Authors

Walter Scott

Scottish 1771 - 1832

Sir Walter Scott, the greatest novelist of the Romantic period and single most influential writer in the history of the novel was born in College Wynd in Edinburgh's old town on 15 August 1771.

His father Walter, the son of a wealthy Border sheep farmer, became Writer to the Signet in 1755, his mother Anne Rutherford was the daughter of Dr John Rutherford, professor of physiology at the University of Edinburgh.

As an infant, Scott contracted poliomyelitis and as a result was left permanently lame in his right leg. To aid his recovery he was sent to live at Sandyknowe, his grandfather's farm in the Scottish Borders and he grew up surrounded by the hills and stories that would haunt his imagination and have a profound impact on his development as a writer. These early years would expose him to the oral tradition of the Border ballads as told to him by his family, and years later he would translate these into his own written narratives.

Scott rejoined his family in Edinburgh in 1778 and the following year attended the High School of Edinburgh where Latin dominated the curriculum. At this time, Scott was more interested in his own reading than his formal studies and he devoured works by Allan Ramsay, Shakespeare, Milton and Pope as well as the novelists Richardson, Fielding and Smollett. He also collected chapbooks and his young imagination was fired by James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry.

In 1783 Scott entered the University of Edinburgh before leaving to join his father's legal practice but, finding office work dull, he returned to university to become an advocate, studying moral philosophy under Dugald Stewart, universal history and civil law in preparation for his bar examination. He was admitted as an advocate in July 1792.

Throughout this period, Scott's wide reading expanded to include the French romances as well as German literature, (he would later translate works by Goethe, Schiller and Burger.) He also returned to the Borders to collect the ballads that would form the basis of The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-1803). In 1797 Scott married Charlotte Carpenter, a French born catholic, and they settled in Edinburgh where they found themselves at the heart of Scottish intellectual and literary life.

Throughout his life Scott was acutely conscious of his lameness, but in spite of this he was a physically active man of seemingly boundless energy as well as talent; he was working as a lawyer, enjoying a very full and lavish social life and continuing his literary pursuits apace.

Aside from his ballad collections, reviews and translations, his earliest literary success was as a poet, notably for The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), written in medieval romance form, Marmion (1808) and most notably, The Lady of the Lake (1810) which sold 20,000 copies in its first year of publication. The Scotland of Scott's verse was wild, bloody, romantic and steeped in history and it would set the scene for the cultural portrayal of Scotland throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. He became the most popular poet of his day until, sensing the threat of being eclipsed by the brilliance of George Gordon Lord Byron on his publication of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, he turned his attention to the novel form.

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Scott's first novel Waverley (1814), set at the time of the Jacobite uprising of 1745 and initially published anonymously, was a tour de force which catapulted historical fiction into the public domain; he achieved worldwide fame and recognition as a result. A steady flow of successes followed including Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Ivanhoe (1819), and later notably Redgauntlet (1824). The novels ranged in setting between Scotland, England, Europe and the East, and were translated widely and read in their hundreds of thousands. He didn't invent the historical novel, but it was under his pen that it became the great imaginative and penetrating vehicle which would influence many great writers including George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy and Honore de Balzac. It was because of Scott that the novel would become the dominant literary genre.

Scott's later years were overshadowed by financial difficulties. His baronial style castle Abbotsford, near Melrose, which was started in 1811 and expanded over the years, was a huge expense. His love of good living led him to buy a stake in his publisher, the Ballantyne printing business and although this had initially brought great rewards, when it fell in the financial crisis of 1826, Scott was bankrupted on a massive scale. It was in this terrible year that he suffered the loss of his wife.

Although the pace of his life and literary output was already exhausting he redoubled his efforts to recoup his loses, producing many fine works including the Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), and The Fair Maid of Perth (1828), in the remaining six years of his life. But this hectic activity would take a terrible toll on his health; having set sail for Malta and Naples he suffered a series of strokes and was brought home to die at Abbotsford on 21 September 1832. He is buried at Dryburgh Abbey.