The Heart of Mid-Lothian emerges as a kind of crisis in Scott's writing. In Graham McMaster's schema, it is the point where his optimism ends and his disillusionment begins. More pertinent to this discussion, however, it can be seen as the moment where the question of language assumes a new urgency for the Author of Waverley, his focus moving from the question of how to capture the ‘ultimate referent’ of the past to one of how the novelist may escape the prison house of language wrought by it. As a result the novels of the 1820s see a significant shift both in terms of the subject matter of Scott's fiction and the complexity with which he approaches the topic of the relationships between meaning and discourse and the implications of these for the novelist. As Scott's fiction moves towards a more distant past he grapples with new questions concerning how, or if, that past might best be articulated. Most significantly in terms of the present study, however, the novels of this period see an increasing interest in the question that was becoming increasingly vexed in his work; the ways in which language operates (or fails to operate) and the limits of its communicative possibilities.