Walter Scott

For other people named Walter Scott, see Walter Scott (disambiguation).
Sir Walter Scott, Bt

Raeburn's portrait of Sir Walter Scott in 1822.
Born 15 August 1771
College Wynd, Edinburgh
Scotland
Died 21 September 1832(1832-09-21) (aged 61)
Abbotsford, Roxburghshire
Scotland
Occupation
Nationality British
Alma mater University of Edinburgh
Period 19th century
Literary movement Romanticism
Spouse Charlotte Carpenter (Charpentier)
Signature

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, FRSE (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright and poet with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America.

Scott's novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Old Mortality, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor.

Although primarily remembered for his extensive literary works and his political engagement, Scott was an advocate, judge and legal administrator by profession, and throughout his career combined his writing and editing work with his daily occupation as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire.

A prominent member of the Tory establishment in Edinburgh, Scott was an active member of the Highland Society and served a long term as President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1820–32).

Biography

Early days

Scott's childhood at Sandyknowes, in the shadow of Smailholm Tower, introduced him to the tales and folklore of the Scottish Borders.

The son of a Writer to the Signet (solicitor),[1] Scott was born in 1771 in his Presbyterian family's third-floor flat on College Wynd in the Old Town of Edinburgh, a narrow alleyway leading from the Cowgate to the gates of the University of Edinburgh (Old College).[2] He survived a childhood bout of polio in 1773 that left him lame,[3] a condition that was to have a significant effect on his life and writing.[4] To cure his lameness he was sent in 1773 to live in the rural Scottish Borders at his paternal grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe, adjacent to the ruin of Smailholm Tower, the earlier family home.[5] Here he was taught to read by his aunt Jenny, and learned from her the speech patterns and many of the tales and legends that characterised much of his work. In January 1775 he returned to Edinburgh, and that summer went with his aunt Jenny to take spa treatment at Bath in England, where they lived at 6 South Parade.[6] In the winter of 1776 he went back to Sandyknowe, with another attempt at a water cure at Prestonpans during the following summer.[5]

The Scotts' family home in George Square, Edinburgh

In 1778, Scott returned to Edinburgh for private education to prepare him for school, and joined his family in their new house built as one of the first in George Square.[2] In October 1779 he began at the Royal High School of Edinburgh (in High School Yards). He was now well able to walk and explore the city and the surrounding countryside. His reading included chivalric romances, poems, history and travel books. He was given private tuition by James Mitchell in arithmetic and writing, and learned from him the history of the Church of Scotland with emphasis on the Covenanters. After finishing school he was sent to stay for six months with his aunt Jenny in Kelso, attending the local grammar school where he met James and John Ballantyne, who later became his business partners and printed his books.[7]

Scott's meeting with Blacklock and Burns

Scott began studying classics at the University of Edinburgh in November 1783, at the age of 12, a year or so younger than most of his fellow students. In March 1786 he began an apprenticeship in his father's office to become a Writer to the Signet. While at the university Scott had become a friend of Adam Ferguson, the son of Professor Adam Ferguson who hosted literary salons. Scott met the blind poet Thomas Blacklock, who lent him books and introduced him to James Macpherson's Ossian cycle of poems. During the winter of 1786–87 the 15-year-old Scott saw Robert Burns at one of these salons, for what was to be their only meeting. When Burns noticed a print illustrating the poem "The Justice of the Peace" and asked who had written the poem, only Scott knew that it was by John Langhorne, and was thanked by Burns.[8] When it was decided that he would become a lawyer, he returned to the university to study law, first taking classes in Moral Philosophy and Universal History in 1789–90.[7]

After completing his studies in law, he became a lawyer in Edinburgh. As a lawyer's clerk he made his first visit to the Scottish Highlands directing an eviction. He was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1792. He had an unsuccessful love suit with Williamina Belsches of Fettercairn, who married Scott's friend Sir William Forbes, 7th Baronet.

Start of literary career

A copy of Scott's Minstrelsy in the National Museum of Scotland

As a boy, youth and young man, Scott was fascinated by the oral traditions of the Scottish Borders. He was an obsessive collector of stories, and developed an innovative method of recording what he heard at the feet of local story-tellers using carvings on twigs, to avoid the disapproval of those who believed that such stories were neither for writing down nor for printing.[9] At the age of 25 he began to write professionally, translating works from German,[10] his first publication being rhymed versions of ballads by Gottfried August Bürger in 1796. He then published an idiosyncratic three-volume set of collected ballads of his adopted home region, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. This was the first sign from a literary standpoint of his interest in Scottish history.

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.[11] Although a determined walker, on horseback he experienced greater freedom of movement. Unable to consider a military career, Scott enlisted as a volunteer in the 1st Lothian and Border yeomanry.[12]

Marriage and family

On a trip to the Lake District with old college friends he met Charlotte Genevieve Charpentier (or Carpenter), daughter of Jean Charpentier of Lyon in France, and ward of Lord Downshire in Cumberland, an Episcopalian. After three weeks of courtship, Scott proposed and they were married on Christmas Eve 1797 in St Mary's Church, Carlisle (a church set up in the now destroyed nave of Carlisle Cathedral).[13][14] After renting a house in George Street, they moved to nearby South Castle Street. They had five children, of whom four survived by the time of Scott's death, most baptized by an Episcopalian clergyman. In 1799 he was appointed Sheriff-Depute of the County of Selkirk, based in the Royal Burgh of Selkirk. In his early married days Scott had a decent living from his earnings at the law, his salary as Sheriff-Depute, his wife's income, some revenue from his writing, and his share of his father's rather meagre estate.

After their third son was born in 1801, they moved to a spacious three-storey house built for Scott at 39 North Castle Street. This remained Scott's base in Edinburgh until 1826, when he could no longer afford two homes. From 1798 Scott had spent the summers in a cottage at Lasswade, where he entertained guests including literary figures, and it was there that his career as an author began. 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. It was sited on the south bank of the River Tweed, and the building incorporated an old tower house.[2]

Scott's father, also Walter (1729–1799), 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, albeit only after the death of his father.[15]

Poetry

Sir Walter Scott, novelist and poet - painted by Sir William Allan

In 1796, Scott's friend James Ballantyne[16] founded a printing press in Kelso, in the Scottish Borders. Through Ballantyne, Scott was able to publish his first works, including "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John", and his poetry then began to bring him to public attention. In 1805, The Lay of the Last Minstrel captured wide public imagination, and his career as a writer was established in spectacular fashion.

He published many other poems over the next ten years, including the popular The Lady of the Lake, printed in 1810 and set in the Trossachs. Portions of the German translation of this work were set to music by Franz Schubert. One of these songs, "Ellens dritter Gesang", is popularly labelled as "Schubert's Ave Maria".

Beethoven's opus 108 "Twenty-Five Scottish Songs" includes 3 folk songs whose words are by Walter Scott.

Marmion, published in 1808, produced lines that have become proverbial. Canto VI. Stanza 17 reads:

Yet Clare's sharp questions must I shun
Must separate Constance from the nun
Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practise to deceive!
A Palmer too! No wonder why
I felt rebuked beneath his eye.[1]

  1. ^ The early editions of Marmion use Scott's original spelling of "practice" (still used in the U.S.A). Later editions, compiled without Scott's oversight, usually favour the modern standard British English spelling of "practise".

In 1809 Scott persuaded James Ballantyne and his brother to move to Edinburgh and to establish their printing press there. He became a partner in their business. As a political conservative,[17] Scott helped to found the Tory Quarterly Review, a review journal to which he made several anonymous contributions. Scott was also a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, which espoused Whig views.

Scott was ordained as an elder in the Presbyterian Church of Duddington and sat in the General Assembly for a time as representative elder of the burgh of Selkirk.

When the lease of Ashestiel expired in 1811 Scott bought Cartley Hole Farm, on the south bank of the River Tweed nearer Melrose. The farm had the nickname of "Clarty Hole", and when Scott built a family cottage there in 1812 he named it "Abbotsford". He continued to expand the estate, and built Abbotsford House in a series of extensions.[2]

In 1813 Scott was offered the position of Poet Laureate. He declined, due to concerns 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."[18] He sought advice from the Duke of Buccleuch, who counseled him to retain his literary independence, and the position went to Scott's friend, Robert Southey.[19]

Novels

A Legend of Montrose, illustration from the 1872 edition

Although Scott had attained world-wide celebrity through his poetry, he soon tried his hand at documenting his researches into the oral tradition of the Scottish Borders in prose fiction—stories and novels—at the time still considered aesthetically inferior to poetry (above all to such classical genres as the epic or poetic tragedy) as a mimetic vehicle for portraying historical events. In an innovative and astute action, he wrote and published his first novel, Waverley, anonymously in 1814. It was a tale of the Jacobite rising of 1745. Its English protagonist, Edward Waverley, like Don Quixote a great reader of romances, has been brought up by his Tory uncle, who is sympathetic to Jacobitism, although Edward's own father is a Whig. The youthful Waverley obtains a commission in the Whig army and is posted in Dundee. On leave, he meets his uncle's friend, the Jacobite Baron Bradwardine and is attracted to the Baron's daughter Rose. On a visit to the Highlands, Edward overstays his leave and is arrested and charged with desertion but is rescued by the Highland chieftain Fergus MacIvor and his mesmerizing sister Flora, whose devotion to the Stuart cause, "as it exceeded her brother's in fanaticism, excelled it also in purity". Through Flora, Waverley meets Bonnie Prince Charlie, and under her influence goes over to the Jacobite side and takes part in the Battle of Prestonpans. He escapes retribution, however, after saving the life of a Whig colonel during the battle. Waverley (whose surname name reflects his divided loyalties) eventually decides to lead a peaceful life of establishment respectability under the House of Hanover rather than live as a proscribed rebel. He chooses to marry the beautiful Rose Bradwardine, rather than cast his lot with the sublime Flora MacIvor, who, after the failure of the '45 rising, retires to a French convent.

There followed a succession of novels over the next five years, each with a Scottish historical setting. Mindful of his reputation as a poet, Scott maintained the anonymity he had begun with Waverley, publishing the novels under the name "Author of Waverley" or as "Tales of..." with no author. Among those familiar with his poetry, his identity became an open secret, but Scott persisted in maintaining the façade, perhaps because he thought his old-fashioned father would disapprove of his engaging in such a trivial pursuit as novel writing. During this time Scott became known by the nickname "The Wizard of the North". In 1815 he was given the honour of dining with George, Prince Regent, who wanted to meet the "Author of Waverley".

"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.

Scott's 1819 series Tales of my Landlord is sometimes considered a subset of the Waverley novels and was intended to illustrate aspects of Scottish regional life. Among the best known is The Bride of Lammermoor, a fictionalized version of an actual incident in the history of the Dalrymple family that took place in the Lammermuir Hills in 1669. In the novel, Lucie Ashton and the nobly born but now dispossessed and impoverished Edgar Ravenswood exchange vows. But the Ravenswoods and the wealthy Ashtons, who now own the former Ravenswood lands, are enemies, and Lucie's mother forces her daughter to break her engagement to Edgar and marry the wealthy Sir Arthur Bucklaw. Lucie falls into a depression and on their wedding night stabs the bridegroom, succumbs to insanity, and dies. In 1821, French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix painted a portrait depicting himself as the melancholy, disinherited Edgar Ravenswood. The prolonged, climactic coloratura mad scene for Lucia in Donizetti's 1835 bel canto opera Lucia di Lammermoor is based on what in the novel were just a few bland sentences.

Tales of my Landlord includes the now highly regarded novel Old Mortality, set in 1679–89 against the backdrop of the ferocious anti-Covenanting campaign of the Tory Graham of Claverhouse, subsequently made Viscount Dundee (called "Bluidy Clavers" by his opponents but later dubbed "Bonnie Dundee" by Scott). The Covenanters were presbyterians who had supported the Restoration of Charles II on promises of a Presbyterian settlement, but he had instead reintroduced Episcopalian church government with draconian penalties for Presbyterian worship. This led to the destitution of around 270 ministers who had refused to take an oath of allegiance and submit themselves to bishops, and who continued to conduct worship among a remnant of their flock in caves and other remote country spots. The relentless persecution of these conventicles and attempts to break them up by military force had led to open revolt. The story is told from the point of view of Henry Morton, a moderate Presbyterian, who is unwittingly drawn into the conflict and barely escapes summary execution. In writing Old Mortality Scott drew upon the knowledge he had acquired from his researches into ballads on the subject for The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.[20] Scott's background as a lawyer also informed his perspective, for at the time of the novel, which takes place before the Act of Union of 1707, English law did not apply in Scotland, and afterwards Scotland has continued to have its own Scots law as a hybrid legal system. A recent critic, who is a legal as well as a literary scholar, argues that Old Mortality not only reflects the dispute between Stuart's absolute monarchy and the jurisdiction of the courts, but also invokes a foundational moment in British sovereignty, namely, the Habeas Corpus Act (also known as the Great Writ), passed by the English Parliament in 1679.[21] Oblique reference to the origin of Habeas corpus underlies Scott's next novel, Ivanhoe, set during the era of the creation of the Magna Carta, which political conservatives like Walter Scott and Edmund Burke regarded as rooted in immemorial British custom and precedent.

Ivanhoe (1819), set in 12th-century England, marked a move away from Scott's focus on the local history of Scotland. Based partly on Hume's History of England and the ballad cycle of Robin Hood, Ivanhoe was quickly translated into many languages and inspired countless imitations and theatrical adaptations. Ivanhoe depicts the cruel tyranny of the Norman overlords (Norman Yoke) over the impoverished Saxon populace of England, with two of the main characters, Rowena and Locksley (Robin Hood), representing the dispossessed Saxon aristocracy. When the protagonists are captured and imprisoned by a Norman baron, Scott interrupts the story to exclaim:

It is grievous to think that those valiant barons, to whose stand against the crown the liberties of England were indebted for their existence, should themselves have been such dreadful oppressors, and capable of excesses contrary not only to the laws of England, but to those of nature and humanity. But, alas ...fiction itself can hardly reach the dark reality of the horrors of the period. (Chapter 24.33)

The institution of the Magna Carta, which happens outside the time frame of the story, is portrayed as a progressive (incremental) reform, but also as a step towards the recovery of a lost golden age of liberty endemic to England and the English system. Scott puts a derisive prophecy in the mouth of the jester Wamba:

Norman saw on English oak.
On English neck a Norman yoke;
Norman spoon to English dish,
And England ruled as Normans wish;
Blithe world in England never will be more,
Till England's rid of all the four. (Ivanhoe, Ch. xxvii)

Although on the surface an entertaining escapist romance, alert contemporary readers would have quickly recognised the political subtext of Ivanhoe, which appeared immediately after the English Parliament, fearful of French-style revolution in the aftermath of Waterloo, had passed the Habeas Corpus Suspension acts of 1817 and 1818 and other extremely repressive measures, and when traditional English Charter rights versus revolutionary human rights was a topic of discussion.[22]

Ivanhoe was also remarkable in its sympathetic portrayal of Jewish characters: Rebecca, considered by many critics the book's real heroine, does not in the end get to marry Ivanhoe, whom she loves, but Scott allows her to remain faithful to her own religion, rather than having her convert to Christianity. Likewise, her father, Isaac of York, a Jewish moneylender, is shown as a victim rather than a villain. In Ivanhoe, which is one of Scott's Waverley novels, religious and sectarian fanatics are the villains, while the eponymous hero is a bystander who must weigh the evidence and decide where to take a stand. Scott's positive portrayal of Judaism, which reflects his humanity and concern for religious toleration, also coincided with a contemporary movement for the Emancipation of the Jews in England.

Recovery of the Crown Jewels, baronetcy and ceremonial pageantry

Rediscovering the 'lost' Honours of Scotland in 1818
George IV landing at Leith in 1822

Scott's fame grew as his explorations and interpretations of Scottish history and society captured popular imagination. Impressed by this, the Prince Regent (the future George IV) gave Scott permission to conduct a search for the Crown Jewels ("Honours of Scotland"). During the years of the Protectorate under Cromwell the Crown Jewels 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. Thereafter, the honours were stored in Edinburgh Castle, but the large locked box in which they were stored was not opened for more than 100 years, and stories circulated that they had been "lost" or removed. In 1818, Scott and a small team of military men opened the box, and "unearthed" the honours from the Crown Room in the depths of Edinburgh Castle. A grateful Prince Regent granted Scott the title of baronet,[23] and in March 1820 he received the baronetcy in London, becoming Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet.[24]

After George's accession to the throne, the city council of Edinburgh invited Scott, at the King's behest, to stage-manage the 1822 visit of King George IV to Scotland.[23] With only three weeks for planning and execution, Scott created a spectacular and comprehensive pageant, designed not only to impress the King, but also in some way to heal the rifts that had destabilised Scots society. He used the event to contribute to the drawing of a line under an old world that pitched his homeland into regular bouts of bloody strife. He, along with his "production team", mounted what in modern days could be termed a PR event, in which the King was dressed in tartan, and was greeted by his people, many of whom were also dressed in similar tartan ceremonial dress. This form of dress, proscribed after the 1745 rebellion against the English, became one of the seminal, potent and ubiquitous symbols of Scottish identity.[25]

In his novel Kenilworth, Elizabeth I is welcomed to the castle of that name by means of an elaborate pageant, the details of which Scott was well qualified to itemize.

Much of Scott's autograph work shows an almost stream-of-consciousness approach to writing. He included little in the way of punctuation in his drafts, leaving such details to the printers to supply.[26] He eventually acknowledged in 1827 that he was the author of the Waverley Novels.[25]

Financial problems and death

Sir Walter Scott's grave at Dryburgh Abbey

In 1825 a UK-wide banking crisis resulted in the collapse of the Ballantyne printing business, of which Scott was the only partner with a financial interest; the company's debts of £130,000 (equivalent to £9,600,000 in 2015) caused his very public ruin.[27] Rather than declare himself bankrupt, or to accept any kind of 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 determined to write his way out of debt. He kept up his prodigious output of fiction, as well as producing a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, until 1831. By then his health was failing, but he nevertheless undertook a grand tour of Europe, and was welcomed and celebrated wherever he went. He returned to Scotland and, in September 1832, during the epidemic in Scotland that year, died of typhus[28] at Abbotsford, the home he had designed and had built, near Melrose in the Scottish Borders. (His wife, Lady Scott, had died in 1826 and was buried as an Episcopalian.) Two Presbyterian ministers and one Episcopalian officiated at his funeral.[29] Scott died owing money, but his novels continued to sell, and the debts encumbering his estate were discharged shortly after his death.[27]

Family

Scott's eldest son Lt Walter Scott, inherited his father's estate and possessions. He married Jane Jobson, only daughter of William Jobson of Lochore (died 1822) and his wife Rachel Stuart (died 1863) on 3 February 1825.[30]

Business associates

Scott's lawyer from at least 1814 was Hay Donaldson WS (died 1822), who was also agent to the Duke of Buccleuch. Scott was Donaldson's proposer when he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.[31]

Abbotsford

Abbotsford House
Tomb of Walter Scott, in Dryburgh Abbey by Henry Fox Talbot, 1844.

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).[32]

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, Scott bought Cartley Hole Farm, downstream on the Tweed nearer Melrose. The farm had the nickname of "Clarty Hole", and when Scott built a family cottage there in 1812 he named it "Abbotsford". He continued to expand the estate, and built Abbotsford House in a series of extensions.[2] The farmhouse developed into a wonderful home that has been likened to a fairy palace. Scott was a pioneer of the Scottish Baronial style of architecture, therefore 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.[33]

It is estimated that the building cost Scott more than £25,000 (equivalent to £1,900,000 in 2015). More land was purchased until Scott owned nearly 1,000 acres (4.0 km2). A Roman road with a ford near Melrose used in olden days by the abbots of Melrose suggested the name of Abbotsford. Scott was buried in Dryburgh Abbey, where his wife had earlier been interred. Nearby is a large statue of William Wallace, one of Scotland's many romanticised historical figures.[34] Abbotsford later gave its name to the Abbotsford Club, founded in 1834 in memory of Sir Walter Scott.[35]

Legacy

Later assessment

Although he continued to be extremely popular and widely read, both at home and abroad,[36] 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 the discerning few (including, as it happened, Sir Walter 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 recognized. He was acclaimed as the inventor of the genre of the modern historical novel (which others trace to Jane Porter, whose work in the genre predates Scott's) 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 been formally suppressed as barbaric, and viewed in the southern mind as a breeding ground of hill bandits, religious fanaticism, and Jacobite rebellions. 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, despite his extensive travels around his native country. It is a testament to Scott's contribution in creating a unified identity for Scotland that Edinburgh's central railway station, opened in 1854 by the North British Railway, is called Waverley. The fact that Scott was a Lowland Presbyterian, rather than a Gaelic-speaking Catholic Highlander, made him more acceptable to a conservative English reading public. Scott's novels were certainly influential in the making of the Victorian craze for all things Scottish among British royalty, who were anxious to claim legitimacy through their rather attenuated historical connection with the royal house of Stuart.

At the time Scott wrote, Scotland was poised to move away from an era of socially divisive clan warfare to a modern world of literacy and industrial capitalism. 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 ago. Scott's 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, in his view, 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 from the 1960s. Postmodern tastes favoured discontinuous narratives and the introduction of the "first person", yet they were more favourable to Scott's work than Modernist tastes. 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 genuine interest in his work. Scott is now seen as an important innovator and a key figure in the development of Scottish and world literature, and particularly as the inventor of the historical novel.[37]

Memorials and commemoration

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 fellow-Scots Sir Henry Raeburn and James Eckford Lauder. 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, as mentioned, Edinburgh's Waverley railway station takes its name from one of his novels.

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.[38] There is a statue of Scott in New York City's Central Park.[39]

Numerous Masonic Lodges have been named after him and his novels. For example: Lodge Sir Walter Scott, No.859, (Perth, Australia) and Lodge Waverly, No.597, (Edinburgh, Scotland).[40]

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. The award has been presented at Scott's historic home, Abbotsford House.

Appearance on banknotes

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.[41]

Scott and education in the United States

During and immediately after World War I there was a movement spearheaded by President Wilson and other eminent people to inculcate patriotism in American school children, 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.[42] The effect was not always as intended. In his 1996 memoirs labor lawyer Victor Rabinowitz recalled:

When I was nine or ten years old, the assigned reading in the class was “The Man without a Country", a short story by Edward Everett Hale. At its climax there appeared a poem by Sir Walter Scott, which we were obliged to memorize. I can still recite it:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
"This is my own, my native land"?
Whose heart hath n’er within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned...?
If such there be, go mark him well...
The wretch, concentrated all in self,
...Doubly dying shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung. —"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805)

This poem troubled me a great deal. My father never intended to return to his native land [of Lithuania]. I didn’t know exactly what a “dead soul” was, but...I was sure my father didn’t have one. The last two lines...stated that my father was to go down into the vile dust from which he sprung...The poem never caused me to think less of my father, whom I loved and respected, but I quickly grew to despise and, in a sense, fear the thought advanced by the poetry. What was all this nonsense about a “native land”? Why was it better than any other land? And why should I have to memorize such a nasty verse. So I pondered at the age of ten.[43]

Scott's Ivanhoe continued to be required reading for many American high school students until the end of the 1950s.

References to Scott in literature by other authors

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.[44]

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 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".[45]

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 First South Carolina Volunteers, the first authorized Union Army regiment recruited from freedmen during the Civil War (memorialized in the 1989 film Glory). 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 his 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".[46]

In his 1883 Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain satirized 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".[47] He goes on to coin the term "Sir Walter Scott disease", which he blames for the South'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 armor, reflecting Twain's ambivalence on the topic.

The idyllic Cape Cod retreat of suffragists Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor in Henry James' The Bostonians (1886) is called Marmion, evoking what James considered the Quixotic idealism of these 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) 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 ... [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 ... 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. 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.

In 1951, 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 To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the protagonist's brother is made to read Walter Scott's book Ivanhoe to the ailing Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose, and he refers to the author as "Sir Walter Scout", in reference to his own sister's nickname.

In Mother Night (1961) by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 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 Canadian author Paul Marlowe, there are several quotes from and references to Marmion, as well as an inn named after Ivanhoe, and a fictitious Scott novel entitled The Beastmen of Glen Glammoch.

Bibliography

Sir Walter Scott by Robert Scott Moncrieff.

Novels

The Waverley Novels series

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:

Other novels

Poetry

Many of the short poems or songs released by Scott were originally not separate pieces but parts of longer poems interspersed throughout his novels, tales, and dramas.

Short stories

Plays

Non-fiction

See also

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Walter Scott
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Walter Scott

References

  1. ↑ "Family Background". Retrieved 2011-04-09.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Edinburgh University Library (22 October 2004). "Homes of Sir Walter Scott". x Edinburgh University Library. Retrieved 9 July 2013.
  3. ↑ Cone, T E (1973). "Was Sir Walter Scott's Lameness Caused by Poliomyelitis?". Pediatrics. 51 (1): 33.
  4. ↑ Robertson, Fiona. "Disfigurement and Disability: Walter Scott's Bodies". Otranto.co.uk. Retrieved 9 May 2014.
  5. 1 2 "Sandyknowe and Early Childhood". Retrieved 2011-04-09.
  6. ↑ "No 1 Nos 2 and 3 (Farrell's Hotel) Nos 4 to 8 (consec) (Pratt's Hotel)". Images of England. English Heritage. Retrieved 29 July 2009.
  7. 1 2 "School and University". Walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk. 24 October 2003. Retrieved 29 November 2009.
  8. ↑ "Literary Beginnings". Walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk. 11 December 2007. Retrieved 29 November 2009.
  9. ↑ Walter, Sir Walter (2012). The Lady of the Lake. Lititz, PA: AP Publishing House. p. 308. ISBN 9781105941573. Retrieved 22 November 2016.
  10. ↑ BBC profile
  11. ↑ Leslie C. R. Letter to Miss C Leslie dated 26 June 1820 in Autobiographical recollections ed. Tom Taylor, Ticknor & Fields, Boston 1855
  12. ↑ 1st Lothians and Border Yeomanry
  13. ↑ http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/biography/chronology.html
  14. ↑ Edinburgh Archive – Family
  15. ↑ Cooper, Robert L D, Ed. 2010. Famous Scottish Freemasons, pp 58–59. ISBN 978-0-9560933-8-7
  16. ↑ Edinburgh Archive – Ballantyne Brothers
  17. ↑ Hay, James (1899). Sir Walter Scott. London. p. 258. ISBN 978-1278170947. Retrieved 22 November 2016.
  18. ↑ http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/biography/poet.html
  19. ↑ "Scott the Poet". Walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk. 11 December 2007. Retrieved 29 November 2009.
  20. ↑ See Old Mortality on the University of Edinburgh Walter Scott website.
  21. ↑ See Amy Witherbee, in "Habeas Corpus: British Imaginations of Power in Walter Scott's Old Mortality", New Literary History 39 (2008): 355–67, writes:
    By the 1670s, conflicts between religious dissidents and the Stuart Crown had given way to a Crown policy of seizing and imprisoning opponents without recourse to the courts. In 1679, this policy of using extrajudicial imprisonments to quell rebellion finally provoked the English Parliament to pass the Act of Habeas Corpus in England. Usually translated as “produce the body,” habeas corpus could be invoked by any subject to require that the king or his agents produce the body of a prisoner for adjudication before the courts. In its barest terms the Great Writ protected a subject from indefinite terms of imprisonment, from imprisonment outside the kingdom, or from imprisonment without cause. It did so by asserting the jurisdiction of the courts as superior to the executive powers of the king. The Act was thus part of a long debate within the three kingdoms about the relationship of king to law and vice versa.
  22. ↑ Witherbee (2008), pp. 363–64. Habeas corpus had been suspended in the mid-1790s at the time of the French Revolution by William Pitt, who had called the French declaration of human rights "monstrous". Widely publicised trials for sedition took place in Edinburgh (1793) and in London (1794) John Thelwall and two others were charged with treason. The Scottish defendants received harsh sentences whereas the English ones were acquitted. According to historian Anne Stott: "The difference between the English and Scottish trials reflects the different legal systems. Ironically, the acquittals made the loyalist case—that England was a country where a man could have a fair trial."
  23. 1 2 "Chronology of Walter Scott's life". Walter Scott Digital Archive. Retrieved 2 May 2015.
  24. ↑ "The Abbot". Walter Scott Digital Archive. Retrieved 2 May 2015. Scott had travelled to London in March [1820] to receive his baronetcy
  25. 1 2 "Walter Scott Digital Archive – Chronology". Walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk. 13 Oct 2008. Retrieved 29 Nov 2009.
  26. ↑ Stuart Kelly quoted by Arnold Zwicky in The Book of Lost Books
  27. 1 2 McKinstry, Sam; Fletcher, Marie (2002). "The Personal Account Books of Sir Walter Scott". The Accounting Historians Journal. 29: 59–89. JSTOR 40698269. (subscription required)
  28. ↑ London Medical and Surgical Journal, January 1833
  29. ↑ Edinburgh Profile, Financial Hardship
  30. ↑ Monuments and monumental inscriptions in Scotland: The Grampian Society, 1871
  31. ↑ BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX OF FORMER FELLOWS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF EDINBURGH 1783 – 2002 (PDF). The Royal Society of Edinburgh. July 2006. ISBN 0 902 198 84 X.
  32. ↑ Lockhart, John Gibson (1837). Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. Philadelphia. p. 1.397. Retrieved 7 November 2016.
  33. ↑ Abbotsford House website.
  34. ↑ Scott, Sir Walter; Grant, George (2001). From Bannockburn to Flodden: Wallace, Bruce, and the Heroes of Medieval Scotland. Nashville: Cumberland. p. viii. ISBN 978-1581821277.
  35. ↑ The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th Edition. Edited by Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, 2000 Pp1
  36. ↑ "…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.
  37. ↑ Higgins, Charlotte (16 August 2010). "Scotland's image-maker Sir Walter Scott 'invented English legends'". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2011-04-09.
  38. ↑ "Glasgow, George Square, Walter Scott's Monument". Retrieved 2011-04-09.
  39. ↑ New York monument
  40. ↑ Grand Lodge of Scotland Year Book. 2014. pp 25 & 34. ISBN 0902324-86-1
  41. ↑ Scottish Banks
  42. ↑ For example, see the textbook compiled by Emma Serl and William J. Pelo, American Ideals: Selected Patriotic Readings for Seventh and Eighth Grades, introduction by Charles W. Eliot, President Emeritus of Harvard (Gregg Publishing, 1919).
  43. ↑ Victor Rabinowitz, Unrepentant Leftist: A Lawyer’s Memoir (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), ISBN 978-0-252-02253-1
  44. ↑ See Francis S. Heck, “Baudelaire's La Fanfarlo: An Example of Romantic Irony”, The French Review 49: 3 (1976): 328–36.
  45. ↑ Kenneth S. Sacks, editor, Emerson: Political Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) (Cambridge University Press, 2008), p, 193.
  46. ↑ S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, Oxford, 1976, p.386.
  47. ↑ Twain, Mark. "Life on the Mississippi", Chapter 46

Further reading

Baronetage of the United Kingdom
New title Baronet
(of Abbotsford)
1st creation
1820–1832 		Next:
Sir Walter Scott
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