But something is missing here, because these blunt alternatives – was Douglass essentially a Northerner or a Southerner? – do not allow that slave society itself was changing during the antebellum period. And it is by attending to these changes that we can perhaps begin to offer a more plausible, modest alternative to Twain's ‘wild proposition’. Scott may have provided a tempting array of set pieces that helped wealthy Southerners to cling onto the antiquated rituals of a distant past, but he also embedded them in narratives that allowed those readers to imagine ways of adapting to the future – and to embrace changes that even Douglass, to some extent, recognised as improvements.

These narratives are often driven by the need to resolve conflicts represented by pairs of opposing characters who are (to varying degrees) either coarse, impetuous, vengeful and superstitious, on the one hand, or refined, disciplined, conciliatory and rational on the other. Universal human types they may be, but as Scott explains at the beginning of Waverley, our passions are necessarily mediated by ‘the state of manners and laws’ that prevail in a given society. The same impulse that once might have been personified by ‘the baron who wrapped the castle of his competitor in flames, and knocked him on the head as he endeavoured to escape from the conflagration’ is in more recent times likely to be associated with ‘the proud peer who can now only ruin his neighbour according to law, by protracted suits’.

The confrontations between Scott's protagonists often take place against a background of economic and political upheavals in which one ethical culture is giving way to another, described in terms that echo those used by philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment like Adam Ferguson who mapped the contrasting moral contours of ‘rude’ and ‘polished’ nations. In other words, Scott – and this is what makes him one of the first truly historical novelists – anchors his characters in emergent or declining social forces, in a way that, say, Porter's Scottish Chiefs, in which we find similar moral pairings, does not. And while Scott was clear about the benefits of progress, he was not unsympathetic to the values and traditions that it was sweeping aside.