Wandering Tales

Abstract

Extracted from Redgauntlet, ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’ is often presented in anthologies and formal surveys as the first modern short story in English, loosely defined. It is not even Scott’s first major short story. That would be ‘The Fortunes of Martin Waldeck’, an interpolated tale included in the second volume of his third novel, The Antiquary. Like ‘Wandering Willie’s Tale’, ‘Martin Waldeck’ has been anthologised as a self-contained work, though far less frequently. After that, two pieces appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine (1817–18) that have been securely attributed to Scott: ‘Alarming Increase of Depravity Among Animals’ and ‘Phantasmagoria’. In The Shorter Fiction volume for the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, Graham Tulloch and Judy King include an even earlier work, ‘The Inferno of Altisidora’ (Edinburgh Annual Register, 1811), as well as ‘Christopher Corduroy’ (The Sale-Room, 1817). Resembling eighteenth-century periodical sketches, they are not short stories as such. Read as sketch-like tales, though, they can ground our understanding of Scott’s early experimentation in the shorter form.