering dies. Colonel Mannering resigns his commission and returns to England, enriched by inheritances. But the injured Brown has survived and eventually returns with the regiment to England -- unknown to Guy Mannering.

Taking leave, love-stricken Vanbeest Brown traces Julia Mannering to Scotland where her father is keen to purchase the old estate of Ellangowan. But immoral lawyer Gilbert Glossin has dispossessed his onetime patron, the old laird, of his ancestral holdings.

Meg Merrilies and Captain Dirk Hattaraick reappear, the latter, it develops, long protected by Glossin. New characters also make their appearance, most notably, the amiable lowland farmer Dandie Dinmont (the terrier breed will be named for him after Scott's novel). Dinmont provides an even warmer reception to young Vanbeest Brown than the Laird had given Guy Mannering two decades earlier.

An austere, wealthy aunt of Miss Lucy Bertram dies in Edinburgh, having been persuaded by none other than Meg Merrilies that somehow her nephew Harry Bertram has survived and will soon return to claim his ancestral home. Guy Mannering, Lucy's host after the sudden death of her father, volunteers to go to Edinburgh for the reading of Lucy's aunt's will. The current sheriff of the shire, Mac-Morlan, gives Colonel Mannering letters of introduction to his predecessor as county sheriff, now a prominent lawyer in Edinburgh. We finally learn that lawyer's name: Paulus Pleydell, Esquire. Pleydell in turn gives Mannering letters of introduction to David Hume and a few other luminaries of the Edinburgh enlightenment. Pleydell also agrees to represent Dandie Dinmont in a property suit.

All of the major players are now linked, in place and the plot gathers speed.

The greatest family of the shire, the Hazelwoods, also come into play. The wealthy Laird of Hazelwood begins to think highly of the crooked lawyer Glossin. The laird's son, Charles, falls in love with Miss Lucy Bertram. It slowly seems likely that Vanbeest Brown is Lucy's missing older brother Harry Bertram, though this is first surmised only by lawyer Glossin and Harry's loyal old protectress, the gypsy Meg Merrilies.

In a scuffle Brown/Bertram accidentally wounds Lucy's admirer Charles Hazelwood. All players shortly come together in a fiery ending so complicated that I had best leave its fun and denouements entirely to you.

Themes embedded in GUY MANNERING occur in other Walter Scott works as well: gypsies, inter-generational tensions, a missing heir, the role of cities and lawyers in accelerating the sunset of the "auld ways" of feudal Scotland, the virtual impossibility of a poor untitled man marrying a rich titled girl -- or vice versa. Once encountered, some of the characters can never be forgotten, notably Meg Merrilies, Dandie Dinmont and taciturn Dominie Sampson with his repeated exclamation of "pro-di-gi-ous!"

And we see old superstitions still holding sway a hundred or so country miles west of contrasting Edinburgh, with its immortal 50 year ascendancy in art, learning and science comparable only to eras of Periclean Athens and Medici Florence. -OOO-

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

Rating: 5 out of 5
A fun hodge-podge of a novel (no spoilers here!), Monday, February 05, 2007

I read Walter Scott for atmosphere, for mood, for humor and characterization and perhaps most of all, to listen to his voice. Scott has an endearingly present narrative persona--he's that chatty, knowledgeable, and even slightly eccentric uncle, the one with all the hobbies and interests and entirely too many books, who seems to be a kind of expert on every subject. The best Scott novels tap into this feeling of cozy kinship and exploit it, and in the end this is often more important than the story proper.

More than many other Waverley novels, more than Waverley itself certainly, Scott's second novel, Guy Mannering (1815), excels at producing this complicated, friendly, peculiar narrative hodge-podge. There's a bit of everything here, from romantic scenery to sharp satire, from a bookish name-dropping to curse-muttering gypsies. There's smugglers and kidnappers, astrologers and cranks, the Scottish lowlands and the English lake district. Like all Scott, there's old and new joyfully intermingled--a birth mystery worthy of Tom Jones yet a good deal of what would become Treasure Island. More Gothic and less historical than Waverley, more fun than Heart of Midlothian, less forced than Ivanhoe, this novel was an unexpected treat. It remains underrated and understudied.

Consider that Scott dashed this novel out in six weeks, and you'll get some idea of both his own considerable talents and also the casualness, almost carelessness of its tone. Like all of his novels, Guy Mannering should be imbibed slowly, savored rather than gulped. Kudos to Penguin Classics for tapping into the Edinburgh Edition and providing us with a cheap, well-annotated text of this neglected classic!

Addendum: Someone asked me, so I thought I'd add: this is the novel featuring Dandy Dinmont, for whom the popular terrier is named.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Rating: 4 out of 5
Great Story, Thursday, September 14, 2006

There are some appalling cliches here - the mysterious gypsy, a lost infant (who turns up as a strapping handsome adult, but who still has the identifying talisman tied around his neck) - but my guess is that these weren't such cliches back in 1805 (so this predates Il Trovatore by a few decades). Even so I was completely taken with this, and found the last 100 pages to be very compelling reading, put down very reluctantly.