Walter Scott

Walter Scott was a Scottish historian, novelist, poet, and playwright. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 15th August 1771 and died at Abbotsford, Melrose, Scotland on 21st September 1832 aged 61.

“Marmion”. (1808)
“The Lady of the Lake”. (1812) 
“Waverley.” (1814) 
“Rob Roy”. (1817) 
“The Heart of Midlothian”. (1818)
“Ivanhoe”. (1819) 
“The Fair Maid of Perth”. (1828) 

1771: Walter Scott was born on15th August in the Old Town, of Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the son of a Solicitor. He was educated at the High School in Edinburgh and at Kelso Grammar School. He then went on o Edinburgh University.

1773: He contracts polio and goes to recuperate at his Grandfather’s farm at Sandyknowe in Roxburghshire and he is so impressed by the beauty of the Borders country that it inspires him to start writing.

1775: He returns to Edinburgh.

1785: He begins a five-year apprenticeship in his father’s legal practice.

1792: He is admitted to the Bar on 11th July and spends the summer in the Borders.

1797: He marries Charlotte Carpenter on 24th December and goes to live in Edinburgh with his new wife.

1799: He is appointed Sheriff Substitute of Selkirkshire.

1803: Dorothy and William Wordsworth are travelling around Scotland and they meet Scott in Melrose on 19th September, who takes them on a tour of the Abbey.

1805: He joins in a partnership with the printer James Ballantyne. He visits the Wordsworth’s in Grasmere in the English Lake District and climbs out of the window of Dove Cottage several times to visit the nearby Swan Inn until the landlord lets the cat out of the bag in front of the poet himself.

1806: He becomes Principal Clerk in the Court of Session.

1809: He founds the firm of John Ballantyne and Company, booksellers and publishers. He helps to found the “Quarterly Review” magazine after a disagreement with the pro-Whig “Edinburgh Review”.

1811: He moves to Abbottsford after the lease on Ashetiel expires. He spends a great deal of money on improvements to the house and garden.

1813: John Ballantyne and Company collapse financially but is rescued by the publishers Constable. He refuses the title of Poet Laureate and recommends Robert Southey instead.

1814: The novel “Waverley” is published anonymously as he is by now a prominent public figure.

1815: He visits London and the continent and embarks on a productive period of novel writing after the successes of “Waverley” and “Guy Mannering”.

1818: He is made a Baronet.

1821: Heattends the Coronation of King George the Fourth in Westminster Abbey.

1822: He supervises King George’s official visit to Scotland.

1825: He visits Ireland. He begins a biography of Napoleon. On 20th November he begins his Journal.

1826: He faces bankruptcy after the failure of the publishers Constable, Hurst and Robinson and the printers James Ballantyne. Death of his wife. He continues writing in an effort to clear his debts.

1831: He embarks on a Mediterranean cruise on the Frigate Borham with his daughter and Lockhart.

1832: He finally returns to Abbotsford

Walter Scott died at home on 21st September 1832 after a final stroke. He was buried at Dryburgh Abbey in Melrose, Scotland.

Scott was an avid reader in his youth and read the works of William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, John Dryden and Edmund Spenser which all influenced his later writing. When he was a law student he became interested in German Romanticism and Gothic novels. Of contemporaries he rated the Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth. He was also fascinated by the history and folklore of the Scottish nation and collected the Scottish Border Ballads which he published as “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border” in 1802. He was a great traveller throughout Scotland and England and his many journeys provided him with material for his novels.

In the Waverley Novels in particular he shows his knowledge of the history of Scotland and its manners and customs and even the local regional dialects. He has become known as the “Father of Historical Novel” in English Literature but was a well-known poet before his fame as a novelist. Famous people of the day such as Jane Austen would visit him or indulge in lengthy correspondence. He met Robert Burns when he was fifteen years old. His fame spread far outside the British Isles and in 1819 his novel “Ivanhoe” became a particularly influential example of the historical genre. His idea of setting stories within actual historical events and introducing fictional characters to the story proved popular with readers and has been widely used ever since in both novels and films.

His early nickname was “The Wizard of the North” as the Waverly novels were published anonymously at first. The Literary Gazette of 14th July 1821 was the first to use the term and he was credited with transforming fiction into a fresh new form. He also occasionally wrote under the pseudonym Jedediah Cleishbotham. 

Although he erroneously believed that tartans were original designs made by Scottish clans and popularised the wearing of the kilt (invented by the Englishman Thomas Rawlinson) when he convinced King George the Fourth to wear one on his visit to Edinburgh in August 1822, he did more to shape the Scottish national dress than anyone. For this he has been panned by some critics for producing an overly sentimental view of Scotland and the Highlands which persists to this day in the commercial selling of Scottish shortbread and other tourist ephemera.

His work was viewed enthusiastically by William Wordsworth whom Scott found a bit dull and famously escaped Dove Cottage in Grasmere through a window to visit the Swan Hotel for a drink instead. Another fellow poet James Hogg was also an admirer. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe praised his “Life of Napoleon” highly. Other British writers who openly praised him were the English poet and novelist Letitia Elizabeth Landon and the Bronte sisters. One of the characters in Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre” gives a copy of Scott’s “Marmion” to another and a similar event happens in Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”. Later critics have also stated that “Wuthering Heights” by Emily owes a particular debt to “Rob Roy” from 1817. In Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” Anne Elliot and Captain James Benwick discuss whether “Marmion” or “The Lady of the Lake” is the better work. In George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” Scott’s “Ivanhoe” is praised and Thomas Hardy described “The Bride of Lammermoor” as an almost perfect specimen of historical format. Mary Shelley asked him for advice when writing “The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck” in 1829 and later novelists such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles Kingsley and Virginia Woolf have also praised him. 

In Europe he is said to have influenced the likes of Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo after he was translated into French by Auguste Defauconpret although Charles Baudelaire found his work very tedious.

In Russia Leo Tolstoy and Alexander Pushkin were admirers. He was particularly popular in The United States of America with elite Southerners during the American Civil War and Mark Twain accused him of arousing them to fight through his use of chivalry in “Ivanhoe”. Twain directly targets Scott in “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” the main character repeatedly uses “Great Scott!” as an oath. James Fenimore Cooper however, who had met Scott in Paris, applied his methods when writing “The Last of the Mohicans” in 1826. In 1864 Henry James praised his creation of memorable characters and described him as a “born storyteller” and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe were admirers and in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” one of the characters is made to read “Ivanhoe” to the invalid Mrs Henry Lafayette Dubose. 

Later in the nineteenth century Scottish critics wanted to distance themselves from what they saw as a flawed image of Scotland and his works fell out of favour and he became regarded as a children’s author. E.M Forster criticised his clumsy and slapdash writing style with “flat” characters, and thin plots. 

His legacy was resurrected during the middle of the twentieth century and “The Historical Novel” by the Hungarian Marxist philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs and “Scott’s Achievement as a Novelist” by David Daiches in 1951 generated much interest in his work. Karl Marx’s  daughter Eleanor had already said that Scott was an author to whom Marx returned again and again and admired.

Some of his novels have been used as operas such as Gioachino Rossini’s “La Donna del Lago” (The Lady of the Lake) of 1829 and Gaetano Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” of 1835. George Bizet’s “La Jolie Fille de Perth” is based on “The Fair Maid of Perth” and Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote a work inspired by “Ivanhoe”. Scott’s songs were set to music by Franz Schubert (“Ellens Dritter Gesang”) and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Twenty-Five Sottish Songs. Hector Berlioz set “Rob Roy” to music in 1831 and the Scottish composer Hamish McCunn wrote “The Land of the Mountain and the Flood” in 1887 based on “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”. Artists too have used his work. Eugène Delacroix painted “L’Enlèvement de Rebecca” based on “Ivanhoe” and John Everett Millais painted “The Bride of Lammermoor” in 1878.

For more information see Britain Unlimited’s page on Walter Scott here.

Complete list of works by Scott.