Walter Scott

• 1. Introduction

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  Walter Scott was born on the 15th of August 1771 in a third-floor apartment on College Wynd, a narrow alleyway in Edinburgh's Old Town, leading from the Cowgate to the gates of the old University. He was the ninth child in a family of fifteen, though only six survived infancy. Two years later, polio left him permanently lame. His parents sent him to his paternal grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe, by the ruin of Smailholm Tower, where his aunt Jenny taught him to read and filled his imagination with the speech patterns and legends that would mark his life's work. That fragile, limping boy from a shadowy Edinburgh alleyway would grow up to write nearly thirty novels, help invent an entire literary genre, and shape how the world imagined Scotland. He would become a baronet, stage-manage a royal visit, and accumulate debts so vast they would consume his final years. The questions his life raises are not small ones. How did a working lawyer become the most widely read novelist in Europe? What made him choose anonymity for two decades at the height of his fame? And what drove a man who owed more than a hundred thousand pounds to write his way out of ruin rather than accept a penny of help?

• 2. A Lawyer Among Letters

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  Scott began studying classics at the University of Edinburgh in November 1783, at the age of twelve, a year or so younger than most of his fellow students. During the winter of 1786-1787, the fifteen-year-old Scott met Robert Burns at one of the literary salons hosted by Professor Adam Ferguson. When Burns noticed a print illustrating a poem and asked who had written it, Scott alone knew the answer: John Langhorne. Burns thanked him. It was their only meeting. Scott went on to study law, co-founded the Literary Society in 1789, and was elected to the Speculative Society the following year, becoming its librarian and secretary-treasurer. He was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1792. In 1799 he was appointed Sheriff of Selkirk, based at the courthouse in the Royal Burgh. He held the positions of Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire simultaneously with his writing career for the rest of his working life. It was a double life he maintained with extraordinary discipline. He was also prominent in Edinburgh's Tory establishment, active in the Highland Society, and served as a long-time president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh between 1820 and 1832. In February 1797, the threat of a French invasion persuaded Scott and many friends to join the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, where daily drill began at five in the morning. He served as quartermaster and secretary into the early 1800s.

• 3. The Ballad Collector

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  Scott recalled that in 1827 he "was German-mad" during the 1790s, when enthusiasm for modern German literature swept Edinburgh. In 1796 he produced English versions of two poems by Gottfried August Burger, and responded to the wider German interest in national identity, folk culture, and medieval literature. A favourite book since childhood was Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Throughout the 1790s he searched manuscript collections and went on Border raids to collect ballads from oral performance. With help from John Leyden, he produced a two-volume Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802, containing 48 traditional ballads, 26 of which were published for the first time. An enlarged three-volume edition appeared the following year. Scott later repudiated his practice of fusing different versions of ballads into more coherent texts. The Minstrelsy was the first of a series of editorial projects that stretched over two decades, including the medieval romance Sir Tristrem in 1804, the works of John Dryden in 18 volumes in 1808, and the works of Jonathan Swift in 19 volumes in 1814. At Scott's insistence, the first edition of Minstrelsy was printed by his school friend James Ballantyne at Kelso. In 1805, Scott and Ballantyne became partners in the printing business, and Scott's works would be routinely printed by the firm until its collapse in 1826.

• 4. The Rise and Fall of the Poet

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  The Lay of the Last Minstrel, published in 1805, grew from Scott's plan to include a long original poem in the second edition of the Minstrelsy. It was to be, in his own words, "a sort of Romance of Border Chivalry and inchantment." He owed its distinctive irregular four-beat metre to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel, which Scott had heard recited by John Stoddart before it was published. The poem was an immediate success, going through five editions in its first year. Three years later, Marmion told a story of corrupt passions culminating in the Battle of Flodden in 1513. In an unprecedented move, the publisher Archibald Constable purchased the copyright for a thousand guineas before only the first canto was complete. Three editions published in 1808 sold 8,000 copies, though reviewers found style and plot both faulty. Scott's poetic peak came with The Lady of the Lake in 1810, which sold 20,000 copies in its first year, and caused what the source describes as a phenomenal increase in the Perthshire Highland tourist trade. Scott was by far the most popular poet of his time until Lord Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812. In 1813 Scott was offered the position of Poet Laureate. He declined, feeling that such an appointment would be "a poisoned chalice," citing the decline in quality of work suffered by previous holders. He sought advice from the 4th Duke of Buccleuch, who counselled him to retain his literary independence. The position went instead to Scott's friend Robert Southey.

• 5. The Anonymous Novelist

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  The first few chapters of Waverley were complete by roughly 1805, but Scott abandoned the project after unfavourable criticism from a friend. It was resumed only in late 1813 and published in 1814. Only a thousand copies were printed at first, but the work was an immediate success and 3,000 more were added in two further editions the same year. Waverley was the first of 27 novels, and by the time the sixth of them, Rob Roy, was published, the print run for the first edition had reached 10,000 copies. Scott published Waverley and the novels that followed it anonymously, most appearing as "By the Author of Waverley" or as Tales of My Landlord. He maintained this practice until his financial ruin in 1826. As he himself said, quoting Shylock, "such was my humour." No fewer than eleven reasons have been suggested for this choice. Only one of his 27 novels, Saint Ronan's Well, has a wholly modern setting. The others range in time from 1794 in The Antiquary back to 1096 or 1097, the time of the First Crusade, in Count Robert of Paris. Sixteen take place in Scotland. In 1820, Scott shifted boldly to 12th-century England for Ivanhoe. He had to bring together material from different centuries and invent an artificial form of speech based on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. The result is, as he acknowledged, as much myth as history, but the novel remains his best-known work. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, reflecting on the early novels, found that they derived their sustained interest from "the contest between the two great moving Principles of social Humanity - religious adherence to the Past and the Ancient... and the Passion for increase of Knowledge, for Truth as the offspring of Reason."

• 6. Baronet, Pageant Master, Debtor

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  On the 28th of October 1817, the Prince Regent gave Scott and other officials permission to search for the Scottish Crown Jewels, known as the Honours of Scotland. These had been hidden during the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, used to crown Charles II, and then stored in a locked box in Edinburgh Castle that had not been opened for more than a hundred years. On the 4th of February 1818, Scott and a small military team opened the box and uncovered the honours from the Crown Room. Scott received a baronetcy in April 1820, becoming Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet. In 1822, with only three weeks to prepare, Scott stage-managed the visit of George IV to Scotland. He dressed the king in tartan and designed a comprehensive pageant intended to heal rifts in Scottish society. Tartan ceremonial dress, proscribed after the Jacobite rising of 1745, became through this event one of the most potent symbols of Scottish identity. Then in 1825, a British banking crisis caused the collapse of the Ballantyne printing business, of which Scott was the only financially exposed partner. Debts of £130,000 became his very public ruin. Rather than declare bankruptcy or accept support from his many admirers, including the King, he placed his house and income in a trust and resolved to write his way clear. His wife Charlotte died in 1826. Despite these blows, between 1826 and 1832 he produced six novels, two short stories, two plays, eleven works of non-fiction, and a journal. In 1831, now gravely ill, he boarded HMS Barham, a frigate put at his disposal by the Admiralty, for a voyage to Malta and Naples. He returned to Abbotsford and died there on the 21st of September 1832, aged 61. Although he died still owing money, his novels continued to sell, and the debts were discharged shortly after his death.

• 7. Abbotsford and the World He Built

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  Scott bought Cartley Hole Farm on the River Tweed in 1811, when his lease on the large house of Ashestiel expired. The farm bore the nickname "Clarty Hole"; Scott renamed it Abbotsford, after a neighbouring ford used by the monks of Melrose Abbey. Massive expansions followed in 1816-19 and again in 1822-24. Scott described the resulting building as "a sort of romance in Architecture" and "a kind of Conundrum Castle." Working with architects William Atkinson and Edward Blore, he became a pioneer of the Scottish Baronial architectural style. Abbotsford held a library of more than 9,000 volumes, suits of armour, trophies of the chase, and panelling of oak and cedar relieved by coats of arms. It is estimated the building cost Scott more than £25,000. He acquired land until he owned nearly 1,000 acres. The house gave its name to the Abbotsford Club, founded in 1834 in his memory. Scott is buried in Dryburgh Abbey, which his maternal ancestry through the Haliburton family had granted him the hereditary right to. The 61.1-metre Victorian Gothic spire of the Scott Monument, designed by George Meikle Kemp, was completed in Edinburgh in 1844. Edinburgh's Waverley railway station, opened in 1854, takes its name from his first novel. Twelve streets in Vancouver, British Columbia are named after Scott's books or characters, and roughly 30 streets in Edinburgh's Inch district, developed in the early 1950s, carry names from his poems and novels. The annual Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, created in 2010 by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, carries a value of £25,000 and is presented at Abbotsford House.

• 8. The Long Reach of His Influence

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  Victor Hugo, in his 1823 essay on Quentin Durward, described Scott as a man whose "imagination caresses and dominates all other imaginations" and who could compel "the contemporary reader to imbue himself... with the spirit of the old times." Scott's historical romances, as the source records, influenced Balzac, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dumas, and Pushkin, as well as Romantic nationalists, particularly in Eastern Europe. Rossini based La donna del lago on The Lady of the Lake in 1819, and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, drawn from The Bride of Lammermoor, followed in 1835. In total, some 90 operas have been traced to his poems and novels. Franz Schubert set seven songs from The Lady of the Lake in German translation, one of them being Ellens dritter Gesang, popularly known as Schubert's Ave Maria. Jane Austen, in a letter of the 16th of December 1816, referenced Scott's The Antiquary with familiarity and affection. Edgar Allan Poe called The Bride of Lammermoor "that purest, and most enthralling of fictions" and "the master novel of Scott." Virginia Woolf, in a letter of the 12th of September 1932, wrote of knowing Scott "in a warm, scattered, amorous way." Mark Twain, writing in Life on the Mississippi in 1883, satirised Scott's influence on the American South so extensively he coined the phrase "Sir Walter Scott disease." Eleanor Marx noted that her father Karl Marx "again and again returned" to Scott, admiring him as well as he did Balzac and Fielding. In 1826, Scott also fought a successful campaign under the pseudonym "Malachi Malagrowther" to preserve the right of Scottish banks to issue their own banknotes, a campaign so effective that the government was forced to relent. His image continues to appear on all notes issued by the Bank of Scotland.