Died: 21 September 1832
(Complications from a series of strokes)
Best Known As: The author of Ivanhoe
Walter Scott was a superstar novelist of the early 19th century, and a pioneer in the art of the historical novel. His special interest was Scotland's history and culture; his first literary success was a collection of Scottish ballads and narrative poems, the five-volume Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03). Over the next 30 years he produced a tremendous amount of novels, biographies, stories and poems. The best-known is probably Ivanhoe (1819), a romantic tale of chivalry with a cast that included Richard the Lion-Hearted and Robin Hood. Other works include The Lady of the Lake (1810), the Waverly novels (first published in 1814), Rob Roy (1818), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and the epic poem Marmion (1808) which includes his famous ballad Lochinvar. Never a prudent man with money, Scott suffered a calamity when the publishing firm of which he was part-owner went bankrupt in 1826. Scott resolved to pay off the debt by writing, but the tremendous exertion ruined his health and led to his death in 1832.
Scott's estate on the River Tweed was known as Abbotsford... The Waverly novels were published anonymously, and not until 1827 did Scott admit his authorship... American abolitionist Frederick Douglass was a former slave who took his name from Scott's 1810 book The Lady Of the Lake... The title of the same book was altered ironically by Raymond Chandler for his 1943 murder mystery The Lady In the Lake.
(click to enlarge) Sir Walter Scott, detail of an oil painting by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, 1824; in the National (credit: Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London)
(born Aug. 15, 1771, Edinburgh, Scot. — died Sept. 21, 1832, Abbotsford, Roxburgh) Scottish writer, often considered both the inventor and the greatest practitioner of the historical novel. From childhood Scott was familiar with stories of the Border region of Scotland. Apprenticed to his father, a lawyer, in 1786, he later became sheriff depute of Selkirk and clerk to the Court of Session in Edinburgh. His interest in border ballads led to the collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802 – 03). His first original poetic romance, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), established his reputation; The Lady of the Lake (1810) was his most successful contribution to the genre. He produced editions of the works of John Dryden, 18 vol. (1808), and Jonathan Swift, 19 vol. (1814). Troubled with debt, from 1813 he wrote in part to make money. He tired of narrative poetry and turned to prose romances. The extremely popular series now known as the Waverley novels consists of more than two dozen works dealing with Scottish history, including the masterpieces Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818). He drew on English history and other themes for Ivanhoe (1819), Kenilworth (1821), and Quentin Durward (1823). All his novels were published anonymously until 1827.
The Scottish novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) is the acknowledged master of the historical novel. He was one of the most influential authors of modern times.
Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh on Aug. 15, 1771, the son of a lawyer with a long family tradition in law. By birth Scott was connected with both the rising middle class of Britain and the aristocratic Scottish heritage then passing into history. He was educated at Edinburgh University and prepared for a career in law, but his avocations were history and literature. He read widely in English and Continental literatures, particularly medieval and Renaissance chivalric romances, German romantic poetry and fiction, and the narrative folk poems known as ballads.
Translations and Poetry
From these intense interests Scott's earliest publications derived: a translation of J. W. von Goethe's play Götz von Berlichingen (1799) and other translations from German; Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-1803), a collection of ballads that generated great interest in folk poetry; and a succession of narrative poems, mainly of chivalric or historical action. These poems - including The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810) - became best sellers, and Scott established his first literary reputation as a poet of the romantic school.
During these years Scott also pursued a legal career, rising to the official position of clerk of the Court of Session. His enormous energies allowed him to engage in scholarly and journalistic activities. His edition and biography of John Dryden, the English poet and dramatist, published in 1808, remains of value. His politically motivated founding of the Quarterly Review, a literary journal, helped make Edinburgh the most influential center of British intellectual life outside London. In these years Scott also began to create an estate, Abbotsford, to reflect his antiquarian interests. He modeled its furnishings and architecture on the traditions of the medieval era.
Waverley Novels
When sales of his verse narrative Rokeby (1813) declined and a new poet, Lord Byron, appeared on the literary scene, Scott began to develop another of his many capacities. Picking up the fragment of a novel he had begun in 1805, he tried his hand at fiction, and his most fully characteristic novel, Waverley (1814), resulted. As its subtitle, 'Tis Sixty Years Since, established, Waverley was a historical novel about the 1745 rebellion to restore the Stuart line to the British throne. By leading a young and naive Englishman through a wide range of Scottish classes, political factions, and cultural modes, Scott built up a substantial picture of an entire nation's life at a dramatic historical juncture.
The success of Waverley established Scott in the career of a novelist, but it did not establish his name in that role. Unwilling to stake too much on his venture into fiction, he had published Waverley anonymously. Finding that the mask of anonymity had stimulated public interest, Scott signed his subsequent novels "by the Author of Waverley." This signature became his trademark, the novels bearing it being called the "Waverley" novels. The Waverley novels exercised enormous fascination not only for Scots and Englishmen but also throughout the Continent. These novels provided the characters and plots for innumerable stories, plays, and operas, the most famous of which is Gaetano Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor.
Scott's achievement as a novelist can best be summarized by grouping his novels according to their themes and settings. His first successes were largely in the realm of Scottish history. In the order of their chronological setting, the Scottish novels are Castle Dangerous (1832) and The Fair Maid of Perth (1828), both set in the 14th century; The Monastery and The Abbot (both 1820), its sequel, set during the 16th century's religious upheavals; A Legend of Montrose (1819) and Old Mortality (1816), which deal with the campaigns of the 17th-century civil wars; and a series of novels of the Jacobite (Stuart) rebellions of the 18th century - Rob Roy (1817), Waverley, and Redgauntlet (1824). Other Scottish novels indirectly related to historical themes are The Black Dwarf (1816), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and The Pirate (1822). Scott also wrote a group of novels set in nearly contemporary times: Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), and St. Ronan's Well (1824).
English Novels
At a critical point of his career, Scott turned to English history for his subject matter. Critics are generally agreed that the English (and Continental) novels, mainly set in medieval times, are inferior in social and psychological realism, but they include Scott's most enduringly popular works. He began with Ivanhoe (1820) and then wrote three other novels set in the period of the Crusades: The Talisman (1825), The Betrothed (1825), and Count Robert of Paris (1832). Quentin Durward (1823) and Anne of Geierstein (1829) deal with the later Middle Ages, and the Renaissance is represented by Kenilworth (1821) and The Fortunes of Nigel (1822). The English phases of the civil-war and Restoration periods were rendered in Woodstock (1826) and Peveril of the Peak (1822), respectively.
So massive a literary corpus cannot be reduced to broad generalizations. Most critics and readers seem to prefer Scott's early novels. On the whole, Scott's work is flawed by sentimentality and rhetoric, but his novels command the power to put modern readers in touch with men of the past.
Scott's later years were clouded by illness, throughout which he continued to write. He spent the energies of his last years trying to write enough to recover honorably from the bankruptcy of a publishing firm in which he had invested heavily. He died at Abbotsford on Sept. 21, 1832.
Further Reading
The authorized biography by Scott's son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (3 vols., 1837-1838), has been supplemented by the definitive, scholarly work of Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown (2 vols., 1970), which combines biography and criticism. The most thorough critical examination of the novels is Francis R. Hart, Scott's Novels: The Plotting of Historical Survival (1966). Another approach is presented in Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels (1963). The most influential recent interpretation is that of George Lukács, The Historical Novel (1962).
Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832). Poet, novelist, man of letters. Scott distilled the literary and historical culture of the Scottish Enlightenment into the first great European works of historical fiction. A patriot and publicist, he placed Scotland on the international tourist map as a land of enlightenment and romance. The son of an Edinburgh lawyer, Scott remained an active lawyer for the rest of his life, becoming latterly sheriff depute of Selkirk and principal clerk of Session. He first made his mark as a poet, collecting, editing, and adapting border ballads and later writing enormously popular narrative poems of which the Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808) are probably the best. His career as a novelist began in 1814 with the publication of Waverley. He built Abbotsford out of his substantial profits, turning it into an extraordinary physical embodiment of his taste for antiquities, real and phoney.
Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832), novelist, poet, and essayist of the romantic period, concerned with Scottish Border legends and traditions throughout his lifetime. His Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802–3) was a collection of folk and literary ballads in three volumes and contained his important early essay ‘The Fairies of Popular Superstition’. While the elfin people play a role in his poetry, notably in ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, they and their lore are featured even more prominently in his novels. The Monastery (1820) discusses the nature of elemental spirits and presents a fairy‐sylph in the form of the White Lady of Avenel. A fairy changeling appears in Peveril of the Peak (1822), and a Rumpelstiltskin‐like supernatural dwarf in The Pirate (1822). Discussions of fairy lore permeate other novels.
Scott's most important contribution, however, is to folklore analysis and theory. In his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1820), he examines the possible origins of the fairies, the connections between fairies and witches, the evidence for fairy abductions, and the ways of avoiding elfin malice. He suggests a rational and historical basis for supernatural beliefs, thus popularizing the euhemerist position. He plays a significant role in legitimizing the 19th‐century study of fairies.
Bibliography
Dorson, Richard M., The British Folklorists (1968).
Parsons, Coleman O., Witchcraft and Demonology in Scott's Fiction (1964).
Silver, Carole G., Strange and Secret Peoples (1998).
Sir Walter Scott, the author of Ivanhoe and "Lochinvar," was born on this date in 1771. Known as the father of the historical novel, Scott didn't even claim credit for his earliest novels, the Waverley novels, until several years after they were first published. He wrote ballads and poems, including "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), "Marmion" (1808 – including the famous verse on Lochinvar) and "The Lady of the Lake" (1810).
Scott, Sir Walter, 1771-1832, Scottish novelist and poet, b. Edinburgh. He is considered the father of both the regional and the historical novel.
Early Life and Works
After an apprenticeship in his father's law office Scott was admitted (1792) to the bar. In 1799 he was made sheriff-deputy of Selkirkshire. His first published works (1796) were translations of two German ballads by Bürger, followed by a translation (1799) of Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen. Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (2 vol., 1802; enl. ed., 3 vol., 1803) was an impressive collection of old ballads with introductions and notes. The Lay of the Last Minstrel, his first major poem, appeared in 1805 and was followed by Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810). In 1812 Scott received a court clerkship that assured him a moderate, steady income.
Novels
His first novel, Waverley (1814), was an immediate success. There followed the "Waverley novels"-romances of Scottish life that reveal Scott's great storytelling gift and his talent for vivid characterization. They include Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), The Black Dwarf (1816), Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1818), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and The Legend of Montrose (1819).
Ivanhoe (1820), Scott's first prose reconstruction of a time long past, is a complicated romance set in 12th-century England. His public acclaim grew, and in 1820 Scott was made a baronet. Most of his following novels were of the Ivanhoe style of reconstructed history. They include The Monastery (1820), The Abbot (1820), Kenilworth (1821), The Pirate (1822), The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), Peveril of the Peak (1822), Quentin Durward (1823), The Betrothed (1825), and The Talisman (1825). With St. Ronan's Well (1824), Scott abandoned the historical style and attempted a novel of manners, but in Redgauntlet (1824) he reverted to the background and treatment of his early novels.
Later Life and Works
In 1825 Scott was ruined financially. He had assumed responsibility for the Ballantyne printing firm in 1813 (previously, for a brief time, he had run it as a publishing house), and subsequently he had met Ballantyne's expenses out of advances from his publishers, Constable and Company. In 1825 an English depression brought ruin to both Constable and Ballantyne's. Refusing to go through bankruptcy, Scott assigned to a trust his property and income in excess of his official salary and set out to pay his debt and much of Constable's.
The next few years' work included Woodstock (1826), a life of Napoleon (1827), Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), The Fair Maid of Perth (1828), and Anne of Geierstein (1829). Scott's health began to fail in 1830. After finishing (1831) Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous, he went abroad, returning to Abbotsford, his estate, in 1832, the year of his death. The remainder of the debt he had assumed was paid from the earnings of his books.
Assessment
Scott's narrative poems introduced a form of verse tale that won great popularity; his lyrics and ballads, such as "Lochinvar" and "Proud Maisie," are masterly in feeling and technique. He was a very prolific and popular novelist. Although his fictional heroes now seem wooden and his plots mechanical, Scott excelled in recreating the spirit of great historical events and in painting realistic pictures of Scottish life.
Bibliography
See his journal, ed. by W. E. K. Anderson (1972); his letters, ed. by Sir H. J. C. Grierson (12 vol., 1932-37); biographies by his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart (10 vol., 1902) and E. Johnson (2 vol., 1970); studies by A. O. J. Cockshut (1969), R. Mayhead (1973), J. Millgate (1984), J. Wilt (1986), J. Kerr (1989), and A. N. Wilson (1989).
"Adversity is, to me at least, a tonic and a bracer."
"The willow which bends to the tempest, often escapes better than the oak which resists it; and so in great calamities, it sometimes happens that light and frivolous spirits recover their elasticity and presence of mind sooner than those of a loftier character."
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."
"Is death the last step? No, it is the final awakening."
"Death -- the last sleep? No, it is the final awakening."
"Come he slow or come he fast. It is but death who comes at last."
Career Highlights: The Adventures of Robin Hood, Quentin Durward, Ivanhoe
First Major Screen Credit: Rebecca the Jewess (1913)
Biography
Sir Walter Scott was the most popular English novelist of the late 18th and early 19th century, and the most enduring of his books -- Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, and Quentin Durward -- have become the sources for notable adventure movies and television shows. Additionally, as a poet, he was one of the most popular of his age, and work in that area also inspired filmmakers since the second decade of the 20th century.
Scott was born in 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the fourth of five surviving children out of 12. All but one of his four brothers ended up in the military or the navy, and two, at least, served with considerable distinction. The younger Walter Scott (his father had the same name) was lame in his right leg, probably as a result of what would later be identified as polio; none of the established treatments of the era, including wrapping the child in the skin of a freshly killed sheep, worked to cure him. He grew up steeped in the songs and stories of his ancestors, especially of the warriors on his mother's side, and also was exposed to literature and theater (including Shakespeare's plays). Scott was an indifferent student, but despite his physical impediment, he enthusiastically embraced boxing, among other physical activities. His special skill, however, was in his ability to read and retain literature in his memory, including large portions of Edmund Spenser's epic poetry, before reaching his teens. In contrast to most learned men of his era, in college Scott neglected learning Greek and gave up Latin, though he learned some Italian, Spanish, and French -- rather anticipating modern scholars' educational focus. He was, however, frustrated in his goals of becoming a painter and a musician.
Scott studied the law and entered the profession in the 1790s. He was known in this period as a gifted speaker, with a great storehouse of arcane knowledge of the past, especially out of Scottish history, but not limited to that field. He also eagerly absorbed stories from those he met, who'd met such renowned figures as Rob Roy on the field of honor, and he did cross paths once with the legendary Robert Burns. By his mid-twenties, Scott was a popular storyteller, even as he earned his living as an attorney. He spent his spare time tramping around the countryside collecting ballads and mementos of wars fought long ago, and became a popular visitor in the hinterlands. He was, in his sympathies, a monarchist, and was appalled by the French Revolution; despite his lameness, he was also an enthusiastic volunteer in various militias organized for defense. Scott was still developing a successful practice when literature beckoned; he published translations of works from other languages and some ballads that were well received. It was in 1800 that he began work on the project that would establish him in literary circles -- he assembled a collection eventually known as the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, printed by his longtime friend James Ballantyne in 1802. Two volumes from Ballantyne led to interest from a much bigger house, Longman, which bought out the rights -- for the huge sum of 500 pounds -- and those to a third volume, all of which were successful printed during the early years of the 19th century.
By 1804, Scott had decided to turn the focus of his life from law to literature. His work now had a major following and was bid on and bought as fast as he produced it, songs, ballads, poems, and stories alike. The most notable of these was The Lady in the Lake (1810). He and Ballantyne became partners in a publishing concern that became Scott's undoing over the next decade. In much the same way that rock bands that founded their own labels in the 1960s and 1970s discovered that there was more to being in the music business than simply making popular music, Scott found that, popular as his work was, it was far more difficult to find and cultivate authors of similar appeal. He also lost money on land acquisitions, and the publication of a 19-volume collection of Jonathan Swift's work had not sold nearly as well as anticipated. By sheer luck, in the early months of 1814, Scott had found a manuscript that he'd abandoned nearly a decade earlier and was impressed with the work he'd previously shunned. This was Waverley, published under a pseudonym, as were all of his books for the next decade. Scott's aliases included Jebediah Cleisbotham, Crystal Croftangry, Malachi Malgrowther, and Lawrence Templeton.
Set against the background of the Scottish rebellion of 1745, and telling a heroic tale of patriotism, the first of the Waverley novels sold out its complete first printing in five weeks, and its popularity only grew from there. In the midst of writing articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica on theater and other essays and nonfiction works to keep himself afloat financially, Scott's fiction was suddenly and rapidly making his financial losses good. He wrote nine Waverley novels during the next five years, and they sold well not only initially but over time as well -- Rob Roy sold out its complete first printing of 10,000 copies in just 14 days, and was still being read 200 years later. Across the ensuing decades, the Waverley novels became a cash cow for Scott and his publishers and associates. He became something of an industry unto himself, akin to what J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen King, and Anne Rice, among others, have become in more recent times. There was also a good deal of ego involved. More than one reader who had more than passing knowledge of the author saw in the hero Guy Mannering many attributes that could be found in Scott himself. All of Scott's writing during this period was tremendously popular, and remained so for centuries -- Rob Roy (1817) for one, and The Bride of Lammermoor (1818), based on the real-life Miss Janet Dalrymple, found new life on the operatic stage when it served as the basis for Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.
Scott's greatest success, however, was Ivanhoe (1819). Set in medieval England and telling of the struggle between Saxon and Norman Britons, it became Scott's biggest success in England (achieving far greater popularity there than any of his Scottish-subject works and, by extension, vast popularity in America). It marked the peak of his critical reputation as well as his popularity and, ironically enough, came at the end of a period of terribly ill health for the author, who wrote his most enduring works during three years of terrible pain and seeming inexorable decline presaging death. Instead, he recovered -- sufficiently to be created a baronet by the and, over the next few years, authored books that were sometimes (as in the case of Quentin Durward) received well in one country (France, in the latter case) or another, but never as universally as his earlier books. Scott's later life was marred by financial setbacks that greatly complicated his very lavish lifestyle, which included a lot of expensive entertaining, and he also experienced a rapid decline in popularity, especially in Scotland and England. He alleviated some of these problems with a new edition of his complete works up to that time, with new autobiographical introductions, in 1827, but his final years were spent in greater uncertainty than one would have anticipated of a man of his renown and lifetime earnings.
For all of his popularity, Scott had his detractors, and not just among the academics who looked down their noses at any popular literature. In the decades after his death, he fell out of favor with readers because of his romanticism, and some prominent readers were even more harsh. Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), for one, despised the brand of romanticism of England's past embodied by Scott's historical novels; he believed that it was the romanticism represented by Scott and his work, embraced by the leaders and property owners of the Southern states, that had helped them justify to themselves their clinging to a slave-owning social order, as well as emboldened them to attempt secession from the United States. In his magnum opus, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Clemens included a scene in which Huck and Jim are going down the river and find a steamboat sinking by the bow, and the steamboat's name was...the Walter Scott. Beyond their sheer familiarity and attractiveness as titles, Scott's works, with their romanticized, often pageant-filled view of the past, accounts of heroism, and struggles against injustice, lent themselves to dramatizations, and the movie industry lost no time in adapting his works once it had achieved the technical capability to do so. The fact that this achievement also postdated the expiration of Scott's copyrights made his works especially attractive to producers.
The first-known adaptation of one of Scott's novels came in 1909 with The Bride of Lammermoor: A Tragedy of Bonnie Scotland, by J. Stuart Blackton, with Annette Kellerman and Maurice Costello. Lochinvar and Kenilworth followed that same year, and the first film versions of Rob Roy and Ivanhoe (retitled Rebecca the Jewess for the United States), the latter starring Lauderdale Maitland and Ethel Bracewell, appeared in 1913. There were also several films inspired by the poem The Lady in the Lake, starting in the teens. The notable adaptations of the sound era came much later, in the postwar period. Piero Ballerini directed a film version of the Donizetti opera Lucia di Lammermoor in 1946, with a young, uncredited Gina Lollobrigida in the cast, but the best screen adaptation of Scott came six years later when MGM and director Richard Thorpe adapted Ivanhoe to the screen, starring Robert Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor, and George Sanders. That movie was not only a huge critical and financial success, but was arguably the best costume drama ever released by MGM, and one of the finest ever produced by Hollywood (though it should be said that it was filmed in England). MGM's success proved more the exception than the rule, however, and a pair of less critically and commercially successful Scott adaptations, Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue and King Richard and the Crusaders (based on Scott's 1825 The Talisman) (both 1954) dampened Hollywood's enthusiasm for the author. A short-lived television series based on Ivanhoe, produced by Sir Lew Grade and starring Roger Moore, also failed to capture the imagination of viewers.
The social changes of the 1960s and the heightened degree of cynicism that permeated Western society, especially in the United States, left Scott's work, with its tales of heroism and injustices righted and redeemed, quaintly out-of-fashion. Subsequent adaptations have been confined to television, mostly from England. One suspects, however, that somewhere a producer may someday come out with a Xena- or Hercules-type version of Ivanhoe, though if they do, it's likely they'll give it a more impassioned title such as "The Saxon Avenger." Ironically, it fell to two filmmakers usually thought of as too sophisticated to bother about Scott, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, to provide the most sophisticated use of his poetry onscreen. In their magnum wartime opus A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven, 1946), at the denouement, a heavenly judge played by Abraham Sofaer quotes Scott by name, and the lines, "Love rules the court, the camp, the grove/And men below, and saints above/For love is heaven, and heaven is love," from The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), giving the movie an unexpectedly reassuring and witty conclusion. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) was a prolific Scottishhistorical novelist and poet, popular throughout Europe during his time. Scott was particularly associated with Toryism.
Scott's childhood at Sandyknowe farm, seen across the lochan from Smailholm Tower, introduced him to the Borders.
Born in College Wynd in the Old Town of Edinburgh in 1771, the son of a solicitor, Scott survived a childhood bout of polio in 1773 that left him lame. To cure his lameness he was sent in 1773 to live in the rural Borders region at his grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe, adjacent to the ruin of Smailholm Tower, the earlier family home. Here he was taught to read by his aunt Jenny, and learned from her the speech patterns and many of the tales and legends that characterized much of his work. In January 1775 he returned to Edinburgh, and that summer went with his aunt Jenny to take spa treatment at Bath in England, where they lived at 6 South Parade.[1] In the winter of 1776 he went back to Sandyknowe, with another attempt at a water cure at Prestonpans during the following summer.[2]
In 1778 Scott returned to Edinburgh for private education to prepare him for school, and in October 1779 he began at the Royal High School of Edinburgh. He was now well able to walk and explore the city and the surrounding countryside. His reading included chivalric romances, poems, history and travel books. He was given private tuition by James Mitchell in arithmetic and writing, and learned from him the history of the Kirk with emphasis on the Covenanters. After finishing school he was sent to stay for six months with his aunt Jenny in Kelso, attending the local Grammar School where he met James Ballantyne who later became his business partner and printed his books.[3]
Thomas Blacklock
Robert Burns
Scott's meeting with Blacklock and Burns
Scott began studying classics at the University of Edinburgh in November 1783, at the age of only 12, a year or so younger than most of his fellow students. In March 1786 he began an apprenticeship in his father's office, to become a Writer to the Signet. While at the university Scott had become a friend of Adam Ferguson, the son of Professor Adam Ferguson who hosted literary salons. Scott met the blind poet Thomas Blacklock who lent him books as well as introducing him to James Macpherson's Ossian cycle of poems. During the winter of 1786–87 the 15-year-old Scott saw Robert Burns at one of these salons, for what was to be their only meeting. When Burns noticed a print illustrating the poem "The Justice of the Peace" and asked who had written the poem, only Scott knew that it was by John Langhorne, and was thanked by Burns.[4] When it was decided that he would become a lawyer he returned to the university to study law, first taking classes in Moral Philosophy and Universal History in 1789–90.[3]
After completing his studies in law, he became a lawyer in Edinburgh. As a lawyer's clerk he made his first visit to the Scottish Highlands directing an eviction. He was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1792. He had an unsuccessful love suit with Williamina Belsches of Fettercairn, who married Sir William Forbes, 6th Baronet.
At the age of 25 he began dabbling in writing, translating works from German, his first publication being rhymed versions of ballads by Bürger in 1796. He then published a three-volume set of collected Scottish ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. This was the first sign of his interest in Scottish history from a literary standpoint.
Scott then became an ardent volunteer in the yeomanry and on one of his "raids" he met at Gilsland Spa Margaret Genevieve Charpentier (or Charpenter), daughter of Jean Charpentier of Lyon in France, whom he married in 1797. They had five children. In 1799 he was appointed Sheriff-Deputy of the County of Selkirk, based in the Royal Burgh of Selkirk.
In his early married days Scott had a decent living from his earnings at the law, his salary as Sheriff-Deputy, his wife's income, some revenue from his writing and his share of his father's rather meagre estate.
After Scott had founded a printing press, his poetry, beginning with The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, brought him fame. He published other poems over the next ten years, including the popular The Lady of the Lake, printed in 1810 and set in the Trossachs. Portions of the German translation of this work were set to music by Franz Schubert. One of these songs, Ellens dritter Gesang, is popularly labelled as "Schubert's Ave Maria".
Another work from this period, Marmion, produced some of his most quoted (and mis-attributed) lines. Canto VI. Stanza 17 reads:
Yet Clare's sharp questions must I shun,
Must separate Constance from the nun
Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
A Palmer too! No wonder why
I felt rebuked beneath his eye;
In 1809 his sympathies led him to become a co-founder of the Quarterly Review, a review journal to which he made several anonymous contributions.
When the press became embroiled in pecuniary difficulties, Scott set out in 1814 to write a cash-cow. The result was Waverley, a novel that did not name its author. It was a tale of the "Forty-Five" Jacobite rising in the Kingdom of Great Britain with its English protagonist Edward Waverley, by his Tory upbringing sympathetic to Jacobitism, becoming enmeshed in events but eventually choosing Hanoverian respectability. The novel met with considerable success. There followed a succession of novels over the next five years, each with a Scottish historical setting. Mindful of his reputation as a poet, he maintained the anonymous habit he had begun with Waverley, always publishing the novels under the name Author of Waverley or attributed as "Tales of..." with no author. Even when it was clear that there would be no harm in coming out into the open he maintained the façade, apparently out of a sense of fun. During this time the nickname The Wizard of the North was popularly applied to the mysterious best-selling writer. His identity as the author of the novels was widely rumoured, and in 1815 Scott was given the honour of dining with George, Prince Regent, who wanted to meet "the author of Waverley".
In 1819 he broke away from writing about Scotland with Ivanhoe, a historical romance set in 12th-century England. It too was a runaway success and he wrote several books along the same lines. Among other things the book is noteworthy for having a very sympathetic Jewish major character, Rebecca, considered by many critics to be the book's real heroine — relevant to the fact that the book was published at a time when the struggle for the Emancipation of the Jews in England was gathering momentum.
Scott wrote "The Bride of Lammermoor", a novel based on a true story of two lovers. In the novel, Lucie Ashton and Edgar Ravenswood exchange vows, but when Lucie's mother discovers that her daughter wants to wed an enemy of their family, she intervenes and forces her daughter to marry Sir Arthur Bucklaw, who has just inherited a large sum of money on the death of his aunt. On their wedding night, Lucie goes insane and stabs the bridegroom, and succumbing to insanity, dies. Donizetti's opera "Lucia di Lamermoor" was based on Scott's novel.
Scott included little in the way of punctuation in his drafts, which he left to the printers to supply.[6]
He eventually acknowledged that he was the author of the Waverley novels in 1827.[7]
Financial woes
Beginning in 1825 he went into dire financial straits again, as his company nearly collapsed. Rather than declare bankruptcy he placed his home, Abbotsford House, and income into a trust belonging to his creditors, and proceeded to write his way out of debt. He kept up his prodigious output of fiction (as well as producing a biography of Napoléon Bonaparte) until 1831. By then his health was failing, and he died at Abbotsford in 1832. Though he died in debt his novels continued to sell, and he made good his debts from beyond the grave. He was buried in Dryburgh Abbey where nearby there is a large statue of William Wallace, one of Scotland's many romanticised historical figures.
When Scott was a boy he sometimes travelled with his father from Selkirk to Melrose in the Border Country where some of his novels are set. At a certain spot the old gentleman would stop the carriage and take his son to a stone on the site of the battle of Melrose (1526). Not far away was a little farm called Cartleyhole, and this he eventually purchased. The farmhouse developed into a wonderful home that has been likened to a fairy palace. Through windows enriched with the insignia of heraldry the sun shone on suits of armour, trophies of the chase, a library of over 9,000 volumes,[8] fine furniture, and still finer pictures. Panelling of oak and cedar and carved ceilings relieved by coats of arms in their correct colour added to the beauty of the house. More land was purchased until Scott owned nearly 1,000 acres (4 km²), and it is estimated that the building cost him over £25,000. A neighbouring Roman road with a ford used in olden days by the abbots of Melrose suggested the name of Abbotsford.
Among the early critics of Scott was Mark Twain, who blamed Scott's "romanticization of battle" for what he saw as the South's decision to fight the American Civil War. Twain's ridiculing of chivalry in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in which the main character repeatedly utters "great Scott" as an oath, is considered as targeting Scott's books. Twain also targeted Scott in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where he names a sinking boat the "Walter Scott".
Sir Walter Scott's statue at his memorial in Edinburgh
From being one of the most popular novelists of the 19th century,[9] Scott suffered from a disastrous decline in popularity after the First World War. The tone was set in E.M. Forster's classic Aspects of the Novel (1927), where Scott was savaged as being a clumsy writer who wrote slapdash badly-plotted novels. Scott also suffered from the rising star of Jane Austen. Considered merely an entertaining "woman's novelist" in the 19th century, in the 20th Austen began to be seen as perhaps the major English novelist of the first few decades of the 19th century. As Austen's star rose Scott's sank, although, ironically, he had been one of the few male writers of his time to recognize Austen's genius.
Scott's ponderousness and prolixity were out of step with Modernist sensibilities. Nevertheless, he was responsible for two major trends that carry on to this day. First, he essentially invented the modern historical novel; an enormous number of imitators (and imitators of imitators) appeared in the 19th century. It is a measure of Scott's influence that Edinburgh's central railway station, opened in 1854 by the North British Railway, is called Waverley. Second, his Scottish novels followed on from James Macpherson's Ossian cycle in rehabilitating the public perception of Highland culture after years in the shadows following southern distrust of hill bandits and the Jacobite rebellions. As enthusiastic chairman of the Celtic Society of Edinburgh he contributed to the reinvention of Scottish culture. It is worth noting, however, that Scott was a Lowland Scot, and that his re-creations of the Highlands were more than a little fanciful. His organisation of the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822 was a pivotal event, leading Edinburgh tailors to invent many "clan tartans" out of whole cloth, so to speak. After being essentially unstudied for many decades, a small revival of interest in Scott's work began in the 1970s and 1980s. Ironically, postmodern tastes, which favoured discontinuous narratives and the introduction of the 'first person', were more favourable to Scott's work than Modernist tastes. Where F.R. Leavis had rubbished Scott, seeing him as a thoroughly bad novelist and a thoroughly bad influence (The Great Tradition (1948)), Marilyn Butler offered a political reading of the fiction of the period that found a great deal of genuine interest in his work (Romantics, Revolutionaries, and Reactionaries]] (1981)). Despite all the flaws, Scott is now seen as an important innovator and a key figure in the development of Scottish and world literature.
Scott is commemorated in Makars' Court, outside The Writers' Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh. Selections for Makars' Court are made by The Writers' Museum; The Saltire Society; The Scottish Poetry Library.
Appearance on banknotes
Scott has been credited with rescuing the Scottish banknote. In 1826, there was outrage in Scotland at the attempt of the United Kingdom Parliament to prevent the production of banknotes of less than five pounds. Scott wrote a series of letters to the Edinburgh Weekly Journal under the pseudonym "Malachi Malagrowther" for retaining the right of Scottish banks to issue their own banknotes. This provoked such a response that the government was forced to relent and allow the Scottish banks to continue printing pound notes. This campaign is commemorated by his continued appearance on the front of all notes issued by the Bank of Scotland. The image on the 2007 series of banknotes is based on the portrait by Henry Raeburn.[10]
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!
from The Lay of the Last Minstrel by Walter Scott
Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
from Marmion, Canto VI. Stanza 17. by Walter Scott
In the book To Kill a Mockingbird, the protagonist is made to read Walter Scott's book Ivanhoe, and he refers to the author as "Sir Walter Scout", in reference to his own sister's nickname.
In the comic strip Peanuts, the book Ivanhoe is repeatedly referenced.
A well-known self-referential anagram features Sir Walter Scott. The letters of the sentence "A novel by a Scottish writer" can be re-arranged to yield "Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott".
^ "…it would be difficult to name, from among both modern and ancient works, many read more widely and with greater pleasure than the historical novels of … Walter Scott." —Alessandro Manzoni, On the Historical Novel
Breathes there the man with soul so deadWho never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!
- Sir Walter Scott, "The Lay of the Last Minstrel"
Breathes there the man with soul so deadWho never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!
