Scott's "character" of Buckingham in Peveril of the Peak, XXVIII: dialogism, speech/writing, and law

Using Bakhtin's categories of dialogism and intonation, and the speech/writing distinction as elaborated upon by contemporary theorists such as Derrida, to examine Scott's de facto "character" of Buckingham in Peveril of the Peak, XXVIII, illuminates not merely the power relations determining the characterization of Buckingham in Scott's novel but the novel's preoccupation with law and justice as notionally structuring later Caroline England. Studying Scott's presentation of Buckingham in those terms also illuminates the intertextual relations among Dryden, Burnet, and Scott in the fashioning of one of the novel's major characters. Through the characterization of Buckingham, newly understood via Bakhtin's categories and the speech/writing distinction, one can more accurately appreciate how Peveril of the Peak contributes to Scott's almost programmatic attempt, in his novels concerned with seventeenth-century British history, to rehabilitate the Stuart monarchy.