Midwinter: Certain Travellers in Old England is a 1923 historical novel by John Buchan. It is set in rural England during the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, during which Charles Stuart's army of Scottish highlanders advanced into England and got as far south as Derby.
The protagonist is Alastair Maclean, a Jacobite officer engaged in a a secret mission to raise support for the Jacobite cause in England.
Tropes:
- Framing Device: The novel begins with the twentieth-century discovery of a manuscript that tells the protagonist's story, with the added bonus that it explains why a particular period of Samuel Johnson's life is missing from Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (the time of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, to be precise). The story itself is the supposed manuscript, fleshed out by the discoverer for publication.
- Historical Domain Character: Samuel Johnson is the most obvious, but we also have James Oglethorpe (a British Army general at the time of the '45), Lord Cornbury (a politician suspected of being a Jacobite sympathiser) and the Duchess of Queensbury.
