3 November 1894

“A Serious Charge”

William Wallace’s review covered The Raiders, Mad Sir Uchtred and The Lilac Sunbonnet together. The frame was consistently diminishing. Crockett might be a talent in preliminary canter — or he may be “the best work of a second-rate writer who has struck oil.” His achievements, Wallace wrote, “prove nothing as to the future.” Throughout, Stevenson was deployed as the elevated standard Crockett had failed to reach: his style lacked Stevenson’s “distinction”; his female characters fell short of Catriona’s.

Embedded within the review, almost as a secondary matter, came the charge. Wallace noted that Crockett “would do well to deal with the serious charge of plagiarism” regarding the chapter “The Cuif before the Session” in The Lilac Sunbonnet, which had allegedly been lifted from Dugald Graham’s eighteenth-century chapbook Jockey and Maggy’s Courtship (1779, reprinted 1883). He printed parallel columns. He described it as a charge Crockett had “not hitherto attempted to meet.”

The same accusation had already appeared in the Glasgow Herald (where Wallace held an editorship) and the Literary World. This was its third outing. It is worth noting that at the time Wallace was a well-known literary critic and he would continue to critique Crockett’s work for the next decade or so in various publications.

There is a private dimension worth noting. In a letter to his publisher T. Fisher Unwin, written later that month, Crockett observed that Wallace had written a book — Scotland Yesterday (1891) — that had “never I suspect sold 700 copies,” published at the moment The Stickit Minister became a sensation, and that Wallace “has never forgiven its success.” It is evidence, not proof. But it is Crockett’s own voice, and it ought to be heard. Crockett (as often) is slightly off on his dates, but the tone reveals his thoughts about Wallace clearly