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Walter Scott

March 07, 2023

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

Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet FRSE FSAScot (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish historian, novelist, poet, and playwright. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels Ivanhoe (1819), Rob Roy (1817), Waverley (1814), Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), along with the narrative poems Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810). He had a major impact on European and American literature.

Sir

Walter Scott

Bt
Portrait by Thomas Lawrence, c. 1820s
Born15 August 1771
Edinburgh, Scotland
Died21 September 1832(1832-09-21) (aged 61)
Abbotsford, Roxburghshire, Scotland
Occupation
Alma materUniversity of Edinburgh
Period19th century
Literary movementRomanticism
SpouseCharlotte Carpenter (Charpentier)
Children5
Signature

As an advocate, judge, 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 a president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1820–1832), and a vice president of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1827–1829).[1] 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, Scotland, on 22 April 1820; the title became extinct on his son's death in 1847.

Early life

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 University of Edinburgh (Old College).[2] He was the ninth child (six having died in infancy) of Walter Scott (1729–1799), a member of a cadet branch of the Clan Scott and a Writer to the Signet, by his wife Anne Rutherford, a sister of Daniel Rutherford and a descendant both of the Clan Swinton and of the Haliburton family (descent from which granted Walter's family the hereditary right of burial in Dryburgh Abbey).[3]

Walter was, through the Haliburtons, a cousin of the London property developer James Burton (d. 1837), who was born with the surname 'Haliburton', and of the same's son the architect Decimus Burton.[4] Walter became a member of the Clarence Club, of which the Burtons were members.[5][6]

 
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,[7] a condition that would greatly affect his life and writing.[8]

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.[9] Here, 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.[10] In the winter of 1776, he went back to Sandyknowe, with another attempt at a water cure at Prestonpans the following summer.[9]

In 1778, Scott returned to Edinburgh for private education to prepare him for school and joined his family in their new house, one of the first to be built in George Square.[2] In October 1779, he began at the Royal High School in Edinburgh (in High School Yards). He was by then 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.

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.[11]

Appearance

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".[12] Although a determined walker, he experienced greater freedom of movement on horseback.[citation needed]

Student

 
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 had become a friend of Adam Ferguson, whose father Professor Adam Ferguson hosted literary salons.[13] 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, a 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;[14] another version of the event appears in Literary Beginnings.[15]

When it was decided that 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.[11] 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.[16]

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,[17] and was appointed quartermaster and secretary. The daily drill practices that year, starting at 5 a.m., indicate the determination with which the role was undertaken.[citation needed]

Literary career, marriage and family

 
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 that he "was German-mad."[18] 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,[16] which linked with his own developing passion for traditional balladry. A favourite book since childhood had been 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.[16] 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).[19] 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.[20] 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[21] 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.[22] In 1799 Scott was appointed Sheriff-Depute of the County 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. It was there 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, sited on the south bank of the River Tweed and incorporating an ancient tower house.[2]

At Scott's insistence the first edition of Minstrelsy was printed by his friend James Ballantyne at Kelso. In 1798 James had published Scott's version of 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.[23][16][24]

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".[25] The best known of Scott's dogs were Maida, a large stag hound, and Spice, a Dandle 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".[25]

The poet

 
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".[26] He owed the distinctive irregular accent in four-beat metre to Coleridge's Christabel, which he had heard recited by John Stoddart. (It was not to be published until 1816.)[27] 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.[16] 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.[28] 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.[29] 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"[30]

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.[16] The reviewers were fairly favourable, finding the defects noted in Marmion largely absent.[31] 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 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."[32] 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.[33] 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.[16]

The remaining two long narrative poems, Rokeby (1813), set in the Yorkshire estate of that name belonging to Scott's friend J. B. S. 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);[34] 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.[35][36]

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."[37] 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.[38]

The novelist

 
A Legend of Montrose, illustration from the 1872 edition
Further information: Historical romance and Romance (literary fiction)

Gothic novel

Scott was influenced by Gothic romance, and had collaborated in 1801 with 'Monk' Lewis on Tales of Wonder.[39][40]

Historic romances

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.[41] 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.[42] 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),[43] especially as it was a fairly open secret, but as he himself said, with Shylock, "such was my humour."[44]

 
Sir Walter Scott by Robert Scott Moncrieff

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).[45][46] 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.[47] 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."[48] 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."[49] 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."[16]

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.[50] 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.

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 (25p) these were an innovative and profitable venture aimed at a wide readership: the print run was an astonishing 30,000.[51]

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]."[52] 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.[53] 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.[54]

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

 
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[55] to conduct a search for the Crown Jewels ("Honours of Scotland"). During the Protectorate under 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,[56] 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".[57] 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.[58]

After George's accession, the city council of Edinburgh invited Scott, at the sovereign's behest, to stage-manage the 1822 visit of King George IV to Scotland.[59] 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 PR 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.[60]

Financial problems and death

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. Its debts of £130,000 (equivalent to £11,400,000 in 2021) caused his very public ruin.[61] 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.

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, however, would not be published until 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 on board 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 pure coincidence, Mary Martha Sherwood was also on board. She would later write about this encounter.[62] After he was landed in England, Scott was transported back to die at Abbotsford on 21 September 1832.[63] 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.[64]

Although Scott died owing money, his novels continued to sell, and the debts encumbering his estate were discharged shortly after his death.[61]

Religion

Scott was raised as a Presbyterian in the Church of Scotland. He was ordained as an elder in Duddingston Kirk in 1806,[65] 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.[66]

Freemasonry

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,[67] albeit only after the death of his father.

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).[68]

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.[69] 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'[70] and 'a kind of Conundrum Castle to be sure'.[71] 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.[69][verification needed]

It is estimated that the building cost Scott more than £25,000 (equivalent to £2,200,000 in 2021). More land was purchased until Scott owned nearly 1,000 acres (4.0 km2). 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.[72] Ferguson commissioned Sir David Wilkie to paint the Scott family[73] resulting in the painting The Abbotsford Family[74] 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,[75] is behind.[76] The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818.[77]

Abbotsford later gave its name to the Abbotsford Club, founded in 1834 in memory of Sir Walter Scott.[78]

Reputation

Later assessment

Although he continued to be extremely popular and widely read, both at home and abroad,[79] 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, 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 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 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

 
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 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.[80] There is a statue of Scott in New York City's Central Park.[81]

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).[82]

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.

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.[83]

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.[84] 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.[85]

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).[86]

Influence

On novelists

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".[87] 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".[88] Also highly influential were the early translations into French by Defauconpret.[88]

 
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,[89] and Sir Walter Scott in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1833.[90] 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.[91]

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.[92]

Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (1827) has similarities with Walter Scott's historic novel Ivanhoe, although evidently distinct.[93]

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.[94]

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 beleive, upon recollection, Lovell is the Reader.[95]

In Jane 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 a letter to Walter 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.[96]

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 Walter Scott.[97] 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).[98]

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.[99]

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.[100]

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.[101]

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."[102]

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."[103]

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.[104]

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. 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 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."[105]

Mark Twain, in his 1883 Life on the Mississippi, 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."[106] 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 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 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.

Virginia 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, amourous 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.[107]

John Cowper Powys described Walter Scott's romances as "by far the most powerful literary influence of my life".[108] 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.[109]

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 Harper Lee's 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. 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 references to Marmion, as well as an inn named after Ivanhoe, and a fictitious Scott novel entitled The Beastmen of Glen Glammoch.

The other arts

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).[110][111] 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.[112] Seven from The Lady of the Lake were set in German translations by Schubert, one of them being 'Ellens dritter Gesang' popularly known as 'Schubert's Ave Maria'. Three lyrics, also in translation, appear from Beethoven in his Twenty-Five Scottish Songs, Op. 108. Other notable musical responses include three overtures: Waverley (1828) and Rob Roy (1831) by 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;[113] Delacroix's L'Enlèvement de Rebecca (1846) from Ivanhoe in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;[114] and Millais's The Bride of Lammermoor (1878) in Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.[115]

Walter Scott features as a character in Sara Sheridan's novel The Fair Botanists (2021).[116]

Works

 
Portrait by James Howe

Novels

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:

  • 1831–1832: The Siege of Malta – a finished novel published posthumously in 2008
  • 1832: Bizarro – an unfinished novel (or novella) published posthumously in 2008

Poetry

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

Short stories

  • 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"

Plays

Non-fiction

  • 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
  • 1816: Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk
  • 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
  • 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

Archives

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.[117]

See also

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

References

  1. ^ "Famous Fellows". Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Retrieved 18 January 2019.
  2. ^ a b c Edinburgh University Library (22 October 2004). "Homes of Sir Walter Scott". Edinburgh University Library. Retrieved 9 July 2013.
  3. ^ "Family Background". Walter Scott. Edinburgh University Library. 24 October 2003.
  4. ^ "Who were the Burtons". The Burtons' St Leonards Society. Retrieved 18 September 2017.
  5. ^ Beattie, William (1849). Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, In Three Volumes, Volume II. Edward Moxon, Dover Street, London. p. 55.
  6. ^ The Athenaeum, Volume 3, Issues 115–165. J. Lection, London. 1830. p. 170.
  7. ^ Cone, T E (1973). "Was Sir Walter Scott's Lameness Caused by Poliomyelitis?". Pediatrics. 51 (1): 33.
  8. ^ Robertson, Fiona. . Otranto.co.uk. Archived from the original on 12 May 2014. Retrieved 9 May 2014.
  9. ^ a b "Sandyknowe and Early Childhood". Walter Scott. Edinburgh University Library. 24 October 2003.
  10. ^ . Images of England. English Heritage. Archived from the original on 31 May 2012. Retrieved 29 July 2009.
  11. ^ a b "School and University". Walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk. 24 October 2003. Retrieved 29 November 2009.
  12. ^ C. R. Leslie, 1855. "Letter to Miss C Leslie dated 26 June 1820" in Autobiographical recollections. ed. Tom Taylor, Ticknor & Fields, Boston.
  13. ^ Lockhart, pp. 378–379.
  14. ^ Lockhart, p. 38.
  15. ^ "Literary Beginnings". Walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk. 11 December 2007. Retrieved 29 November 2009.
  16. ^ a b c d e f g h Hewitt, David (2004) "Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/24928
  17. ^ J. G. Lockhart, 1872. The Life Of Scott. Ch. 2.
  18. ^ The Letters of Sir Walter Scott': 1826‒1828, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London, 1936), p. 331: Scott to Mrs Hughes.
  19. ^ "Williamina, Charlotte and Marriage". University of Edinburgh. 24 October 2003. Retrieved 31 October 2017.
  20. ^ "Abbotsford – The Home of Sir Walter Scott". www.scottsabbotsford.com. Retrieved 19 November 2021.
  21. ^ Monuments and monumental inscriptions in Scotland: The Grampian Society, 1871.
  22. ^ C. S. M. Lockhart, 1871 The Centenary Memorial of Sir Walter Scott. Virtue & Co. p. 62.
  23. ^ Johnson, p. 171.
  24. ^ Sharon Ragaz, 2004. "James Ballantyne", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/1228
  25. ^ a b 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.
  26. ^ The Letters of Sir Walter Scott: 1787‒1807, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London, 1932), 166 (Scott to Anna Seward, 30 November 1802).
  27. ^ Johnson, p. 197.
  28. ^ Walter Scott, 2018. Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field, ed. Ainsley McIntosh. Edinburgh. pp. 292‒93. ISBN 978-1717020321
  29. ^ J. H. Alexander, 1976. Two Studies in Romantic Reviewing, Vol. 2. Salzburg. pp. 358‒369. ISBN 0773401296
  30. ^ Canto 6, stanza 17 (6.766‒67).
  31. ^ J. H. Alexander, 1976. Two Studies in Romantic Reviewing, Vol. 2. Salzburg. pp. 369‒380. ISBN 0773401296
  32. ^ Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Volume 3 1807‒1814, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford. 1959. p. 808 (early October 1810).
  33. ^ The Letters of Sir Walter Scott: 1808‒1811, ed. H. J. C. Grierson. London. 1932. 419n.
  34. ^ The Romantics Part III, S–Z, No. 25, London: Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers, 2021.
  35. ^ Johnson, pp. 299‒300.
  36. ^ 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
  37. ^ "Scott the Poet". www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk.
  38. ^ "Scott the Poet". Walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk. 11 December 2007. Retrieved 29 November 2009.
  39. ^ The Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature, ed. Marion Wynne Davis. New York: Prentice Hall, 1990, p. 885.
  40. ^ See also, Robert Letellier, Sir Walter Scott and the Gothic Novel. Lewiston, New York:Mellen Press, 1995.
  41. ^ Walter Scott, 1889. Waverley Novels Centenary Edition Vol. I, "General Preface, 1829." Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black.
  42. ^ Walter Scott, 2007. Waverley, ed. P. D. Garside. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 367‒383. ISBN 0748605673
  43. ^ Cooney, Seamus (1973). "Scott's Anonymity—Its Motive and Consequences". Studies in Scottish Literature. 10: 207‒19.
  44. ^ 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
  45. ^ 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).
  46. ^ 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
  47. ^ Graham McMaster, 1981. Scott and Society. Cambridge University Press. Ch. 2 "Scott and the Enlightenment". ISBN 9780521237697
  48. ^ 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.
  49. ^ Walter Scott, 2007. Waverley, ed. P. D. Garside. Edinburgh University Press. Ch. 16, p. 78. ISBN 0748605673
  50. ^ 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.
  51. ^ Jane Millgate, 1987. Scott's Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 21 and 125 note 51. ISBN 0852245416
  52. ^ 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
  53. ^ 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.
  54. ^ Paul Scott, Walter Scott and Scotland (Edinburgh, 1981); Julian Meldon D'Arcy, Subversive Scott (Reykjavik, 2005).
  55. ^ William Bell, 1829. Papers Relative to the Regalia of Scotland. Edinburgh. p. 6.
  56. ^ William Bell, 1829. Papers Relative to the Regalia of Scotland. Edinburgh. p. 9.
  57. ^ The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1818, Vol. 11 Appx. IV p. 227.
  58. ^ 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.
  59. ^ "Chronology of Walter Scott's life". Walter Scott Digital Archive. Retrieved 2 May 2015.
  60. ^ "Walter Scott Digital Archive – Chronology". Walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk. 13 October 2008. Retrieved 29 November 2009.
  61. ^ a b 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.
  62. ^ Sherwood 1857, p. 531.
  63. ^ London Medical and Surgical Journal, January 1833
  64. ^ Sefton, Henry R. (1983) "Scott as Churchman", Scott and his Influence. Aberdeen. pp. 234–42 (241). ISBN 9780950262932
  65. ^ "Duddingston Kirk – History and Buildings". Duddingston Kirk – Home. Retrieved 27 May 2019.
  66. ^ Lockhart, Vol. 2, pp. 186, 190.
  67. ^ Mackey, Albert G. Encyclopedia Of Freemasonry And Its Kindred Sciences. Vol. 4 (S-Z). Jazzybee Verlag. p. 36. ISBN 978-3-8496-8802-8.
  68. ^ Lockhart, p. 397
  69. ^ a b "Abbotsford – The Home of Sir Walter Scott". www.scottsabbotsford.com. Retrieved 26 August 2019.
  70. ^ Grierson, op. cit., 8.129: Scott to John Richardson, [November–December 1823].
  71. ^ The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, ed. W. E. K. Anderson (Oxford, 1972), 11: 7 January 1828.
  72. ^ "Huntlyburn; statement of interest". British Listed Buildings. Retrieved 7 August 2018.
  73. ^ McCunn, Florence (1910) Sir Walter Scott's friends. New York : John Lane Co. p. 329
  74. ^ "The Abbotsford Family". National Gallery. Retrieved 4 August 2018.
  75. ^ "Thomas Scott (1731–1823), Uncle of Sir Walter Scott". Art UK. Retrieved 26 August 2019.
  76. ^ "The Abbotsford Family – Walter Scott Image Collection". images.is.ed.ac.uk.
  77. ^ "Douglas David 1895 Records of The Clan Ferguson". p. x. Retrieved 4 August 2018.
  78. ^ Drabble, Margaret (2000). The Oxford companion to English literature (6th ed.). New York : Oxford University Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-19-866244-0.
  79. ^ "...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.
  80. ^ "Glasgow, George Square, Walter Scott's Monument". Retrieved 9 April 2011.
  81. ^ "Central Park Monuments – Sir Walter Scott : NYC Parks". www.nycgovparks.org.
  82. ^ Grand Lodge of Scotland Year Book. 2014. pp 25 & 34. ISBN 0902324-86-1
  83. ^ "Bank of Scotland". www.scotbanks.org.uk.
  84. ^ 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)
  85. ^ The origins of all 651 street names in Vancouver. CBC Canada
  86. ^ Harris, Stuart (2002). The Place Names of Edinburgh: Their Origins and History. Steve Savage Publishers. pp. 323–324.
  87. ^ ""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.
  88. ^ a b "Abstract": M. Pittock, ed., The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe.
  89. ^ Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (1832). "Walter Scott". Literary Gazette, 1832. The Proprietors, Wellington Street, Strand. pp. 619–620.
  90. ^ Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (1832). "poetical illustration". Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1833. Fisher, Son & Co.Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (1832). "picture". Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1833. Fisher, Son & Co.
  91. ^ Blanchard, Laman (1841). "Volume 2". Life and Literary Remains of L. E. L. Henry Colburn.
  92. ^ "Things Seen, Essays by Victor Hugo". Victor Hugo. 1823. p. 309. Retrieved 1 April 2022.
  93. ^ 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."
  94. ^ Heck, Francis S. (1976). "Baudelaire's La Fanfarlo: An Example of Romantic Irony". The French Review. 49 (3): 328–36. JSTOR 390170.
  95. ^ "16 December 1816 – Monday – from Chawton – to James Edward". 1816. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
  96. ^ "Sir Walter's Post-Bag". John Murray. 1932. p. 271. Retrieved 21 March 2022.
  97. ^ Elizabeth Gaskell The Life of Charlotte Brontë, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1857, p.104.
  98. ^ Ian Brinton. Bronte's Wuthering Heights Reader's Guides. London : Continuum. 2010, p. 14. Quoting Barker, The Brontes. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholas, 1994.
  99. ^ "The Profitable Reading of Fiction". Thomas Hardy. 1888. pp. 57–70. Retrieved 30 May 2022.
  100. ^ "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.
  101. ^ The Development of the American Short Story: An Historical Survey. Biblo and Tannen. 1923. p. 93. ISBN 9780819601759. Retrieved 27 March 2022.
  102. ^ "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.
  103. ^ Sacks, Kenneth S. (2008). Emerson: Political Writings. Cambridge University Press. p. 193. ISBN 978-1-139-47269-2.
  104. ^ "Notes And Reviews by Henry James". Freeport, N.Y., Books for Libraries Press. 1921. p. 14. Retrieved 2 August 2022.
  105. ^ S. S. Prawer, 1976. Karl Marx and World Literature. Oxford University Press. p. 386. ISBN 9780192812483
  106. ^ Twain, Mark. "Life on the Mississippi", Chapter 46.
  107. ^ "The letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, 1932–1935". New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1975. p. 104. Retrieved 1 August 2022.
  108. ^ Autobiography (1934). London: Macdonald, 1967, p. 66.
  109. ^ W. J. Keith, Aspects of John Cowper Powys's Owen Glendower, pp. 20–21
  110. ^ Mitchell, Jerome (1977) Walter Scott Operas. University, Alabama.
  111. ^ Mitchell, Jerome (1996) More Scott Operas. Lanham, Maryland.
  112. ^ Bibliography in Yonge, C. D. (1888) Life of Sir Walter Scott. London. pp. xxxiv‒xxxviii.
  113. ^ "Ashmolean Museum". Retrieved 8 June 2020.
  114. ^ "Metropolitan Museum of Art". Retrieved 8 June 2020.
  115. ^ "Bristol Museum and Art Gallery". Retrieved 8 June 2020.
  116. ^ Sheridan, Sara (2021), The Fair Botanists, Hodder & Stoughton, ISBN 9781529336207
  117. ^ 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, September 18, 2000.

Cited sources

  • Johnson, Edgar (1870). Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown. Vol. 1. London.
  • 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

  • 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
  • Rigney, Ann. The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move. Oxford UP, 2012. ISBN 9780199644018
  • 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.
  • Robertson, Fiona, The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott. Edinburgh University Press, 2012.
  • 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

  • Works by Walter Scott in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
  • Works by Walter Scott at Project Gutenberg
  • Works by or about Walter Scott at Internet Archive
  • Works by Walter Scott at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)  
  • Works by Walter Scott at The Online Books Page
  • Sir Walter Scott and Hinx, his Cat
  • The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club
  • 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.
  • Walter Scott's profile and catalogue of his library at Abbotsford on LibraryThing.
  • 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)
  • Poems by Walter Scott at English Poetry

Archive materials

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 savage wreathed around the head and middle, holding in the exterior hand a club
Motto
(above) Reparabit cornua phoebe – the moon shall fill her horns again
(below) Watch weel
Baronetage of the United Kingdom
New creation Baronet
(of Abbotsford)
1820–1832 		Next:
Walter Scott

March 07, 2023
walter, scott, other, people, named, disambiguation, baronet, frse, fsascot, august, 1771, september, 1832, scottish, historian, novelist, poet, playwright, many, works, remain, classics, european, scottish, literature, notably, novels, ivanhoe, 1819, 1817, wa. For other people named Walter Scott see Walter Scott disambiguation Sir Walter Scott 1st Baronet FRSE FSAScot 15 August 1771 21 September 1832 was a Scottish historian novelist poet and playwright Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature notably the novels Ivanhoe 1819 Rob Roy 1817 Waverley 1814 Old Mortality 1816 The Heart of Mid Lothian 1818 and The Bride of Lammermoor 1819 along with the narrative poems Marmion 1808 and The Lady of the Lake 1810 He had a major impact on European and American literature SirWalter ScottBtPortrait by Thomas Lawrence c 1820sBorn15 August 1771Edinburgh ScotlandDied21 September 1832 1832 09 21 aged 61 Abbotsford Roxburghshire ScotlandOccupationHistorical novelistPoetAdvocateSheriff DeputeClerk of SessionAlma materUniversity of EdinburghPeriod19th centuryLiterary movementRomanticismSpouseCharlotte Carpenter Charpentier Children5SignatureAs an advocate judge 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 a president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1820 1832 and a vice president of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 1827 1829 1 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 Scotland on 22 April 1820 the title became extinct on his son s death in 1847 Contents 1 Early life 1 1 Appearance 2 Student 3 Literary career marriage and family 4 The poet 5 The novelist 5 1 Gothic novel 5 2 Historic romances 6 Recovery of the Crown Jewels baronetcy and ceremonial pageantry 7 Financial problems and death 8 Religion 9 Freemasonry 10 Abbotsford House 11 Reputation 11 1 Later assessment 11 2 Memorials and commemoration 12 Influence 12 1 On novelists 12 2 The other arts 13 Works 13 1 Novels 13 2 Poetry 13 3 Short stories 13 4 Plays 13 5 Non fiction 14 Archives 15 See also 16 References 17 Cited sources 18 Further reading 19 External links 19 1 Archive materialsEarly life EditWalter 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 University of Edinburgh Old College 2 He was the ninth child six having died in infancy of Walter Scott 1729 1799 a member of a cadet branch of the Clan Scott and a Writer to the Signet by his wife Anne Rutherford a sister of Daniel Rutherford and a descendant both of the Clan Swinton and of the Haliburton family descent from which granted Walter s family the hereditary right of burial in Dryburgh Abbey 3 Walter was through the Haliburtons a cousin of the London property developer James Burton d 1837 who was born with the surname Haliburton and of the same s son the architect Decimus Burton 4 Walter became a member of the Clarence Club of which the Burtons were members 5 6 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 7 a condition that would greatly affect his life and writing 8 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 9 Here 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 10 In the winter of 1776 he went back to Sandyknowe with another attempt at a water cure at Prestonpans the following summer 9 In 1778 Scott returned to Edinburgh for private education to prepare him for school and joined his family in their new house one of the first to be built in George Square 2 In October 1779 he began at the Royal High School in Edinburgh in High School Yards He was by then 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 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 11 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 12 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 had become a friend of Adam Ferguson whose father Professor Adam Ferguson hosted literary salons 13 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 a 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 14 another version of the event appears in Literary Beginnings 15 When it was decided that 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 11 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 16 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 17 and was appointed quartermaster and secretary The daily drill practices that year starting at 5 a m indicate the determination with which the role was undertaken citation needed 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 that he was German mad 18 In 1796 he produced English versions of two poems by Gottfried August Burger Der wilde Jager 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 16 which linked with his own developing passion for traditional balladry A favourite book since childhood had been 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 16 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 19 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 20 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 21 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 22 In 1799 Scott was appointed Sheriff Depute of the County 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 It was there 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 sited on the south bank of the River Tweed and incorporating an ancient tower house 2 At Scott s insistence the first edition of Minstrelsy was printed by his friend James Ballantyne at Kelso In 1798 James had published Scott s version of Goethe s Erlkonig in his newspaper The Kelso Mail and in 1799 included it and the two Burger 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 23 16 24 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 25 The best known of Scott s dogs were Maida a large stag hound and Spice a Dandle 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 25 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 amp inchantment 26 He owed the distinctive irregular accent in four beat metre to Coleridge s Christabel which he had heard recited by John Stoddart It was not to be published until 1816 27 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 16 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 28 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 29 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 30 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 16 The reviewers were fairly favourable finding the defects noted in Marmion largely absent 31 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 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 32 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 33 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 16 The remaining two long narrative poems Rokeby 1813 set in the Yorkshire estate of that name belonging to Scott s friend J B S 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 34 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 35 36 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 37 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 38 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 39 40 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 41 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 42 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 43 especially as it was a fairly open secret but as he himself said with Shylock such was my humour 44 Sir Walter Scott by Robert Scott Moncrieff 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 45 46 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 fiancee 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 47 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 amp 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 48 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 49 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 16 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 50 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 daemon 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 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 25p these were an innovative and profitable venture aimed at a wide readership the print run was an astonishing 30 000 51 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 52 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 53 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 54 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 55 to conduct a search for the Crown Jewels Honours of Scotland During the Protectorate under 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 56 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 57 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 58 After George s accession the city council of Edinburgh invited Scott at the sovereign s behest to stage manage the 1822 visit of King George IV to Scotland 59 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 PR 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 60 Financial problems and death EditIn 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 Its debts of 130 000 equivalent to 11 400 000 in 2021 caused his very public ruin 61 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 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 however would not be published until 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 on board 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 pure coincidence Mary Martha Sherwood was also on board She would later write about this encounter 62 After he was landed in England Scott was transported back to die at Abbotsford on 21 September 1832 63 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 64 Although Scott died owing money his novels continued to sell and the debts encumbering his estate were discharged shortly after his death 61 Religion EditScott was raised as a Presbyterian in the Church of Scotland He was ordained as an elder in Duddingston Kirk in 1806 65 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 66 Freemasonry EditScott 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 67 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 68 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 69 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 70 and a kind of Conundrum Castle to be sure 71 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 69 verification needed It is estimated that the building cost Scott more than 25 000 equivalent to 2 200 000 in 2021 More land was purchased until Scott owned nearly 1 000 acres 4 0 km2 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 72 Ferguson commissioned Sir David Wilkie to paint the Scott family 73 resulting in the painting The Abbotsford Family 74 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 75 is behind 76 The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818 77 Abbotsford later gave its name to the Abbotsford Club founded in 1834 in memory of Sir Walter Scott 78 Reputation EditThis section needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Walter Scott news newspapers books scholar JSTOR April 2021 Learn how and when to remove this template message Later assessment Edit Although he continued to be extremely popular and widely read both at home and abroad 79 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 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 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 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 Gyorgy Lukacs 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 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 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 80 There is a statue of Scott in New York City s Central Park 81 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 82 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 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 83 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 84 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 85 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 86 Influence EditOn novelists Edit 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 87 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 88 Also highly influential were the early translations into French by Defauconpret 88 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 89 and Sir Walter Scott in Fisher s Drawing Room Scrap Book 1833 90 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 91 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 92 Alessandro Manzoni s The Betrothed 1827 has similarities with Walter Scott s historic novel Ivanhoe although evidently distinct 93 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 94 Jane Austen in a letter to her nephew James Edward Austen on 16 December 1816 writes Uncle Henry writes very superior Sermons You amp I must try to get hold of one or two amp put them into our Novels it would be a fine help to a volume amp 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 beleive upon recollection Lovell is the Reader 95 In Jane 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 a letter to Walter 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 96 In Charlotte Bronte 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 Bronte s Wuthering Heights was influenced by the novels of Walter Scott 97 In particular according to Juliet Barker Rob Roy 1817 had a significant influence on Bronte 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 98 In Anne Bronte 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 99 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 100 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 101 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 102 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 103 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 104 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 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 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 105 Mark Twain in his 1883 Life on the Mississippi 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 106 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 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 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 linesThe 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 Virginia 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 amourous 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 107 John Cowper Powys described Walter Scott s romances as by far the most powerful literary influence of my life 108 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 109 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 Harper Lee s 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 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 references to Marmion as well as an inn named after Ivanhoe and a fictitious Scott novel entitled The Beastmen of Glen Glammoch 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 110 111 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 112 Seven from The Lady of the Lake were set in German translations by Schubert one of them being Ellens dritter Gesang popularly known as Schubert s Ave Maria Three lyrics also in translation appear from Beethoven in his Twenty Five Scottish Songs Op 108 Other notable musical responses include three overtures Waverley 1828 and Rob Roy 1831 by 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 113 Delacroix s L Enlevement de Rebecca 1846 from Ivanhoe in the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York 114 and Millais s The Bride of Lammermoor 1878 in Bristol Museum and Art Gallery 115 Walter Scott features as a character in Sara Sheridan s novel The Fair Botanists 2021 116 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 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 LandlordOther novels 1831 1832 The Siege of Malta a finished novel published posthumously in 2008 1832 Bizarro an unfinished novel or novella published posthumously in 2008Poetry Edit Many of the short poems or songs released by Scott or later anthologized 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 Burger 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 DundeeShort 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 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 Gotz von Berlichingen 1822 Halidon Hill 1823 MacDuff s Cross 1830 The Doom of Devorgoil 1830 AuchindraneNon 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 Encyclopaedia Britannica 1816 Paul s Letters to his Kinsfolk 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 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 1996Archives EditIn 1925 Scott s manuscripts letters and papers were donated to the National Library of Scotland by the Advocates Library of the Faculty of Advocates 117 See also Edit Wikiquote has quotations related to Walter Scott Wikisource has original works by or about Walter Scott Poetry portalJedediah 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 Writers MuseumReferences Edit Famous Fellows Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Retrieved 18 January 2019 a b c Edinburgh University Library 22 October 2004 Homes of Sir Walter Scott Edinburgh University Library Retrieved 9 July 2013 Family Background Walter Scott Edinburgh University Library 24 October 2003 Who were the Burtons The Burtons St Leonards Society Retrieved 18 September 2017 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 a b 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 a b 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 amp Fields Boston Lockhart pp 378 379 Lockhart p 38 Literary Beginnings Walterscott lib ed ac uk 11 December 2007 Retrieved 29 November 2009 a b c d e f g h 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 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 amp Co p 62 Johnson p 171 Sharon Ragaz 2004 James Ballantyne Oxford Dictionary of National Biography doi 10 1093 ref odnb 1228 a b 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 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 a b 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 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 a b 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 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 Glasgow George Square Walter Scott s Monument Retrieved 9 April 2011 Central Park Monuments Sir Walter Scott NYC Parks www nycgovparks org Grand Lodge of Scotland Year Book 2014 pp 25 amp 34 ISBN 0902324 86 1 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 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a 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 a b 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 amp Co Landon Letitia Elizabeth 1832 picture Fisher s Drawing Room Scrap Book 1833 Fisher Son amp 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 Lukacs 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 Retrieved 25 July 2022 Sir Walter s Post Bag John Murray 1932 p 271 Retrieved 21 March 2022 Elizabeth Gaskell The Life of Charlotte Bronte London Smith Elder amp 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 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 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 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 amp Stoughton ISBN 9781529336207 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 September 18 2000 Cited sources EditJohnson Edgar 1870 Sir Walter Scott The Great Unknown Vol 1 London 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 amp Co LondonFurther reading EditApproaches 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 amp 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 amp 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 amp 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 Rigney Ann The Afterlives of Walter Scott Memory on the Move Oxford UP 2012 ISBN 9780199644018 Stephen Leslie 1898 The Story of Scott s Ruin Studies of a Biographer Vol 2 London Duckworth amp 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 Robertson Fiona The Edinburgh Companion to Sir Walter Scott Edinburgh University Press 2012 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 EditWalter Scott at Wikipedia s sister projects Media from Commons Quotations from Wikiquote Texts from Wikisource Data from Wikidata Works by Walter Scott in eBook form at Standard Ebooks Works by Walter Scott at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Walter Scott at Internet Archive Works by Walter Scott at LibriVox public domain audiobooks Works by Walter Scott at The Online Books Page Sir Walter Scott and Hinx his Cat The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club Sir Walter Scott biography by Richard H Hutton 1878 from Project Gutenberg Chisholm Hugh ed 1911 Scott Sir Walter Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th ed Cambridge University Press Walter Scott s profile and catalogue of his library at Abbotsford on LibraryThing 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 Poems by Walter Scott at English PoetryArchive materials Edit Walter Scott Digital Archive 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 CenterCoat 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 amp 4th or two mullets in chief and a crescent in base azure within an orle azure Scott 2nd amp 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 savage wreathed around the head and middle holding in the exterior hand a club Motto above Reparabit cornua phoebe the moon shall fill her horns again below Watch weelBaronetage of the United KingdomNew creation Baronet of Abbotsford 1820 1832 Next Walter Scott Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Walter Scott amp oldid 1141161527, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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