Walter Scott - Wikipedia

Walter Scott - Wikipedia
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Scottish novelist (1771–1832)
For other people named Walter Scott, see
Walter Scott (disambiguation)
Sir Walter Scott
Bt
FRSE
FSA Scot
Scott,
c.
1826
Born
15 August 1771
Edinburgh
, Scotland
Died
21 September 1832
(1832-09-21)
(aged 61)
Abbotsford
, Selkirkshire, Scotland
Occupation
Historical novelist
Poet
Advocate
Sheriff-Depute
Clerk of Session
Alma mater
University of Edinburgh
Military Service
Allegiance
Great Britain
Branch
British Militia
Service years
1797–1802
Rank
Quartermaster
Unit
Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons
Conflicts
French Revolutionary Wars
Genre
Novel, poetry
Subject
History
Literary movement
Romanticism
Spouse
Charlotte Carpenter (Charpentier)
m.
1797; died 1826)
Children
5: unnamed son (died shortly after birth), Sophia, Walter, Anna, Charles
Signature
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet
(15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet and historian. Many of his works remain classics of
European
and
Scottish literature
. He is known for his
Waverley novels
(1814–1831), which were, for nearly a century, among the most popular and widely read novels in Europe. He is also known for his narrative poems
Marmion
(1808) and
The Lady of the Lake
(1810). He greatly influenced European and
American literature
As an advocate and legal administrator by profession, he combined writing and editing with his daily work as
Clerk of Session
and
Sheriff-Depute
of
Selkirkshire
. He was prominent in Edinburgh's
Tory establishment
, active in the
Highland Society
, long time a president of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh
(1820–1832), and a vice president of the
Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
(1827–1829).
His knowledge of history and literary facility equipped him to establish the
historical novel
genre
as an exemplar of European
Romanticism
. He became a
baronet
of
Abbotsford
in the
County of Roxburgh
on 22 April 1820; the title became extinct upon his son's death in 1847.
Early life
edit
Walter Scott was born on 15 August 1771 in a third-floor apartment on College Wynd in the
Old Town
, Edinburgh, a narrow alleyway leading from the
Cowgate
to the gates of the old
University of Edinburgh
He was the ninth child (of which six died in infancy) of Walter Scott Senior (1729 – 1799), who was a member of a cadet branch of the
Clan Scott
and a
Writer to the Signet
. His mother was Anne Rutherford, who was a sister of
Daniel Rutherford
, who was a descendant both of the
Clan Swinton
and of the Scottish
Haliburton family
(whose prominent English members were to shorten their surname to 'Burton').
His maternal ancestry granted Scott the hereditary right of burial in
Dryburgh Abbey
Scott was, through his mother's Haliburton ancestry, a cousin of the eminent London property-developer
James Burton
, who had shortened his surname to 'Burton', and of his son, the architect
Decimus Burton
Scott became a member of the London
Clarence Club
, of which the Burtons were members.
Scott's childhood at Sandyknowes, in the shadow of
Smailholm Tower
, introduced him to the tales and folklore of the
Scottish Borders
The Scott family's home in
George Square
, Edinburgh, from about 1778
A childhood bout of
polio
in 1773 left Scott lame,
a condition that would greatly affect his life and writing.
To improve his lameness, he was sent in 1773 to live in the rural
Scottish Borders
, at his paternal grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe, by the ruin of
Smailholm Tower
, the earlier family home.
10
There, he was taught to read by his aunt Jenny Scott, and learned from her the speech patterns and many of the tales and legends that later marked much of his work. In January 1775, he returned to Edinburgh, and that summer with his aunt Jenny took spa treatment at
Bath
in Somerset, southern England, where they lived at 6
South Parade
11
In the winter of 1776, he went back to Sandyknowe, with another attempt at a water cure at
Prestonpans
the following summer.
10
In 1778, Scott returned to Edinburgh for private education to prepare him for school. He joined his family in their new house, one of the first to be built in
George Square
In October 1779, he began at the
Royal High School
in Edinburgh (in High School Yards). He was by then 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
Church of Scotland
with emphasis on the
Covenanters
In 1783, his parents, believing he had outgrown his strength, sent him to stay for six months with his aunt Jenny at
Kelso
in the Scottish Borders. There, he attended
Kelso Grammar School
, where he met
James Ballantyne
and his brother
John
, who later became his business partners and printers.
12
Appearance
edit
As a result of his early polio infection, Scott had a pronounced limp. He was described in 1820 as "tall, well formed (except for one ankle and foot which made him walk lamely), neither fat nor thin, with forehead very high, nose short, upper lip long and face rather fleshy, complexion fresh and clear, eyes very blue, shrewd and penetrating, with hair now silvery white".
13
Although a determined walker, he experienced greater freedom of movement on horseback.
citation needed
Student
edit
Sketch of Scott c.1800 by an unknown artist
Scott began studying
classics
at the
University of Edinburgh
in November 1783, at the age of 12, a year or so younger than most fellow students. In March 1786, aged 14, he began an apprenticeship in his father's office to become a
Writer to the Signet
. At school and university, Scott befriended
Adam Ferguson
, whose father, Professor
Adam Ferguson
, hosted literary salons.
14
Scott met the blind poet
Thomas Blacklock
, who lent him books and introduced him to the
Ossian
cycle of poems by
James Macpherson
. During the winter of 1786–1787, the 15-year-old Scott met the
Scots
poet
Robert Burns
at one of these salons, their only meeting. When Burns noticed a print illustrating the poem "The Justice of the Peace" and asked who had written it, Scott alone named the author as
John Langhorne
and was thanked by Burns. Scott describes the event in his memoirs, where he whispers the answer to his friend
Adam
, who tells Burns.
15
Another version of the event appears in
Literary Beginnings
16
When it was decided he would become a lawyer, he returned to the university to study law, first taking classes in
moral philosophy
under
Dugald Stewart
and universal history under
Alexander Fraser Tytler
in 1789–1790.
12
During this second university spell, Scott became prominent in student intellectual activities: he co-founded the Literary Society in 1789 and was elected to
the Speculative Society
the following year, becoming librarian and secretary-treasurer a year after.
17
After completing his law studies, Scott took up law in Edinburgh. He made his first visit as a lawyer's clerk 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 Scott's friend,
Sir William Forbes, 7th Baronet
. In February 1797, the threat of a French invasion persuaded Scott and many of his friends to join the
Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons
, where he served into the early 1800s,
18
and was appointed
quartermaster
and secretary. The daily drill practices that year, starting at 5 am, indicate the determination with which the role was undertaken.
19
Literary career, marriage and family
edit
A copy of Scott's
Minstrelsy
, in the National Museum of Scotland
Scott was prompted to take up a literary career by enthusiasm in Edinburgh in the 1790s for modern German literature. Recalling the period in 1827, Scott said he "was German-mad."
20
In 1796, he produced English versions of two poems by
Gottfried August Bürger
Der wilde Jäger
and
Lenore
, published as
The Chase
, and
William and Helen
. Scott responded to the German interest at the time in national identity, folk culture, and medieval literature,
17
which linked with his own developing passion for traditional balladry. A favourite book since childhood was
Thomas Percy
's
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
. During the 1790s, he would search in manuscript collections and on Border "raids" for 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 and two imitations apiece by Leyden and himself. Of the 48 traditionals, 26 were published for the first time. An enlarged edition appeared in three volumes the following year. With many of the ballads, Scott fused different versions into more coherent texts, a practice he later repudiated.
17
The
Minstrelsy
was the first and most important of a series of editorial projects over the next two decades, including the medieval romance
Sir Tristrem
(which Scott attributed to
Thomas the Rhymer
) in 1804, the works of
John Dryden
(18 vols, 1808), and the works of
Jonathan Swift
(19 vols, 1814).
On a trip to the English
Lake District
with old college friends, he met Charlotte Charpentier (Anglicised to "Carpenter"), a daughter of Jean Charpentier of
Lyon
in France and a
ward
of Lord Downshire in
Cumberland
, an Anglican. After three weeks' courtship, Scott proposed and they were married on Christmas Eve 1797 in St Mary's Church, Carlisle (now the nave of
Carlisle Cathedral
).
21
After renting a house in Edinburgh's
George Street
, they moved to nearby South Castle Street. Their eldest child, Sophia, was born in 1799, and later married
John Gibson Lockhart
22
Four of their five children survived Scott himself.
His eldest son,
Sir Walter Scott, 2nd Baronet
(1801–1847), inherited his father's estates and possessions: on 3 February 1825
23
he married Jane Jobson, only daughter of William Jobson of Lochore (died 1822) by his wife Rachel Stuart (died 1863), heiress of
Lochore
and a niece of Lady Margaret Ferguson.
24
In 1799, Scott was appointed
Sheriff of Selkirk
, based at the
courthouse
in the
Royal Burgh
of
Selkirk
. In his early married days, Scott earned a decent living from his work as a lawyer, his salary as Sheriff-Depute, his wife's income, some revenue from his writing, and his share of his father's modest estate.
Right to left: numbers 39, 41 and 43 North Castle Street, Edinburgh. No 39 was the home of Sir Walter Scott from 1801
After the younger Walter was born in 1801, the Scotts moved to a spacious three-storey house at 39 North Castle Street, which remained his Edinburgh base until 1826, when it was sold by the trustees appointed after his financial ruin. From 1798, Scott had spent summers in a cottage at
Lasswade
, where he entertained guests, including literary figures. His career as an author began there. There were nominal residency requirements for his position of Sheriff-Depute, and at first he stayed at a local inn during the circuit. In 1804, he ended his use of the Lasswade cottage and leased the substantial house of
Ashestiel
, 6 miles (9.7 km) from Selkirk, on the south bank of the
River Tweed
and incorporating an ancient
tower house
At Scott's insistence, the first edition of
Minstrelsy
was printed by his friend James Ballantyne at Kelso. In 1798, Ballantyne had published Scott's version of
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
's
Erlkönig
in his newspaper,
The Kelso Mail
, and in 1799 included it and the two Bürger translations in a privately printed anthology,
Apology for Tales of Terror
. In 1800, Scott suggested that Ballantyne set up business in Edinburgh and provided a loan for him to make the transition in 1802. In 1805, they became partners in the printing business, and from then until the financial crash of 1826, Scott's works were routinely printed by the firm.
25
17
26
Scott was known for his fondness of dogs, and owned several throughout his life. Upon his death, one newspaper noted "of all the great men who have loved dogs no one ever loved them better or understood them more thoroughly".
27
The best known of Scott's dogs were
Maida
, a large stag hound reported to be his favourite dog,
28
and Spice, a Dandie Dinmont terrier described as having
asthma
, to which Scott gave particular care. In a diary entry written at the height of his financial woes, Scott described dismay at the prospect of having to sell them: "The thoughts of parting from these dumb creatures have moved me more than any of the reflections I have put down".
27
The poet
edit
Sir Walter Scott, novelist and poet – painted by
Sir William Allan
Between 1805 and 1817 Scott produced five long, six-canto narrative poems, four shorter independently published poems, and many small metrical pieces. Scott was by far the most popular poet of the time until
Lord Byron
published the first two cantos of
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
in 1812 and followed them up with his exotic oriental verse narratives.
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
(1805), in medieval romance form, grew out of Scott's plan to include a long original poem of his own in the second edition of the
Minstrelsy
: it was to be "a sort of Romance of Border Chivalry & inchantment".
29
He owed the distinctive irregular accent in four-beat metre to
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
's
Christabel
, which he had heard recited by
John Stoddart
. (It was not to be published until 1816.)
30
Scott was able to draw on his unrivalled familiarity with Border history and legend acquired from oral and written sources beginning in his childhood to present an energetic and highly coloured picture of 16th-century Scotland, which both captivated the general public and with its voluminous notes also addressed itself to the antiquarian student. The poem has a strong moral theme, as human pride is placed in the context of the last judgment with the introduction of a version of the "
Dies irae
" at the end. The work was an immediate success with almost all the reviewers and with readers in general, going through five editions in one year.
17
The most celebrated lines are the ones that open the final stanza:
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned,
From wandering on a foreign strand!—
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell.
Three years after
The Lay
Scott published
Marmion
(1808) telling a story of corrupt passions leading up as a disastrous climax to the
Battle of Flodden
in 1513. The main innovation involves prefacing each of the six cantos with an epistle from the author to a friend:
William Stewart Rose
, The Rev.
John Marriot
William Erskine
James Skene
George Ellis
, and
Richard Heber
: the epistles develop themes of moral positives and special delights imparted by art. In an unprecedented move, the publisher
Archibald Constable
purchased the copyright of the poem for a thousand guineas at the beginning of 1807, when only the first had been completed.
31
Constable's faith was justified by the sales: the three editions published in 1808 sold 8,000 copies. The verse of
Marmion
is less striking than that of
The Lay
, with the epistles in iambic tetrameters and the narrative in tetrameters with frequent trimeters. The reception by the reviewers was less favourable than that accorded
The Lay
: style and plot were both found faulty, the epistles did not link up with the narrative, there was too much antiquarian pedantry, and Marmion's character was immoral.
32
The most familiar lines in the poem sum up one of its main themes: "O what a tangled web we weave,/ When first we practice to deceive"
33
Scott's meteoric poetic career peaked with his third long narrative,
The Lady of the Lake
(1810), which sold 20,000 copies in the first year.
17
The reviewers were fairly favourable, finding the defects noted in
Marmion
largely absent.
34
In some ways it is more conventional than its predecessors: the narrative is entirely in iambic tetrameters and the story of the transparently disguised
James V
(King of Scots 1513‒42) predictable: Coleridge wrote to
William Wordsworth
: 'The movement of the Poem... is between a sleeping Canter and a Marketwoman's trot – but it is endless – I seem never to have made any way – I never remember a narrative poem in which I felt the sense of Progress so languid."
35
But the metrical uniformity is relieved by frequent songs and the Perthshire Highland setting is presented as an enchanted landscape, which caused a phenomenal increase in the local tourist trade.
36
Moreover, the poem touches on a theme that was to be central to the Waverley Novels: the clash between neighbouring societies in different stages of development.
17
The remaining two long narrative poems,
Rokeby
(1813), set in the
Yorkshire
estate of that name belonging to Scott's friend
John Bacon Sawrey Morritt
during the
Civil War
period, and
The Lord of the Isles
(1815), set in early 14th-century Scotland and culminating in the
Battle of Bannockburn
in 1314. Both works had generally favourable receptions and sold well, but without rivalling the huge success of
The Lady of the Lake
. Scott also produced four minor narrative or semi-narrative poems between 1811 and 1817:
The Vision of Don Roderick
(1811, celebrating Wellington's successes in the Peninsular Campaign, with profits donated to Portuguese war sufferers);
37
The Bridal of Triermain
(published anonymously in 1813);
The Field of Waterloo
(1815); and
Harold the Dauntless
(published anonymously in 1817).
Throughout his creative life Scott was an active reviewer. Although himself a Tory he reviewed for
The Edinburgh Review
between 1803 and 1806, but that journal's advocacy of peace with Napoleon led him to cancel his subscription in 1808. The following year, at the height of his poetic career, he was instrumental in establishing a Tory rival,
The Quarterly Review
to which he contributed reviews for the rest of his life.
38
39
In 1813 Scott was offered the position of
Poet Laureate
. He declined, feeling that "such an appointment would be a poisoned chalice," as the Laureateship had fallen into disrepute due to the decline in quality of work suffered by previous title holders, "as a succession of poetasters had churned out conventional and obsequious odes on royal occasions."
40
He sought advice from the
4th Duke of Buccleuch
, who counselled him to retain his literary independence. The position went to Scott's friend
Robert Southey
41
The novelist
edit
A Legend of Montrose
, illustration from the 1872 edition
Further information:
Historical romance
and
Romance (literary fiction)
Gothic novel
edit
Scott was influenced by
Gothic romance
, and had collaborated in 1801 with
'Monk' Lewis
on
Tales of Wonder
42
43
Historic romances
edit
Scott's career as a novelist was attended with uncertainty. The first few chapters of
Waverley
were complete by roughly 1805, but the project was abandoned as a result of unfavourable criticism from a friend. Soon after, Scott was asked by the publisher John Murray to posthumously edit and complete the last chapter of an unfinished romance by
Joseph Strutt
. Published in 1808 and set in 15th-century England,
Queenhoo Hall
was not a success due to its archaic language and excessive display of antiquarian information.
44
The success of Scott's Highland narrative poem
The Lady of the Lake
in 1810 seems to have put it into his head to resume the narrative and have his hero Edward Waverley journey to Scotland. Although
Waverley
was announced for publication at that stage, it was again laid by and not resumed until late 1813, then published in 1814.
45
Only a thousand copies were printed, but the work was an immediate success and 3,000 more were added in two further editions the same year.
Waverley
turned out to be the first of 27 novels (eight published in pairs), and by the time the sixth of them,
Rob Roy
, was published, the print run for the first edition had been increased to 10,000 copies, which became the norm.
Given Scott's established status as a poet and the tentative nature of
Waverley
s emergence, it is not surprising that he followed a common practice in the period and published it anonymously. He continued this until his financial ruin in 1826, the novels mostly appearing as "By the Author of
Waverley
" (or variants thereof) or as
Tales of My Landlord
. It is not clear why he chose to do this (no fewer than eleven reasons have been suggested),
46
especially as it was a fairly open secret, but as he himself said, with
Shylock
, "such was my humour."
47
Sir Walter Scott by
Robert Scott Moncrieff
Depicts Edie Ochiletree guiding Sir Arthur and Isabella Wardour through the storm from Chapter 7 of The Antiquary
Scott was an almost exclusively historical novelist. Only one of his 27 novels –
Saint Ronan's Well
– has a wholly modern setting. The settings of the others range 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. The first nine, from
Waverley
(1814) to
A Legend of Montrose
(1819), all have Scottish locations and 17th- or 18th-century settings. Scott was better versed in his material than anyone: he could draw on oral tradition and a wide range of written sources in his ever-expanding library (many of the books rare and some unique copies).
48
49
In general it is these pre-1820 novels that have drawn the attention of modern critics – especially:
Waverley
, with its presentation of the
1745 Jacobites
drawn from the Highland clans as obsolete and fanatical idealists;
Old Mortality
(1816) with its treatment of the 1679
Covenanters
as fanatical and often ridiculous (prompting
John Galt
to produce a contrasting picture in his novel
Ringan Gilhaize
in 1823);
The Heart of Mid-Lothian
(1818) with its low-born heroine Jeanie Deans making a perilous journey to Richmond in 1737 to secure a promised royal pardon for her sister, falsely accused of
infanticide
; and the tragic
The Bride of Lammermoor
(1819), with its stern account of a declined aristocratic family, with Edgar Ravenswood and his fiancée as victims of the wife of an upstart lawyer in a time of political power-struggle before the
Act of Union
in 1707.
"Edgar and Lucie at Mermaiden's well" by Charles Robert Leslie (1886), after Sir Walter Scott's
Bride of Lammermoor
. Lucie is wearing a
full plaid
In 1820, in a bold move, Scott shifted period and location for
Ivanhoe
(1820) to 12th-century England. This meant he was dependent on a limited range of sources, all of them printed: 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 much myth as history, but the novel remains his best-known work, the most likely to be found by the general reader. Eight of the subsequent 17 novels also have medieval settings, though most are set towards the end of the era, for which Scott had a better supply of contemporaneous sources. His familiarity with Elizabethan and 17th-century English literature, partly resulting from editorial work on pamphlets and other minor publications, meant that four of his works set in the England of that period –
Kenilworth
(1821),
The Fortunes of Nigel
and
Peveril of the Peak
(1821), and
Woodstock
(1826) – present rich pictures of their societies. The most generally esteemed of Scott's later fictions, though, are three short stories: a supernatural narrative in Scots, "Wandering Willie's Tale" in
Redgauntlet
(1824), and "The Highland Widow" and "The Two Drovers" in
Chronicles of the Canongate
(1827).
Crucial to Scott's historical thinking is the concept that very different societies can move through the same stages as they develop, and that humanity is basically unchanging, or as he puts it in the first chapter of
Waverley
that there are "passions common to men in all stages of society, and which have alike agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corslet of the fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and white dimity waistcoat of the present day." It was one of Scott's main achievements to give lively, detailed pictures of different stages of Scottish, British, and European society while making it clear that for all the differences in form, they took the same human passions as those of his own age.
50
His readers could therefore appreciate the depiction of an unfamiliar society, while having no difficulty in relating to the characters.
Scott is fascinated by striking moments of transition between stages in societies.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
, in a discussion of Scott's early novels, found that they derive their "long-sustained
interest
" from "the contest between the two great moving Principles of social Humanity – religious adherence to the Past and the Ancient, the Desire & the admiration of Permanence, on the one hand; and the Passion for increase of Knowledge, for Truth as the offspring of Reason, in short, the mighty Instincts of
Progression
and
Free-agency
, on the other."
51
This is clear, for example, in
Waverley
, as the hero is captivated by the romantic allure of the Jacobite cause embodied in
Bonnie Prince Charlie
and his followers before accepting that the time for such enthusiasms has passed and accepting the more rational, humdrum reality of
Hanoverian
Britain. Another example appears in 15th-century Europe in the yielding of the old chivalric world view of
Charles, Duke of Burgundy
, to the
Machiavellian
pragmatism of
Louis XI
. Scott is intrigued by the way different stages of societal development can exist side by side in one country. When Waverley has his first experience of Highland ways after a raid on his Lowland host's cattle, it "seemed like a dream ... that these deeds of violence should be familiar to men's minds, and currently talked of, as falling with the common order of things, and happening daily in the immediate neighbourhood, without his having crossed the seas, and while he was yet in the otherwise well-ordered island of Great Britain."
52
A more complex version of this comes in Scott's second novel,
Guy Mannering
(1815), which "set in 1781‒2, offers no simple opposition: the Scotland represented in the novel is at once backward and advanced, traditional and modern – it is a country in varied stages of progression in which there are many social subsets, each with its own laws and customs."
17
Scott's process of composition can be traced through the manuscripts (mostly preserved), the more fragmentary sets of proofs, his correspondence, and publisher's records.
53
He did not create detailed plans for his stories, and the remarks by the figure of "the Author" in the Introductory Epistle to
The Fortunes of Nigel
probably reflect his own experience: "I think there is a dæmon who seats himself on the feather of my pen when I begin to write, and leads it astray from the purpose. Characters expand under my hand; incidents are multiplied; the story lingers, while the materials increase – my regular mansion turns out a Gothic anomaly, and the work is complete long before I have attained the point I proposed." Yet the manuscripts rarely show major deletions or changes of direction, and Scott could clearly keep control of his narrative. That was important, for as soon as he had made fair progress with a novel he would start sending batches of manuscript to be copied (to preserve his anonymity), and the copies were sent to be set up in type. (As usual at the time, the compositors would supply the punctuation.) He received proofs, also in batches, and made many changes at that stage, but these were almost always local corrections and enhancements.
Steel engraving by C. Heath after a drawing by P. De Wint of a scene relating to Scott's novel
Waverley
, 1832. The University of Edinburgh Collections.
As the number of novels grew, they were republished in small collections:
Novels and Tales
(1819:
Waverley
to
A Tale of Montrose
);
Historical Romances
(1822:
Ivanhoe
to
Kenilworth
);
Novels and Romances
(1824 [1823]:
The Pirate
to
Quentin Durward
); and two series of
Tales and Romances
(1827:
St Ronan's Well
to
Woodstock
; 1833:
Chronicles of the Canongate
to
Castle Dangerous
). In his last years Scott marked up interleaved copies of these collected editions to produce a final version of what were now officially the
Waverley Novels
, often called his 'Magnum Opus' or 'Magnum Edition'. Scott provided each novel with an introduction and notes and made mostly piecemeal adjustments to the text. Issued in 48 smart monthly volumes between June 1829 and May 1833 at a modest price of five shillings (60p) these were an innovative and profitable venture aimed at a wide readership: the print run was an astonishing 30,000.
54
In a "General Preface" to the "Magnum Edition", Scott wrote that one factor prompting him to resume work on the
Waverley
manuscript in 1813 had been a desire to do for Scotland what had been done in the fiction of
Maria Edgeworth
, "whose Irish characters have gone so far to make the English familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of Ireland, that she may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union, than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up [the
Act of Union
of 1801]."
55
Most of Scott's readers were English: with
Quentin Durward
(1823) and
Woodstock
(1826), for example, some 8000 of the 10,000 copies of the first edition went to London.
56
In the Scottish novels the lower-class characters normally speak Scots, but Scott is careful not to make the Scots too dense, so that those unfamiliar with it can follow the gist without understanding every word. Some have also argued that although Scott was formally a supporter of the Union with England (and Ireland) his novels have a strong nationalist subtext for readers attuned to that wavelength.
57
Scott's new career as a novelist in 1814 did not mean he abandoned poetry. The Waverley Novels contain much original verse, including familiar songs such as "Proud Maisie" from
The Heart of Mid-Lothian
(Ch. 41) and "Look not thou on Beauty's charming" from
The Bride of Lammermoor
(Ch. 3). In most of the novels Scott preceded each chapter with an epigram or "motto"; most of these are in verse, and many are of his own composition, often imitating other writers such as
Beaumont and Fletcher
Recovery of the Crown Jewels, baronetcy, and ceremonial pageantry
edit
George IV
landing at
Leith
in 1822
Prompted by Scott, the Prince Regent (the future
George IV
) gave Scott and other officials permission in a Royal Warrant dated 28 October 1817
58
to conduct a search for the Crown Jewels ("
Honours of Scotland
"). During
the Protectorate
under
Oliver Cromwell
these had been hidden away, but had subsequently been used to crown
Charles II
. They were not used to crown subsequent monarchs, but were regularly taken to sittings of Parliament, to represent the absent monarch, until the
Act of Union 1707
. So the honours were stored in Edinburgh Castle, but their large locked box was not opened for more than 100 years, and stories circulated that they had been "lost" or removed. On 4 February 1818,
59
Scott and a small military team opened the box and "unearthed" the honours from the Crown Room of
Edinburgh Castle
. On 19 August 1818 through Scott's effort, his friend
Adam Ferguson
was appointed Deputy Keeper of the "
Scottish Regalia
".
60
The Scottish patronage system swung into action and after elaborate negotiations the Prince Regent granted Scott the title of
baronet
: in April 1820 he received the baronetcy in London, becoming Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet.
61
After George's accession, the
city council of Edinburgh
invited Scott, at the sovereign's behest, to stage-manage the 1822
visit of George IV to Scotland
62
In spite of having only three weeks to work with, Scott created a spectacular, comprehensive pageant, designed not only to impress the King, but in some way to heal the rifts that had destabilised Scots society. Probably fortified by his vivid depiction of the pageant staged for the reception of Queen Elizabeth in
Kenilworth
he and his "production team" mounted what in modern days would be a
public-relations
event, with the King dressed in
tartan
and greeted by his people, many of them also in similar tartan ceremonial dress. This form of dress, proscribed after the
Jacobite rising of 1745
, became one of the seminal, potent and ubiquitous symbols of Scottish identity.
63
Coat of arms of Sir Walter Scott
Crest
A nymph, in her dexter hand a sun in splendour, in her sinister a crescent (moon)
Escutcheon
Quarterly; 1st & 4th or two mullets in chief and a crescent in base azure within an orle azure (Scott); 2nd & 3rd or on a bend azure three mascles or, in sinister chief point a buckle azure (Haliburton); escutcheon of the Hand of Ulster
Supporters
Dexter a mermaid holding in the exterior hand a mirror proper; Sinister a "Moor proper banded and cinctured argent holding in his left hand, a flaming torch lowered proper"
64
Motto
(above)
Reparabit cornua phoebe
– the moon shall fill her horns again
(below)
Watch weel
Financial problems and death
edit
In 1825 a British
banking crisis
resulted in the collapse of the Ballantyne printing business, of which Scott was the only partner with a financial interest. Its debts of £130,000 (equivalent to £10,500,000 in 2025) caused his very public ruin.
65
Rather than declare himself bankrupt or accept any financial support from his many supporters and admirers (including the King himself), he placed his house and income in a trust belonging to his creditors and set out to write his way out of debt. To add to his burdens, his wife Charlotte died in 1826.
Walter Scott's Tomb at Dryburgh Abbey
Despite these events or because of them, Scott kept up his prodigious output. Between 1826 and 1832 he produced six novels, two short stories and two plays, eleven works or volumes of non-fiction, and a journal, along with several unfinished works. The non-fiction included
The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte
in 1827, two volumes of the
History of Scotland
in 1829 and 1830, and four instalments of the series entitled
Tales of a Grandfather – Being Stories Taken From Scottish History
, written one per year over the period 1828–1831, among several others. Finally, Scott had recently been inspired by the diaries of
Samuel Pepys
and
Lord Byron
, and he began keeping a journal over the period, which was published in 1890 as
The Journal of Sir Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott's grave at
Dryburgh Abbey
– the largest tomb is that of Sir Walter and Lady Scott. The engraved slab covers the grave of their son, Lt Col Sir Walter Scott. On the right is their son-in-law and biographer,
John Gibson Lockhart
By then Scott's health was failing, and on 29 October 1831, in a vain search for improvement, he set off on a voyage to
Malta
and
Naples
aboard
HMS
Barham
, a frigate put at his disposal by the
Admiralty
. He was welcomed and celebrated wherever he went. On his journey home he boarded the steamboat
Prins Frederik
going from Cologne to Rotterdam. While on board he had a final stroke near
Emmerich
. After local treatment, a steamboat took him to the steamship
Batavier
, which left for England on 12 June. By coincidence, the writer
Mary Martha Sherwood
was also on board. She would later write about this encounter.
66
After he was landed in England, Scott was transported back to die at Abbotsford on 21 September 1832.
67
He was 61.
Scott was buried in
Dryburgh Abbey
, where his wife had earlier been interred. Lady Scott had been buried as an Episcopalian; at Scott's own funeral, three ministers of the Church of Scotland officiated at Abbotsford and the service at Dryburgh was conducted by an Episcopal clergyman.
68
Although Scott died owing money, his novels continued to sell, and the debts encumbering his estate were discharged shortly after his death.
65
Religion
edit
Scott was raised as a
Presbyterian
in the
Church of Scotland
. He was ordained as an elder in
Duddingston Kirk
in 1806,
69
and sat in the General Assembly for a time as representative elder of the burgh of Selkirk. In adult life he also adhered to the
Scottish Episcopal Church
: he seldom attended church but read the
Book of Common Prayer
services in family worship.
70
Scott was one of the last individuals cursed by the
Muggletonian
movement on account of his reviling Muggletonianism.
71
Freemasonry
edit
Scott's father was a
Freemason
, being a member of Lodge St David, No. 36 (Edinburgh), and Scott also became a Freemason in his father's Lodge in 1801,
72
albeit only after the death of his father.
Abbotsford House
edit
Abbotsford House
Tomb of Walter Scott, in Dryburgh Abbey, photo by
Henry Fox Talbot
, 1844
The Abbotsford Family
by Sir David Wilkie, 1817, depicting Scott and his family dressed as country folk, with his wife and two daughters dressed as milkmaids
When Scott was a boy, he sometimes travelled with his father from Selkirk to Melrose, 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).
73
During the summers from 1804, Scott made his home at the large house of Ashestiel, on the south bank of the River Tweed, 6 miles (9.7 km) north of Selkirk. When his lease on this property expired in 1811, he bought Cartley Hole Farm, downstream on the Tweed nearer Melrose. The farm had the nickname of "
Clarty
Hole", and Scott renamed it "Abbotsford" after a neighbouring ford used by the monks of
Melrose Abbey
74
Following a modest enlargement of the original farmhouse in 1811–12, massive expansions took place in 1816–19 and 1822–24. Scott described the resulting building as 'a sort of romance in Architecture'
75
and 'a kind of Conundrum Castle to be sure'.
76
With his architects
William Atkinson
and
Edward Blore
Scott was a pioneer of the Scottish Baronial style of architecture, and Abbotsford is festooned with turrets and stepped gabling. Through windows enriched with the insignia of heraldry the sun shone on suits of armour, trophies of the chase, a library of more than 9,000 volumes, fine furniture, and still finer pictures. Panelling of oak and cedar and carved ceilings relieved by coats of arms in their correct colours added to the beauty of the house.
74
verification needed
It is estimated that the building cost Scott more than £25,000 (equivalent to £2,000,000 in 2025). More land was purchased until Scott owned nearly 1,000 acres (4.0 km
). In 1817 as part of the land purchases Scott bought the nearby mansion-house of Toftfield for his friend Adam Ferguson to live in along with his brothers and sisters and on which, at the ladies' request, he bestowed the name of Huntlyburn.
77
Ferguson commissioned
Sir David Wilkie
to paint the Scott family
78
resulting in the painting
The Abbotsford Family
79
in which Scott is seated with his family represented as a group of country folk.
Ferguson
is standing to the right with the feather in his cap and Thomas Scott, Scott's Uncle,
80
is behind.
81
The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818.
82
Abbotsford later gave its name to the
Abbotsford Club
, founded in 1834 in memory of Sir Walter Scott.
83
Reputation
edit
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Later assessment
edit
Although he continued to be extremely popular and widely read, both at home and abroad,
84
Scott's critical reputation declined in the last half of the 19th century as serious writers turned from romanticism to realism, and Scott began to be regarded as an author suitable for children. This trend accelerated in the 20th century. For example, in his classic study
Aspects of the Novel
(1927),
E. M. Forster
harshly criticized Scott's clumsy and slapdash writing style, "flat" characters, and thin plots. In contrast, the novels of Scott's contemporary
Jane Austen
, once appreciated only by a discerning few (including, as it happened, Scott himself) rose steadily in critical esteem, though Austen, as a female writer, was still faulted for her narrow ("feminine") choice of subject matter, which, unlike Scott, avoided the grand historical themes traditionally viewed as masculine.
Nevertheless, Scott's importance as an innovator continued to be recognised. He was acclaimed as the inventor of the genre of the modern historical novel (which others
who?
trace to
Jane Porter
, whose work in the genre predates Scott's
citation needed
85
) and the inspiration for enormous numbers of imitators and genre writers both in Britain and on the European continent. In the cultural sphere, Scott's Waverley novels played a significant part in the movement (begun with
James Macpherson
's
Ossian
cycle) in rehabilitating the public perception of the
Scottish Highlands
and its culture, which had formerly been viewed by the southern mind as a barbaric breeding ground of hill bandits, religious fanaticism, and
Jacobite risings
Scott served as chairman of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh
and was also a member of the
Royal Celtic Society
. His own contribution to the reinvention of Scottish culture was enormous, even though his re-creations of the customs of the
Highlands
were fanciful at times. Through the medium of Scott's novels, the violent religious and political conflicts of the country's recent past could be seen as belonging to history—which Scott defined, as the subtitle of
Waverley
("'Tis Sixty Years Since") indicates, as something that happened at least 60 years earlier. His advocacy of objectivity and moderation and his strong repudiation of political violence on either side also had a strong, though unspoken, contemporary resonance in an era when many conservative English speakers lived in mortal fear of a revolution in the French style on British soil. Scott's orchestration of
King George IV's visit to Scotland
, in 1822, was a pivotal event intended to inspire a view of his home country that accentuated the positive aspects of the past while allowing the age of quasi-medieval blood-letting to be put to rest, while envisioning a more useful, peaceful future.
After Scott's work had been essentially unstudied for many decades, a revival of critical interest began in the middle of the 20th century. While
F. R. Leavis
had disdained Scott, seeing him as a thoroughly bad novelist and a thoroughly bad influence (
The Great Tradition
[1948]),
György Lukács
The Historical Novel
[1937, trans. 1962]) and
David Daiches
Scott's Achievement as a Novelist
[1951]) offered a Marxian political reading of Scott's fiction that generated a great deal of interest in his work. These were followed in 1966 by a major thematic analysis covering most of the novels by Francis R. Hart (
Scott's Novels: The Plotting of Historic Survival
). Scott has proved particularly responsive to
Postmodern
approaches, most notably to the concept of the interplay of multiple voices highlighted by
Mikhail Bakhtin
, as suggested by the title of the volume with selected papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference held in Edinburgh in 1991,
Scott in Carnival
. Scott is now increasingly recognised not only as the principal inventor of the historical novel and a key figure in the development of Scottish and world literature, but also as a writer of a depth and subtlety who challenges his readers as well as entertaining them.
Memorials and commemoration
edit
Painted by Charles Robert Leslie 1824. Engraved by M I Danforth in 1829
The
Scott Monument
on Edinburgh's
Princes Street
Statue by
Sir John Steell
on the
Scott Monument
in Edinburgh
Scott Monument
in Glasgow's
George Square
Statue on the Glasgow monument
During his lifetime, Scott's portrait was painted by Sir
Edwin Landseer
and his fellow-Scots Sir
Henry Raeburn
and
James Eckford Lauder
, and in 1824 by the American painter
Charles Robert Leslie
, later engraved by M I Danforth in 1829. After Watts Souvenir of 1829 was published Close friends and family said "That it was the best engraving that had yet appeared of the likeness of the author of Waverley".
86
Post Scott's life, 1833, W J Thompson painted a miniature for a gold memorial locket shown in
William John Thompson
In Edinburgh, the 61.1-metre-tall
Victorian Gothic
spire of the
Scott Monument
was designed by
George Meikle Kemp
. It was completed in 1844, 12 years after Scott's death, and dominates the south side of
Princes Street
. Scott is also commemorated on a stone slab in
Makars' Court
, outside The Writers' Museum,
Lawnmarket
, Edinburgh, along with other prominent Scottish writers; quotes from his work are also visible on the
Canongate
Wall of the
Scottish Parliament building
in
Holyrood
. There is a tower dedicated to his memory on
Corstorphine Hill
in the west of the city and Edinburgh's Waverley railway station, opened in 1854, takes its name from his first novel.
In
Glasgow
Walter Scott's Monument
dominates the centre of
George Square
, the main public square in the city. Designed by
David Rhind
in 1838, the monument features a large column topped by a statue of Scott.
87
There is a statue of Scott in
Central Park
in
New York City
88
In 1837 his son-in-law
John Gibson Lockhart
published his nine-volume
Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott
, one of the two most influential
literary biographies
of the decade along with
Thomas Moore
's
Life of Lord Byron
89
Numerous Masonic Lodges have been named after Scott and his novels. For example: Lodge Sir Walter Scott, No. 859 (
Perth, Australia
) and Lodge Waverley, No. 597, (Edinburgh, Scotland).
90
The annual
Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
was created in 2010 by the
Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch
, whose ancestors were closely linked to Sir Walter Scott. At £25,000, it is one of the largest prizes in British literature.
91
The award has been presented at Scott's historic home, Abbotsford House.
92
Scott has been credited with rescuing the
Scottish banknote
. In 1826, there was outrage in Scotland at the attempt of
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
93
In the United States, during and immediately after the
First World War
, there was a movement spearheaded by President
Woodrow Wilson
and other eminent people to
inculcate patriotism in American schoolchildren
, especially immigrants, and to stress the American connection with the literature and institutions of the "mother country" of Great Britain, using selected readings in middle school textbooks.
94
Scott's
Ivanhoe
continued to be required reading for many American high-school students until the end of the 1950s.
A bust of Scott is in the Hall of Heroes of the
National Wallace Monument
in
Stirling
. Twelve streets in
Vancouver, British Columbia
are named after Scott's books or characters.
95
In
the Inch
district of Edinburgh, some 30 streets developed in the early 1950s are named for Scott (Sir Walter Scott Avenue) and for characters and places from his poems and novels. Examples include Saddletree Loan (after Bartoline Saddletree, a character in
The Heart of Midlothian
), Hazelwood Grove (after Charles Hazelwood, a character in
Guy Mannering
) and Redgauntlet Terrace (after the 1824
novel of that name
).
96
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Walter Scott had an immense impact throughout Europe. "His historical fiction ... created for the first time a sense of the past as a place where people thought, felt and dressed differently".
97
His historical romances "influenced
Balzac
Dostoevsky
Flaubert
Tolstoy
Dumas
Pushkin
, and many others; and his interpretation of history was seized on by
Romantic nationalists
, particularly in
Eastern Europe
".
98
Also highly influential were the early translations into French by
Auguste Defauconpret
98
Wikisource
has original text related to this article:
'On Walter Scott',
a poem by L. E. L.
Wikisource
has original text related to this article:
'Sir Walter Scott',
a poetical illustration
by L. E. L.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
was a great admirer of Scott and, on his death, she wrote two tributes to him:
On Walter Scott
in the Literary Gazette,
99
and
Sir Walter Scott
in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1833.
100
Towards the end of her life she began a series called
The Female Picture Gallery
with a series of character analyses based on the women in Scott's works.
101
Victor Hugo
, in his 1823 essay,
Sir Walter Scott: Apropos of Quentin Durward
, writes:
Surely there is something strange and marvelous in the talent of this man who disposes of his reader as the wind disposes of a leaf; who leads him at his will into all places and into all times; unveils for him with ease the most secret recesses of the heart, as well as the most mysterious phenomena of nature, as well as the obscurest pages of history; whose imagination caresses and dominates all other imaginations, clothes with the same astonishing truth the beggar with his rags and the king with his robes, assumes all manners, adopts all garbs, speaks all languages; leaves to the physiognomy of the ages all that is immutable and eternal in their lineaments, traced there by the wisdom of God, and all that is variable and fleeting, planted there by the follies of men; does not force, like certain ignorant romancers, the personages of the past to colour themselves with our brushes and smear themselves with our varnish; but compels, by his magic power, the contemporary reader to imbue himself, at least for some hours, with the spirit of the old times, today so much scorned, like a wise and adroit adviser inviting ungrateful
children to return to their father.
102
Alessandro Manzoni
's
The Betrothed
(1827) has similarities with Scott's historic novel
Ivanhoe
, although evidently distinct.
103
In
Charles Baudelaire
's
La Fanfarlo
(1847), poet Samuel Cramer says of Scott:
Oh that tedious author, a dusty exhumer of chronicles! A fastidious mass of descriptions of bric-a-brac ... and castoff things of every sort, armor, tableware, furniture, gothic inns, and melodramatic castles where lifeless mannequins stalk about, dressed in leotards.
In the novella, however, Cramer proves as deluded a romantic as any hero in one of Scott's novels.
104
Jane Austen
, in a letter to her nephew James Edward Austen on 16 December 1816, writes:
Uncle Henry writes very superior Sermons.– You & I must try to get hold of one or two, & put them into our Novels;– it would be a fine help to a volume; & we could make our Heroine read it aloud of a Sunday Evening, just as well as Isabella Wardour in
the Antiquary
, is made to read the History of the Hartz Demon in the ruins of St Ruth– tho' I believe, upon recollection,
Lovell
is the Reader.
105
In Austen's
Persuasion
(1817) Anne Elliot and Captain James Benwick discuss the "richness of the present age" of poetry, and whether
Marmion
or
The Lady of the Lake
is the more preferred work.
Mary Shelley
, while researching for her historical novel
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck
(1830), wrote to Scott on 25 May 1829, asking him for information on any works or manuscripts he knew about
Perkin Warbeck
. She concludes the letter:
I hope you will forgive my troubling you. It is almost impertinent to say how foolish it appears to me that I should intrude on your ground, or to compliment one all the world so highly appreciates. But as every traveller when they visit the Alps endeavours, however imperfectly, to express their admiration in the Inn's album, so it is impossible to address the Author of
Waverley
without thanking him for the delight and instruction derived from the inexhaustible source of his genius, and trying to express a part of the enthusiastic admiration his works inspire.
106
In
Charlotte Brontë
's
Jane Eyre
(1847) St. John Rivers gives a copy of
Marmion
to Jane to provide her "evening solace" during her stay in her small lodging.
Emily Brontë
's
Wuthering Heights
was influenced by the novels of Scott.
107
In particular, according to
Juliet Barker
Rob Roy
(1817) had a significant influence on Brontë's novel, which, though "regarded as the archetypal Yorkshire novel ... owed as much, if not more, to Walter Scott's Border country".
Rob Roy
is set "in the wilds of
Northumberland
, among the uncouth and quarrelsome squirearchical Osbaldistones", while Cathy Earnshaw "has strong similarities with Diana Vernon, who is equally out of place among her boorish relations" (Barker p. 501).
108
In
Anne Brontë
's
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(1848) the narrator, Gilbert Markham, brings an elegantly bound copy of
Marmion
as a present to the independent "tenant of Wildfell Hall" (Helen Graham) whom he is courting, and is mortified when she insists on paying for it.
In
George Eliot
's
Middlemarch
(1871), Mr. Trumbull remarks to Mary Garth:
"You have an interesting work there, I see, Miss Garth," he observed, when Mary re-entered. "It is by the author of
Waverley
: that is Sir Walter Scott. I have bought one of his works myself—a very nice thing, a very superior publication, entitled
Ivanhoe
. You will not get any writer to beat him in a hurry, I think—he will not, in my opinion, be speedily surpassed. I have just been reading a portion at the commencement of
Anne of Jeersteen
sic
]. It commences well."
Thomas Hardy
, in his 1888 essay,
The Profitable Reading of Fiction
, writes:
Tested by such considerations as these there are obviously many volumes of fiction remarkable, and even great, in their character-drawing, their feeling, their philosophy, which are quite second-rate in their structural quality as narratives. Their fewness is remarkable, and bears out the opinion expressed earlier in this essay, that the art of novel-writing is as yet in its tentative stage only....
The Bride of Lammermoor
is an almost perfect specimen of form, which is the more remarkable in that Scott, as a rule, depends more upon episode, dialogue, and description, for exciting interest, than upon the well-knit interdependence of parts.
109
The many other British novelists whom Scott influenced included
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Charles Kingsley
, and
Robert Louis Stevenson
. He also shaped children's writers like
Charlotte Yonge
and
G. A. Henty
110
Nathaniel Hawthorne
, in a letter to his sister Elizabeth on 31 October 1820, writes:
I have bought the
Lord of the Isles
and intend either to send or bring it to you. I like it as well as any of Scott's other poems... I shall read
The Abbot
, by the author of Waverley, as soon as I can hire it. I have read all of Scott's novels except that, I wish I had not, that I might have the pleasure of reading them again.
111
Edgar Allan Poe
, an admirer of Scott, was particularly captivated with
The Bride of Lammermoor
, calling it "that purest, and most enthralling of fictions", and "the master novel of Scott."
112
In a speech delivered at Salem, Massachusetts, on 6 January 1860, to raise money for the families of the executed abolitionist
John Brown
and his followers,
Ralph Waldo Emerson
calls Brown an example of true chivalry, which consists not in noble birth but in helping the weak and defenseless and declares that "Walter Scott would have delighted to draw his picture and trace his adventurous career."
113
Henry James
, in his 1864 essay,
Fiction and Sir Walter Scott
, writes:
Scott was a born story-teller: we can give him no higher praise. Surveying his works, his character, his method, as a whole, we can liken him to nothing better than to a strong and kindly elder brother, who gathers his juvenile public about him at eventide, and pours out a stream of wondrous improvisation. Who cannot remember an experience like this? On no occasion are the delights of fiction so intense. Fiction? These are the triumphs of fact. In the richness of his invention and memory, in the infinitude of his knowledge, in his improvidence for the future, in the skill with which he answers, or rather parries, sudden questions, in his low-voiced pathos and his resounding merriment, he is identical with the ideal fireside chronicler. And thoroughly to enjoy him, we must again become as credulous as children at twilight.
114
In his 1870 memoir,
Army Life in a Black Regiment
, New England abolitionist
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
(later editor of
Emily Dickinson
), described how he wrote down and preserved Negro spirituals or "shouts" while serving as a colonel in the
1st South Carolina Colored Infantry Regiment
, the first authorized Union Army regiment recruited from freedmen during the Civil War. He wrote that he was "a faithful student of the Scottish ballads, and had always envied Sir Walter the delight of tracing them out amid their own heather, and of writing them down piecemeal from the lips of aged crones."
According to
Karl Marx
's daughter
Eleanor
, Scott was "an author to whom Karl Marx again and again returned, whom he admired and knew as well as he did Balzac and Fielding."
115
Mark Twain
, in his 1883
Life on the Mississippi
, satirised the impact of Scott's writings, declaring with humorous hyperbole that Scott "had so large a hand in making
Southern
character, as it existed before the
[American Civil] war
" that he is "in great measure responsible for the war."
116
He goes on to coin the term "Sir Walter Scott disease", describing a respect for aristocracy, a social acceptance of duels and vendettas, and a taste for fantasy and romanticism, which he blames for the Southern US's lack of advancement. Twain also targeted Scott in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, where he names a sinking boat the "Walter Scott" (1884); and, in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
(1889), the main character repeatedly utters "Great Scott!" as an oath; by the end of the book, however, he has become absorbed in the world of knights in armour, reflecting Twain's ambivalence on the topic.
In
Anne of Green Gables
(1908) by
Lucy Maude Montgomery
, as
Anne
is bringing in the cows from pasture:
The cows swung placidly down the lane, and Anne followed them dreamily, repeating aloud the battle canto from
Marmion
—which had also been part of their English course the preceding winter and which Miss Stacy had made them learn off by heart—and exulting in its rushing lines and the clash of spears in its imagery. When she came to the lines
The stubborn spearsmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood,
she stopped in ecstasy to shut her eyes that she might the better fancy herself one of that heroic ring.
The idyllic Cape Cod retreat of suffragists Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor in Henry James's
The Bostonians
(1886) is called Marmion, evoking what James considered the Quixotic idealism of such social reformers.
In
To the Lighthouse
by
Virginia Woolf
, Mrs. Ramsey glances at her husband:
He was reading something that moved him very much ... He was tossing the pages over. He was acting it – perhaps he was thinking himself the person in the book. She wondered what book it was. Oh, it was one of old Sir Walter's she saw, adjusting the shade of her lamp so that the light fell on her knitting. For Charles Tansley had been saying (she looked up as if she expected to hear the crash of books on the floor above) – had been saying that people don't read Scott any more. Then her husband thought, "That's what they'll say of me;" so he went and got one of those books? ... It fortified him. He clean forgot all the little rubs and digs of the evening... and his being so irritable with his wife and so touchy and minding when they passed his books over as if they didn't exist at all ...[Scott's] feeling for straight forward simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed creature in
Mucklebackit
's cottage [in
The Antiquary
] made him feel so vigorous, so relieved of something that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke back his tears. Raising the book a little to hide his face he let them fall and shook his head from side to side and forgot himself completely (but not one or two reflections about morality and French novels and English novels and Scott's hands being tied but his view perhaps being as true as the other view), forgot his own bothers and failures completely in poor Steenie's drowning and Mucklebackit's sorrow (that was Scott at his best) and the astonishing delight and feeling of vigor that it gave him.
Well, let them improve upon that, he thought as he finished the chapter ... The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.
Woolf, in a letter to
Hugh Walpole
on 12 September 1932, writes:
I don't know him [Scott] accurately and minutely as you do, but only in a warm, scattered, amorous way. Now you have put an edge on my love, and if it weren't that I must read MSS—how they flock! I should plunge—you urge me almost beyond endurance to plunge once more—yes, I say to myself, I shall read
The Monastery
again and then I shall go back to [The Heart of]
Midlothian
. I cant read the
Bride
[of Lammermoor], because I know it almost by heart: also the
Antiquary
(I think those two, as a whole, are my favourites). Well—to inspire a harassed hack to this wish to kick up her heels—what greater proof could there be of your powers of persuasion and illumination? My only complaint is that you pay too much attention to the arid gulls who can't open their beaks wide enough to swallow Sir Walter. One of the things I want to write about one day is the Shakespearean talk in Scott: the dialogues: surely that is the last appearance in England of the blank verse of
Falstaff
and so on! We have lost the art of the poetic speech.
117
John Cowper Powys
described Walter Scott's romances as "by far the most powerful literary influence of my life".
118
This can be seen particularly in his two historical novels,
Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages
, set during the end of
Roman rule in Britain
, and
Owen Glendower
119
In 1951 the science-fiction author
Isaac Asimov
wrote "
Breeds There a Man...?
", a short story with a title alluding vividly to Scott's
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
(1805). In Harper Lee's
To Kill a Mockingbird
(1960), the protagonist's brother is made to read Scott's book
Ivanhoe
to the ailing Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose. In
Mother Night
(1961) by
Kurt Vonnegut
Jr, the memoirist and playwright Howard W. Campbell Jr. prefaces his text with the six lines beginning "Breathes there the man..." In
Knights of the Sea
(2010) by the Canadian author
Paul Marlowe
, there are several references to
Marmion
, as well as an inn named after
Ivanhoe
, and a fictitious Scott novel entitled
The Beastmen of Glen Glammoch
Scott also features as a character in two of
Sara Sheridan
's novels
The Fair Botanists
(2021) and The Jewel Keepers (2026)
The other arts
edit
Further information:
Opera in Scotland § Operas inspired by Walter Scott
Although Scott's own appreciation of music was basic, to say the least, he had a considerable influence on composers. Some 90 operas based to some extent on his poems and novels have been traced, the most celebrated being
Rossini
's
La donna del lago
(1819, based on
The Lady of the Lake
) and
Donizetti
's
Lucia di Lammermoor
(1835, based on
The Bride of Lammermoor
).
120
121
Others include Donizetti's 1829 opera
Il castello di Kenilworth
based on
Kenilworth
Georges Bizet
's
La jolie fille de Perth
(1867, based on
The Fair Maid of Perth
), and
Arthur Sullivan
's
Ivanhoe
(1891).
Many of Scott's songs were set to music by composers throughout the 19th century.
122
Seven from
The Lady of the Lake
were set in German translations by
Franz Schubert
, one of them being '
Ellens dritter Gesang
' popularly known as 'Schubert's
Ave Maria'
. Three lyrics, also in translation, appear from
Ludwig van Beethoven
in his
Twenty-Five Scottish Songs
, Op. 108. Other notable musical responses include three overtures:
Waverley
(1828) and
Rob Roy
(1831) by
Hector Berlioz
, and
The Land of the Mountain and the Flood
(1887, alluding to
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
) by
Hamish MacCunn
. "Hail to the Chief" from "The Lady of the Lake" was set to music around 1812 by the songwriter James Sanderson (
c.
1769
c.
1841
). See the Wikipedia article "Hail to the Chief."
The Waverley Novels are full of eminently paintable scenes and many 19th-century artists responded to them. Among the outstanding paintings of Scott subjects are:
Richard Parkes Bonington
's
Amy Robsart and the Earl of Leicester
c.
1827) from
Kenilworth
in the
Ashmolean Museum
, Oxford;
123
Eugène Delacroix
's
L'Enlèvement de Rebecca
(1846) from
Ivanhoe
in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art
, New York;
124
and
John Everett Millais
's
The Bride of Lammermoor
(1878) in Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.
125
Walter Scott features as a character in
Sara Sheridan
's novel
The Fair Botanists
(2021).
126
Works
edit
Portrait by
James Howe
Novels
edit
The
Waverley novels
is the title given to the long series of Scott novels released from 1814 to 1832, which takes its name from the first novel,
Waverley
. The following is a chronological list of the entire series:
1814:
Waverley
1815:
Guy Mannering
1816:
Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk
127
1816:
The Antiquary
1816:
The Black Dwarf
and
Old Mortality
or
The Tale of Old Mortality
– the 1st instalment from the subset series,
Tales of My Landlord
1817:
Rob Roy
1818:
The Heart of Mid-Lothian
– the 2nd instalment from the subset series,
Tales of My Landlord
1819:
The Bride of Lammermoor
and
A Legend of Montrose
or
A Legend of the Wars of Montrose
– the 3rd instalment from the subset series,
Tales of My Landlord
1819 (dated 1820):
Ivanhoe
1820:
The Monastery
1820:
The Abbot
1821:
Kenilworth
1822:
The Pirate
1822:
The Fortunes of Nigel
1822:
Peveril of the Peak
1823:
Quentin Durward
1824:
St. Ronan's Well
or
Saint Ronan's Well
1824:
Redgauntlet
1825:
The Betrothed
and
The Talisman
– a subset series,
Tales of the Crusaders
1826:
Woodstock
1827:
Chronicles of the Canongate
— containing two short stories ("The Highland Widow" and "The Two Drovers") and a novel (
The Surgeon's Daughter
1828:
The Fair Maid of Perth
– the 2nd instalment from the subset series,
Chronicles of the Canongate
1829:
Anne of Geierstein
1832:
Count Robert of Paris
and
Castle Dangerous
– the 4th instalment from the subset series,
Tales of My Landlord
Other novels:
1831–1832:
The Siege of Malta
– a finished novel published posthumously in 2008
1832:
Bizarro
– an unfinished novel (or novella) published posthumously in 2008
Short stories
edit
1811: "The Inferno of Altisidora"
1817: "Christopher Corduroy"
1818: "Alarming Increase of Depravity Among Animals"
1818: "Phantasmagoria"
1827: "The Highland Widow" and "The Two Drovers" (see
Chronicles of the Canongate
above)
1828: "My Aunt Margaret's Mirror", "The Tapestried Chamber", and "Death of the Laird's Jock" – from the series
The Keepsake Stories
1832: "A Highland Anecdote"
Poetry
edit
Many of the short poems or songs released by Scott (or later anthologised) were originally not separate pieces but parts of longer poems interspersed throughout his novels, tales, and dramas.
1796:
The Chase, and William and Helen
: Two Ballads, translated from the German of Gottfried Augustus Bürger
1800:
Glenfinlas
1802–1803:
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
1805:
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
1806:
Ballads and Lyrical Pieces
1808:
Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field
1810:
The Lady of the Lake
1811:
The Vision of Don Roderick
1813:
The Bridal of Triermain
1813:
Rokeby
1815:
The Field of Waterloo
1815:
The Lord of the Isles
1817:
Harold the Dauntless
1825:
Bonnie Dundee
Plays
edit
1799:
Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand: A Tragedy
– an English-language translation of the 1773 German-language play by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
entitled
Götz von Berlichingen
1822:
Halidon Hill
1823:
MacDuff's Cross
1830:
The Doom of Devorgoil
1830:
Auchindrane
Non-fiction
edit
1814–1817:
The Border Antiquities of England and Scotland
– a work co-authored by
Luke Clennell
and
John Greig
with Scott's contribution consisting of the substantial introductory essay, originally published in 2 volumes from 1814 to 1817
1815–1824:
Essays on Chivalry, Romance, and Drama
– a supplement to the 1815–1824 editions of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
1819–1826:
Provincial Antiquities of Scotland
1821–1824:
Lives of the Novelists
1825–1832:
The Journal of Sir Walter Scott
— first published in 1890
1826:
The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther
1827:
The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French. With a Preliminary View of the French Revolution.
Published in 9 volumes.
1828:
Religious Discourses. By a Layman
1828:
Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from Scottish History
– the 1st instalment from the series,
Tales of a Grandfather
1829:
The History of Scotland: Volume I
1829:
Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from Scottish History
– the 2nd instalment from the series,
Tales of a Grandfather
1830:
The History of Scotland: Volume II
1830:
Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from Scottish History
– the 3rd instalment from the series,
Tales of a Grandfather
1830:
Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft
1831:
Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from the History of France
– the 4th instalment from the series,
Tales of a Grandfather
1831:
Tales of a Grandfather: The History of France (Second Series)
— unfinished; published 1996
Collections
edit
In 1925 Scott's manuscripts, letters and papers were donated to the
National Library of Scotland
by the
Advocates Library
of the
Faculty of Advocates
128
University College London
holds about 300 books relating to Scott. The collection originated with a donation from
Arthur MacNalty
129
See also
edit
Poetry portal
Biography portal
Jedediah Cleishbotham
(fictional editor of
Tales of My Landlord
, and Scott's
alter ego
G. A. Henty
Karl May
Baroness Orczy
Rafael Sabatini
Emilio Salgari
People on Scottish banknotes
Samuel Shellabarger
Lawrence Schoonover
Jules Verne
Frank Yerby
GWR Waverley Class
steam locomotives
"Famous Scots Series"
Principal Clerk of Session and Justiciary
Scott Monument
Writers' Museum
Moral Emblems
References
edit
"Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832)"
www.oxforddnb.com
doi
10.1093/ref:odnb/24928
"Famous Fellows"
. Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
. Retrieved
18 January
2019
Edinburgh University Library (22 October 2004).
"Homes of Sir Walter Scott"
Edinburgh University Library
. Retrieved
9 July
2013
"Who were the Burtons"
The Burtons' St Leonards Society
. Archived from
the original
on 8 September 2019
. Retrieved
18 September
2017
"Family Background"
Walter Scott
. Edinburgh University Library. 24 October 2003.
Beattie, William (1849).
Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, In Three Volumes, Volume II
. Edward Moxon, Dover Street, London. p. 55.
The Athenaeum, Volume 3, Issues 115–165
. J. Lection, London. 1830. p. 170.
Cone, T E (1973).
"Was Sir Walter Scott's Lameness Caused by Poliomyelitis?"
Pediatrics
51
(1): 33.
Robertson, Fiona.
"Disfigurement and Disability: Walter Scott's Bodies"
Otranto.co.uk
. Archived from
the original
on 12 May 2014
. Retrieved
9 May
2014
"Sandyknowe and Early Childhood"
Walter Scott
. Edinburgh University Library. 24 October 2003.
"No 1 Nos 2 and 3 (Farrell's Hotel) Nos 4 to 8 (consec) (Pratt's Hotel)"
Images of England
. English Heritage. Archived from
the original
on 31 May 2012
. Retrieved
29 July
2009
"School and University"
. Walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk. 24 October 2003
. Retrieved
29 November
2009
C. R. Leslie, 1855. "Letter to Miss C Leslie dated 26 June 1820" in
Autobiographical recollections
. ed. Tom Taylor, Ticknor & Fields, Boston.
Lockhart
, pp. 378–379.
Lockhart
, p. 38.
"Literary Beginnings"
. Walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk. 11 December 2007
. Retrieved
29 November
2009
Hewitt, David (2004) "Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832)",
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
doi
10.1093/ref:odnb/24928
J. G. Lockhart, 1872.
The Life Of Scott
. Ch. 2.
J. G. Lockhart, 1872. The Life Of Scott. Ch. 2 p.49
The Letters of Sir Walter Scott': 1826‒1828
, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London, 1936), p. 331: Scott to Mrs Hughes.
"Williamina, Charlotte and Marriage"
. University of Edinburgh. 24 October 2003
. Retrieved
31 October
2017
"Abbotsford – The Home of Sir Walter Scott"
www.scottsabbotsford.com
. Retrieved
19 November
2021
Monuments and monumental inscriptions in Scotland: The Grampian Society, 1871.
C. S. M. Lockhart, 1871
The Centenary Memorial of Sir Walter Scott
. Virtue & Co. p. 62.
Johnson
, p. 171.
Sharon Ragaz, 2004. "James Ballantyne",
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
doi
10.1093/ref:odnb/1228
Humanities, National Endowment for the (14 November 1894).
"The North Platte tribune. (North Platte, Neb.) 1890–1894, November 14, 1894, Image 7"
ISSN
2165-8838
. Retrieved
6 November
2022
Thomas Brown's written portrait of Maida
The Letters of Sir Walter Scott: 1787‒1807
, ed.
H. J. C. Grierson
(London, 1932), 166 (Scott to
Anna Seward
, 30 November 1802).
Johnson
, p. 197.
Walter Scott, 2018.
Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field
, ed. Ainsley McIntosh. Edinburgh. pp. 292‒93.
ISBN
978-1717020321
J. H. Alexander, 1976.
Two Studies in Romantic Reviewing
, Vol. 2. Salzburg. pp. 358‒369.
ISBN
0773401296
Canto 6, stanza 17 (6.766‒67).
J. H. Alexander, 1976.
Two Studies in Romantic Reviewing
, Vol. 2. Salzburg. pp. 369‒380.
ISBN
0773401296
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume 3 1807‒1814
, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford. 1959. p. 808 (early October 1810).
The Letters of Sir Walter Scott: 1808‒1811
, ed. H. J. C. Grierson. London. 1932. 419n.
The Romantics Part III, S–Z
, No. 25, London: Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, 2021.
Johnson
, pp. 299‒300.
William B. Todd and Ann Bowen, 1998.
Sir Walter Scott: A Bibliographical History 1796‒1832
. New Castle, Delaware, Items 10A, 26A, 36A, 245A.
ISBN
9781884718649
"Scott the Poet"
www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk
"Scott the Poet"
. Walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk. 11 December 2007
. Retrieved
29 November
2009
The Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature
, ed. Marion Wynne Davis. New York: Prentice Hall, 1990, p. 885.
See also, Robert Letellier,
Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Novel
. Lewiston, New York:Mellen Press, 1995.
Walter Scott, 1889.
Waverley Novels Centenary Edition Vol. I
, "General Preface, 1829." Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black.
Walter Scott, 2007.
Waverley
, ed. P. D. Garside. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 367‒383.
ISBN
0748605673
Cooney, Seamus (1973).
"Scott's Anonymity—Its Motive and Consequences"
Studies in Scottish Literature
10
: 207‒19.
Walter Scott, 2012. "General Preface" in
Introductions and Notes from The Magnum Opus: Waverley to A Legend of the Wars of Montrose
, ed. J. H. Alexander, P. D. Garside and
Claire Lamont
. Edinburgh University Press. p. 15.
ISBN
0748605908
Levy, Lindsay (2010). "
"Long life to thy fame and peace to thy soul": Walter Scott's Collection of Robert Burns's Books and Manuscripts".
Scottish Archives
16
: 32‒40 (34).
Lindsay Levy, 2012. "Was Sir Walter Scott a Bibliomaniac?", in
From Compositors to Collectors: Essays on Book-Trade History
, ed. John Hinks and Matthew Day. New Castle, Delaware. pp. 309‒321.
ISBN
9780712358729
Graham McMaster, 1981.
Scott and Society
. Cambridge University Press. Ch. 2 "Scott and the Enlightenment".
ISBN
9780521237697
Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford, 1956‒71), 5.34‒35: Coleridge to
Thomas Allsop
, 8 April 1820.
Walter Scott, 2007.
Waverley
, ed. P. D. Garside. Edinburgh University Press. Ch. 16, p. 78.
ISBN
0748605673
For an overview of the process see the revised "General Introduction" to the
Edinburgh edition of the Waverley novels
by David Hewitt, first published in 1997 in the
Guy Mannering
volume.
Jane Millgate, 1987.
Scott's Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History
. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 21 and 125 note 51.
ISBN
0852245416
Walter Scott, 2012. "General Preface" in
Introductions and Notes from The Magnum Opus: Waverley to A Legend of the Wars of Montrose
, ed. J. H. Alexander, P. D. Garside and Claire Lamont. Edinburgh University Press. p. 12.
ISBN
0748605908
Walter Scott,
Quentin Durward
, ed. J. H. Alexander and G. A. M. Wood (Edinburgh, 2001), 408; Walter Scott,
Woodstock
, ed. Tony Inglis (Edinburgh, 2009) 445.
Paul Scott,
Walter Scott and Scotland
(Edinburgh, 1981); Julian Meldon D'Arcy,
Subversive Scott
(Reykjavik, 2005).
William Bell, 1829.
Papers Relative to the Regalia of Scotland
. Edinburgh. p. 6.
William Bell, 1829.
Papers Relative to the Regalia of Scotland
. Edinburgh. p. 9.
The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1818, Vol. 11 Appx. IV p. 227.
Garside, Peter (1982). "Patriotism and Patronage: New Light on Scott's Baronetcy".
The Modern Language Review
77
(1):
16–
28.
doi
10.2307/3727490
JSTOR
3727490
"Chronology of Walter Scott's life"
Walter Scott Digital Archive
. Retrieved
2 May
2015
"Walter Scott Digital Archive – Chronology"
. Walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk. 13 October 2008
. Retrieved
29 November
2009
History Scotland (9 October 2021).
"Sir Walter Scott of Abbotsford and the Enigma of His 'Moor Proper' Heraldic Supporter"
Scribd
McKinstry, Sam; Fletcher, Marie (2002). "The Personal Account Books of Sir Walter Scott".
The Accounting Historians Journal
29
(2):
59–
89.
doi
10.2308/0148-4184.29.2.59
JSTOR
40698269
Sherwood 1857
, p. 531.
London Medical and Surgical Journal
, January 1833
Sefton, Henry R. (1983) "Scott as Churchman",
Scott and his Influence
. Aberdeen. pp. 234–42 (241).
ISBN
9780950262932
"Duddingston Kirk – History and Buildings"
Duddingston Kirk – Home
. Retrieved
27 May
2019
Lockhart
, Vol. 2, pp. 186, 190.
Lamont, William M. (2006).
Last witnesses: the Muggletonian history, 1652-1979
. Aldershot, Hampshire, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
ISBN
978-0-7546-5532-9
OCLC
60715132
Mackey, Albert G.
Encyclopedia Of Freemasonry And Its Kindred Sciences
. Vol. 4 (S-Z). Jazzybee Verlag. p. 36.
ISBN
978-3-8496-8802-8
Lockhart
, p. 397
"Abbotsford – The Home of Sir Walter Scott"
www.scottsabbotsford.com
. Retrieved
26 August
2019
Grierson,
op. cit.
, 8.129: Scott to John Richardson, [November–December 1823].
The Journal of Sir Walter Scott
, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford, 1972), 11: 7 January 1828.
"Huntlyburn; statement of interest"
. British Listed Buildings
. Retrieved
7 August
2018
McCunn, Florence (1910)
Sir Walter Scott's friends
. New York : John Lane Co. p. 329
"The Abbotsford Family"
. National Gallery
. Retrieved
4 August
2018
"Thomas Scott (1731–1823), Uncle of Sir Walter Scott"
Art UK
. Retrieved
26 August
2019
"The Abbotsford Family – Walter Scott Image Collection"
images.is.ed.ac.uk
"Douglas David 1895 Records of The Clan Ferguson"
. p. x
. Retrieved
4 August
2018
Drabble, Margaret (2000).
The Oxford companion to English literature
(6th ed.). New York : Oxford University Press. p. 1.
ISBN
978-0-19-866244-0
{{
cite book
}}
: CS1 maint: publisher location (
link
"...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
McLean, T. (2099). Jane Porter's later works, 1825-1846.
Harvard Library Bulletin
20
(2), 45–63.
Watts Souvenir 1829 p 193 and p ix accessed 11 June 2024
Historic Environment Scotland
"Glasgow, George Square, Walter Scott's Monument (Site no. NS56NE 687)"
. Retrieved
6 July
2025
"Central Park Monuments – Sir Walter Scott : NYC Parks"
www.nycgovparks.org
Bradford, Richard (ed.)
A Companion to Literary Biography
. Wiley, 2018. p.49
Grand Lodge of Scotland Year Book. 2014. pp 25 & 34.
ISBN
0902324-86-1
"Home -"
The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
. 29 May 2025
. Retrieved
29 May
2025
"The Home of Sir Walter Scott"
Abbotsford
. 29 May 2025
. Retrieved
29 May
2025
"Bank of Scotland"
www.scotbanks.org.uk
Serl, Emma and Joseph Pelo, William (1919).
American Ideals: Selected Patriotic Readings for Seventh and Eighth Grades
. New York Public Library. The Gregg publishing company.
{{
cite book
}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link
The origins of all 651 street names in Vancouver
. CBC Canada
Harris, Stuart (2002).
The Place Names of Edinburgh: Their Origins and History
. Steve Savage Publishers. pp.
323–
324.
"Abstract": M. Pittock, ed.,
The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe
. Series: The reception of British and Irish authors in Europe. Bloomsbury: London, 2014. ISBN 9781472535474"
. March 2014.
"Abstract": M. Pittock, ed.,
The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (1832). "Walter Scott".
Literary Gazette, 1832
. The Proprietors, Wellington Street, Strand. pp.
619–
620.
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (1832). "poetical illustration".
Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1833
. Fisher, Son & Co. pp.
44–
46.
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (1832). "picture".
Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1833
. Fisher, Son & Co.
Blanchard, Laman (1841). "Volume 2".
Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L.
Henry Colburn.
"Things Seen, Essays by Victor Hugo"
. Victor Hugo. 1823. p. 309
. Retrieved
1 April
2022
From Georg Lukàcs, "The Historical Novel" (1969): "In Italy Scott found a successor who, though in a single, isolated work, nevertheless broadened his tendencies with superb originality, in some respect surpassing him. We refer, of course, to Manzoni's
I Promessi Sposi
(The Betrothed). Scott himself recognized Manzoni's greatness. When in Milan Manzoni told him that he was his pupil, Scott replied that in that case Manzoni's was his best work. It is, however, very characteristic that while Scott was able to write a profusion of novels about English and Scottish society, Manzoni confined himself to this single masterpiece."
Heck, Francis S. (1976). "Baudelaire's La Fanfarlo: An Example of Romantic Irony".
The French Review
49
(3):
328–
36.
JSTOR
390170
"16 December 1816 – Monday – from Chawton – to James Edward"
. 1816. Archived from
the original
on 28 June 2022
. Retrieved
25 July
2022
"Sir Walter's Post-Bag"
. John Murray. 1932. p. 271
. Retrieved
21 March
2022
Elizabeth Gaskell
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857, p.104.
Ian Brinton.
Bronte's Wuthering Heights Reader's Guides
. London : Continuum. 2010, p. 14. Quoting Barker,
The Brontes
. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholas, 1994.
"The Profitable Reading of Fiction"
. Thomas Hardy. 1888. pp.
57–
70. Archived from
the original
on 4 October 2022
. Retrieved
30 May
2022
"Abstract": James Watt, '"Sir Walter Scott and the Medievalist Novel".
The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism
, ed. Joanne Parker and Corinna Wagner. Oxford University Press, 2020.
The Development of the American Short Story: An Historical Survey
. Biblo and Tannen. 1923. p. 93.
ISBN
9780819601759
. Retrieved
27 March
2022
{{
cite book
}}
ISBN / Date incompatibility (
help
"Edgar Allan Poe (ed. J. A. Harrison), "Review of Conti the Discarded," The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe"
. Edgar Allan Poe. 1836. p. 233
. Retrieved
30 May
2022
Sacks, Kenneth S. (2008).
Emerson: Political Writings
. Cambridge University Press. p. 193.
ISBN
978-1-139-47269-2
"Notes And Reviews by Henry James"
. Freeport, N.Y., Books for Libraries Press. 1921. p. 14
. Retrieved
2 August
2022
S. S. Prawer, 1976.
Karl Marx and World Literature
. Oxford University Press. p. 386.
ISBN
9780192812483
"Twain, Mark. "Life on the Mississippi", Chapter 46"
www.gutenberg.org
"The letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, 1932–1935"
. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1975. p. 104
. Retrieved
1 August
2022
Autobiography
(1934). London: Macdonald, 1967, p. 66.
W. J. Keith,
Aspects of John Cowper Powys's Owen Glendower
, pp. 20–21
Mitchell, Jerome (1977)
Walter Scott Operas
. University, Alabama.
Mitchell, Jerome (1996)
More Scott Operas
. Lanham, Maryland.
Bibliography in Yonge, C. D. (1888)
Life of Sir Walter Scott
. London. pp. xxxiv‒xxxviii.
"Ashmolean Museum"
. Retrieved
8 June
2020
"Metropolitan Museum of Art"
. Retrieved
8 June
2020
"Bristol Museum and Art Gallery"
. Retrieved
8 June
2020
Sheridan, Sara (2021),
The Fair Botanists
Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN
9781529336207
Walter Scott (1816).
Paul's Letters to His Kinsfolk
. Edinburgh: Printed by
James Ballantyne and Co.
for
Archibald Constable and Company
; London:
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown
, and
John Murray
OCLC
220554999
Brown, Iain Gordon (2000). "Collecting Scott for Scotland: 1850–2000."
The Book Collector
49 no.4 (winter): 502–534. Article by the curator of the Scott Collection at the National Library of Scotland expanded from his presentation at the 35th Congress of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, Edinburgh, 18 September 2000.
UCL Special Collections (23 August 2018).
"Sir Walter Scott Collection"
UCL Special Collections
. Retrieved
15 December
2023
Cited sources
edit
Johnson, Edgar (1970).
Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown
. Vol. 1. London.
{{
cite book
}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (
link
Lockhart, John Gibson (1852).
Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart
. A. and C. Black.
Sherwood, Mary Martha (1857),
The life of Mrs Sherwood
, Darton & Co., London
Further reading
edit
Approaches to Teaching Scott's Waverley Novels
, ed. Evan Gottlieb and Ian Duncan (New York, 2009).
Bautz, Annika.
Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study
. Continuum, 2007.
ISBN
0-8264-9546-X
ISBN
978-0-8264-9546-4
Bates, William (1883).
"Sir Walter Scott"
The Maclise Portrait-Gallery of "Illustrious Literary Characters"
. Illustrated by
Daniel Maclise
(1 ed.). London: Chatto and Windus. pp.
31–
37 – via
Wikisource
Brown, David.
Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination
. Routledge, 1979,
ISBN
0-7100-0301-3
; Kindle ed. 2013.
Buchan, John
Sir Walter Scott
, Coward-McCann Inc., New York, 1932.
Calder, Angus (1983),
Scott &
Goethe
: Romanticism and Classicism
, in Hearn, Sheila G. (ed.),
Cencrastus
No. 13, Summer 1983, pp. 25–28,
ISSN
0264-0856
Carlyle, Thomas
(1838).
Eliot, Charles W.
(ed.).
Sir Walter Scott
The Harvard Classics
. Vol. XXV, Part 5. New York:
P.F. Collier & Son
(published 1909–14).
Cornish, Sidney W.
The "Waverley" Manual; or, Handbook of the Chief Characters, Incidents, and Descriptions in the "Waverley" Novels, with Critical Breviates from Various Sources
. Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1871.
Crawford, Thomas,
Scott
, Kennedy & Boyd, 2013
ISBN
9781849211406
Duncan, Ian.
Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh
. Princeton UP, 2007.
ISBN
978-0-691-04383-8
Ferris, Ina.
The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels
(Ithaca, New York, 1991).
Hart, Francis R..
Scott's Novels: The Plotting of Historic Survival
(Charlottesville, Virginia, 1966).
Kelly, Stuart.
Scott-Land: The Man Who Invented a Nation
. Polygon, 2010.
ISBN
978-1-84697-107-5
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth
The Female Portrait Gallery
. A series of 22 analyses of Scott's female characters (curtailed by Letitia's death in 1838). Laman Blanchard:
Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L.
, 1841. Vol. 2. pp. 81–194.
Lincoln, Andrew.
Walter Scott And Modernity
. Edinburgh UP, 2007.
Millgate, Jane.
Walter Scott: The Making of the Novelist
(Edinburgh, 1984).
Oliver, Susan.
Walter Scott and the Greening of Scotland: Emergent Ecologies of a Nation
. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
ISBN
9781108917674
Pope-Hennessy, Una
Sir Walter Scott
, Home & Van Thal, 1948 (The English Novelists series).
Quayle, Eric
The Ruin of Sir Walter Scott
, Rupert Hart-Davis, 1968.
Rigney, Ann
The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move
. Oxford UP, 2012.
ISBN
9780199644018
Robertson, Fiona,
The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott.
Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
Stephen, Leslie
(1898).
"The Story of Scott's Ruin"
Studies of a Biographer
. Vol. 2. London: Duckworth & Co.
Scott in Carnival: Selected Papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference, Edinburgh, 1991
, ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt (Aberdeen, 1993).
Scott, Paul Henderson.
Walter Scott and Scotland
, William Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1981.
ISBN
0-85158-143-9
Shaw, Harry,
Scott, Scotland and Repression
, in Bold, Christine (ed.),
Cencrastus
No. 3, Summer 1980, pp. 26 – 28.
Sutherland, John
The Life of Walter Scott. A Critical Biography
, Blackwell, 1995.
ISBN
978-1-55786231-0
Tulloch, Graham.
The Language of Walter Scott: A Study of his Scottish and Period Language
(London, 1980).
Walter Scott: New Interpretations, The Yearbook of English Studies
. Vol. 47. 2017. Modern Humanities Research Association.
DOI: 10.5699/yearenglstud.47.issue-2017
Welsh, Alexander.
The Hero of the Waverley Novels
(New Haven, 1963).
External links
edit
Library resources
about
Walter Scott
Resources in your library
Resources in other libraries
Walter Scott
at Wikipedia's
sister projects
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from Commons
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from Wikiquote
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from Wikidata
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at
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at
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at the
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at
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(public domain audiobooks)
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at
The Online Books Page
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Physical collections
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at the
University of Edinburgh
Millgate Union Catalogue of Walter Scott Correspondence
Archived
10 January 2018 at the
Wayback Machine
Correspondence of Sir Walter Scott, with related papers, ca. 1807–1929
Sir Walter Scott Collection
. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Sir Walter Scott Collection
at the
Harry Ransom Center
Walter Scott's profile and catalogue of his library at Abbotsford
on
LibraryThing
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at
University College London
Other biographical information
Walter Scott
at
IMDb
Sir Walter Scott and Hinx, his Cat
Sir Walter Scott
, biography by
Richard H. Hutton
, 1878 (from
Project Gutenberg
Chisholm, Hugh
, ed. (1911).
"Scott, Sir Walter"
Encyclopædia Britannica
(11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Miscellaneous links
The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club
Guardian Books – Sir Walter Scott
Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery
Bust of Walter Scott by Sir
Francis Leggatt Chantrey
, 1828, white marble, Philadelphia Museum of Art, # 2002.222.1, Philadelphia (PA).
Sir Walter Scotts friends by Florence MacCunn 1910.
Scottish Freemasonry (The Grand Lodge of Scotland)
Baronetage of the United Kingdom
New creation
Baronet
(of Abbotsford)
1820–1832
Next:
Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Waverley
novels
Queenhoo Hall
(1808)
Waverley
(1814)
Guy Mannering
(1815)
The Antiquary
(1816)
The Black Dwarf
(1816)
Old Mortality
(1816)
Rob Roy
(1817)
The Heart of Midlothian
(1818)
The Bride of Lammermoor
(1819)
A Legend of Montrose
(1819)
Ivanhoe
(1819)
The Monastery: A Romance
(1820)
The Abbot
(1820)
Kenilworth
(1821)
The Pirate
(1821)
The Fortunes of Nigel
(1822)
Peveril of the Peak
(1823)
Quentin Durward
(1823)
Saint Ronan's Well
(1823)
Redgauntlet
(1824)
The Betrothed
(1825)
The Talisman
(1825)
Woodstock
(1826)
The Fair Maid of Perth
(1828)
Anne of Geierstein
(1829)
Count Robert of Paris
(1831)
Castle Dangerous
(1831)
The Siege of Malta
(1831–1832, pub. posthumously 2008)
Bizarro
(1832, pub. posthumously 2008)
Poetry
Translations and Imitations from German Ballads
(1796–1819)
Glenfinlas
" (1800)
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
(1802–1803)
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
(1805)
Ballads and Lyrical Pieces
(1806)
Marmion
(1808)
The Lady of the Lake
(1810)
The Vision of Don Roderick
(1811)
The Bridal of Triermain
(1813)
Rokeby
(1813)
The Field of Waterloo
(1815)
The Lord of the Isles
(1815)
Harold the Dauntless
(1817)
Short stories
Chronicles of the Canongate
, 1st series (1827)
The Keepsake Stories
" (1828)
Non-fiction
The letters
(1788–1832)
Abstract of the Eyrbiggia-Saga
" (1814)
Memoirs
" (1808–1826)
The Journal
(1825–1832)
The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte
(1827)
Tales of a Grandfather
(1828–1831)
Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft
(1830)
Manners, customs and history of the Highlanders of Scotland; Historical account of the clan MacGregor.
(1893, posthumously)
Plays
Halidon Hill
(1822)
MacDuff's Cross
(1823)
The Doom of Devorgoil
(1830)
Auchindrane
(1830)
People
James Ballantyne
Lord Byron
James Hogg
William Laidlaw
John Gibson Lockhart
J. B. S. Morritt
Robert Southey
William Wordsworth
Characters
Jedediah Cleishbotham
Jeanie Deans
Dryasdust
Lord Glenallan
Saunders Mucklebackit
Edie Ochiltree
Jonathan Oldbuck
Dominie Sampson
Sir Arthur Wardour
Related
Abbotsford House
Dandie Dinmont Terrier
Fair Maid's House
"Hail to the Chief"
Maida
Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott
Portrait of Sir Walter Scott
(1823)
Portrait of Sir Walter Scott
(1826)
Scott Monument
Scott Monument, Glasgow
Scott's View
Sir Walter Scott Way
Walter Scott Prize
Writers' Museum
Walter Scott
's
The Heart of Midlothian
(1818)
Characters
Jeanie Deans
Films
The Heart of Midlothian
(1914)
A Woman's Triumph
(1914)
For stage
Jeanie Deans
(1860 play)
Jeanie Deans
(1894 opera)
Lyrics
Jeanie Deans
(1820s poem)
Jeanie Deans
(late 19th-century song)
Walter Scott
's
Ivanhoe
Opera
Ivanhoé
Der Templer und die Jüdin
Il templario
Ivanhoe
Films
Ivanhoe
(1913 British)
Ivanhoe
(1913 American)
Ivanhoe
(1952)
Ivanhoe
(1982)
The Ballad of the Valiant Knight Ivanhoe
(1983)
Television
Ivanhoe
(1958)
Ivanhoe
(1970)
Young Ivanhoe
(1995)
Ivanhoe
(1997)
Paintings
Rebecca and the Wounded Ivanhoe
(1823)
Rebecca and Brian de Bois-Guilbert
(1828)
Robin Hood and His Merry Men Entertaining Richard the Lionheart in Sherwood Forest
(1839)
The Abduction of Rebecca
(1846)
Related
The Betrothed
(Manzoni)
Walter Scott
's
Quentin Durward
(1823)
Screen adaptations
The Adventures of Quentin Durward
(1955)
Quentin Durward
(1971)
The Adventures of Quentin Durward, Marksman of the Royal Guard
(1988)
Paintings
Quentin Durward at Liège
(1828)
The Murder of the Bishop of Liège
(1831)
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Walter Scott
1771 births
1832 deaths
Haliburton family
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Walter Scott
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