Midwinter: Certain Travellers in Old England — Inside the Classic

A Manuscript Within a Manuscript

The novel's framing device is not merely decorative. The preface describes a 'little bundle' of papers found during a law-firm clearing-out, including a three-quarto-page fair copy and a 'long ill-written manuscript' partly in a broken volume. Buchan emphasizes the materiality of these documents: the paper's quality 'suggested the eighteenth century,' and the loose sheets were torn from printed books. This editorial apparatus creates a sense of authenticity while also signaling that the story is a reconstruction—'obscure in parts, but capable of being told with some pretence of continuity.' The reader is thus positioned as a co-discoverer, piecing together events from incomplete sources. This technique allows Buchan to introduce ambiguity and multiple viewpoints, as the editor must infer connections between the quarto sheets, the manuscript, and the docketed letters.

The Road as Stage: Movement and Encounter

Travel is the novel's organizing principle. The protagonist Alastair arrives at an inn on foot, having spent ten days 'in an older world with a man who is a kind of king there.' The inn itself becomes a stage for encounter: the arrival of Samuel Johnson, the summoning by a mysterious 'her ladyship,' and the detailed description of a meal. Buchan lingers on the specifics of the inn's fare—'thick hare soup,' 'a big dressed pike,' 'roast hill mutton,' and a veal pie with plums—using food to evoke place and character. Johnson's gustatory enthusiasm ('This is as nutty as venison') and his wine-tasting ritual (sampling three bottles, choosing port, dropping sugar into each glass) anchor the scene in concrete detail. The movement between rooms—from the dining table to the summons—mirrors the larger pattern of travel and interruption that structures the narrative.

Johnson's Voice: Argument and Appetite

Samuel Johnson appears not as a historical cameo but as a fully embodied presence, defined by his talk and his appetites. The excerpt captures his characteristic blend of truculence and wit: he dismisses mountain scenery ('I deny any grandeur in the spectacle'), preferring 'a furlong of Cheapside' to elevated bodies. His gestures are violent—'with a wheel of his right hand he swept two glasses to the floor'—and his eating is described with comic hyperbole: 'he ate of it largely, using his fingers, because, as he said, he was short-sighted and afraid of bones.' Johnson's argument with Alastair over the virtues of town versus country, and his refusal to 'rave like a green girl over scenery,' sets up a philosophical tension that runs through the novel. His voice, with its periodic cadences and blunt assertions, provides a counterpoint to the more romantic strains of the Jacobite plot.

Recurring Motifs: Wine, Weather, and the 'Older World'

Throughout the excerpts, certain images recur: wine and food, the contrast between civilization and barbarism, and the idea of an 'older world.' Alastair speaks of having been 'in an older world with a man who is a kind of king there'—a reference to the mysterious Midwinter of the title. Johnson's response is skeptical: 'When a man decries civility and exalts barbarism, it is because he is ill fitted to excel in good society.' This debate is enacted through the novel's structure, which alternates between the comforts of the inn (with its 'bright fire' and 'famous brown sherry') and the wildness of the road. The weather is implied but not described in the excerpts; the title 'Midwinter' suggests a seasonal setting that likely shapes the journey. The recurring attention to what is eaten and drunk—from the editor's sherry to Johnson's port—creates a sensory continuity that anchors the historical fiction in bodily experience.

Readers approaching Midwinter should attend to the interplay between the editorial frame and the main narrative. Buchan's use of discovered documents invites questions about reliability and perspective: whose story is this, and how has it been shaped by the editor? The novel rewards attention to its material details—the food, the wine, the landscape—as much as to its political intrigue. The excerpts suggest a work that is as much about the act of telling as about the events told, a meditation on how history is pieced together from fragments.