W.

Scott, the master of the historical fiction

Plan:

CHAPTER 1. WALTER SCOTT AND THE HISTORICAL NOVEL

1.1. Scott’s Times

1.2. The emergence of the historical novel

CHAPTER 2. CLASS AND ETHNIC CONFLICT – THE HEART OF

MIDLOTHIAN

2.1. Sketch of Scott c.1800 by an unknown artist

2.2. Literary career, marriage and family

 INTRODUCTION

On his 250th anniversary, Jenny Farrell writes about Walter Scott and his historical
novels, uncovering themes of class conflict, ethnic and nationalist struggles, and
how the personal experiences of his characters link with broader historical upheavals

History is vanishing from school curricula, and historical awareness is being

deliberately erased. Novels in historical setting portray characters as unhistorical, no
different to 21st century people, transporting a sense that people never develop, that
society cannot and will not change. Such misrepresentation of the historical process
fuels the sense that the world cannot be understood and any effort to change it for
the better of humankind is ultimately futile. The history of literature shows that
another kind of historical novel is possible, one that shows history as upheaval and
people themselves as historical.

Walter Scott and the Historical Novel

Walter Scott was admired by his contemporaries Goethe, Pushkin and Balzac, and
celebrated by Lukács as the founder of the historical novel. He was born in
Edinburgh 250 years ago on 15 August 1771. Born into the upper middle class, his
family preserved a sense of tradition from one of the great Scottish clans, including
folk heritage. Like Robert Burns, Scott grew up with the songs and legends of
Scotland. He collected them and reflected them in his own work. This cultural
awareness was accompanied by a deep sense of national identity.

Scott read European literature of popular, patriotic spirit fluently and was familiar
with the English realistic novel. He studied Scottish law and took a lively interest in
the historical relations between Scotland and England. In 1797 he married Charlotte
Carpenter of French royalist stock. Scott was a landowner and staunch Tory – yet
his work goes beyond this.

Scott’s interest in Scottish border ballads led to his collection Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border (1802-03), in which he endeavoured to restore orally corrupted
versions to their original wording. This publication made Scott known to a wide
audience. His epic poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), was followed by
further lyrical romances. During these years Scott led a very active literary and social
life. At the same time, he was deputy sheriff of Selkirkshire from 1799 and clerk of
the court in Edinburgh from 1806, as well as part-owner of a printing press and later
publishing house, which he saved from bankruptcy. Personal financial crises
increasingly impacted on the course of his career and his writing became determined
by the need to pay off debts. His estate in Abbotsford, furnished with many
antiquarian objects, also consumed vast sums.

In 1813 Scott rediscovered the unfinished manuscript of a novel he had begun in

1805, which he rapidly finished in the early summer of 1814. This novel Waverley,
about the Jacobite uprising of 1745, was enthusiastically received. Like all of Scott’s
novels written before 1827, Waverley was published anonymously.

A born storyteller and master of dialogue in both Scots dialect and aristocratic
etiquette, he was able to portray sensitively the whole range of Scottish society, from
beggars and farm labourers to the bourgeoisie, the professions and the landowning
aristocracy. Scott’s sensitivity to ordinary people was a new orientation. He
convincingly portrayed outlandish highlanders as well as the political and religious
conflicts that shook Scotland in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Scott’s masterpieces include Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and
his most popular novel, Ivanhoe (1819).

Unfortunately, the haste with which he wrote his later books affected Scott’s health,
as well as his writing. In 1827 his authorship of the Waverley novels became known.
In 1831 his health deteriorated badly and he died on 21 September 1832.

Scott’s Times

Scott lived and wrote in an era of enormous upheaval – revolutions in France and
North America, uprisings in Haiti and Ireland, the Napoleonic wars, the expansion
of the British Empire and its domination of the seas, the slave trade, the uprooting
of large sections of Britain’s peasantry through enclosure for the purpose of sheep
farming, increasing capitalist “rationalisation” of the countryside, and large-scale
highland clearances and evictions.

clearances

The beginnings of the Industrial Revolution consolidated the power of the

bourgeoisie and the first political organisations of the working class emerged. Such
density of dramatic events suddenly made the course of history, the progression from
one society to another, directly tangible. History unfolded before everyone’s eyes
and, it seemed, could be influenced. This is the shifting ground on which Scott’s
historical novels are set.

In addition, literary production in Scotland and Ireland flourished. Here, on the

colonial edges, questions of history and cultural identity, colonialism and anti-
colonialism sharply crystallised. This begins in Ireland with Swift and his
magnificent writings against British colonial power from the perspective of the Irish
people as early as the 1720s. In Scott’s time, the Irish people speak in their idiom in
Maria Edgeworth’s novels.

While England in the 18th century is preparing for the Industrial Revolution,
politically it is already a post-revolutionary country, following the bourgeois English
Revolution in the 1640s.

The emergence of the historical novel

As Georg Lukács argues convincingly in The Historical Novel, this genre emerges
with Scott at this time. There had been novels with historical themes in the 17th and
18th centuries, but their characters and plots were taken from the time of the authors,
who did not yet grasp their own epoch as historical. Scott’s novels introduce a new
sense of history to the English realist novel tradition.

While Scott neither creates psychologically profound individuals nor reaches the
level of the emerging bourgeois novel, he vividly embodies for the first time
historical-social types. His main characters’ conflicts give artistic expression to
social crises. The task of the protagonists is to find neutral ground on which the
opponents can coexist. The main characters are usually tied to both camps. Pointing
out a middle path is typical of Scott’s novels, and this is how his political
conservatism is expressed.

For Scott, outstanding historical figures are representatives of a movement that

encompasses large sections of the people. This passionate character unites various
sides of this movement and embodies the aspirations of the people. Through Scott’s
plot, readers understand how the crisis arose, how the division of the nation came
about. It is against this background that the historical hero appears. The broad
panorama of social struggles illuminates, as Lukács writes, how a particular time
produces an heroic person, whose task it becomes to solve historically specific
problems. These leaders, directly linked to the people, often overshadow the main
characters. Historical authenticity is achieved through condensed dramatic events
and the collision of opposites.

By interweaving personal fates of people with historical upheavals, Scott’s narrative

is never abstract. Ruptures run between generations, between friends and affect them
deeply in their personal lives. Scott’s great strength lies in the credible narration of
human relationships in the context of their historical age.

Class struggles in feudal times – Ivanhoe

With Ivanhoe, Scott reaches far back into history. The novel is set around 1194, when
the Norman Richard the Lionheart, King of England, Duke of Normandy and Count
of Anjou, returns to England from his various adventures in the Crusades and from
prisons in Austria and Germany. The Anglo-Saxon Ivanhoe, loyal knight in
Richard’s army, also appears in England in disguise.

The central historical conflict of the novel is between the Anglo-Saxons of England
and the Norman conquerors. The people are largely Anglo-Saxon, the feudal upper
class are Norman. Parts of the Anglo-Saxon nobility, deprived of political and
material power, still retain some aristocratic privileges and form the ideological and
political centre of Anglo-Saxon national resistance to the Normans. Yet Scott shows
how parts of the Anglo-Saxon nobility sink into apathy, while others await the
opportunity to reach a compromise with the more moderate sections of the Norman
nobility, which Richard the Lionheart represents.

When Ivanhoe, the title character and also a supporter of this compromise,
disappears from the novel’s plot for some time and is overshadowed by secondary
characters, this formal structure illuminates the historical-political reference to an
absent compromise. The characters who overshadow Ivanhoe include his father, the
Anglo-Saxon nobleman Cedric, unflinchingly insisting on anti-Norman positions,
who even disinherits Ivanhoe because of his allegiance to Richard’s army, as well as
his serfs, Gurth and Wamba.

Above all, however, this includes the leader of the armed resistance against Norman
rule, the legendary Robin Hood. The true heroism with which the historical
antagonisms are contested comes, with few exceptions, from “below”.

The folk figures are depicted with great vitality and nuance, while the antagonists
tend to be stereotypes with little development. But neither does Ivanhoe change.
Isaac the Jew is also stereotyped, although the same cannot be said of his daughter
Rebecca, who captures the reader’s heart. Letters to Scott complained that Ivanhoe
does not marry Rebecca at the end, but the comparatively pale Anglo-Saxon
Rowenta. The author rejected such an ending as historically indefensible.

Scott proves himself here once again to be a defender of the middle road. The future
belongs to Ivanhoe, knight in the service of the moderate Norman Richard the
Lionheart and son of the anti-Norman Anglo-Saxon Cedric. His marriage to
Rowenta points to this middle ground.

Scott, in depicting historical conflict in the lives of the people, shows the energies
ignited in the people by such crises. Consciously or unconsciously, as Georg Lukács
notes, the experience of the French Revolution is in the background.

The defeat of clan-based society – Rob Roy

Published in 1817, this novel is, along with Ivanhoe, among Scott’s most famous.
Written in 1816, practically 100 years after the events it describes – the first Jacobite
uprising of 1715 – the aim of the Jacobite uprisings was to restore the Catholic Stuart
dynasty and Scottish independence. At the same time, Scott sketches the Gaelic-
speaking Highland Scots as still living in clans, especially in the character of Rob
Roy MacGregor. In this character, Scott creates a genuine folk hero with a passionate
humanity that lends heroic traits to this clan society. Rob Roy is nevertheless an
individualised character, initially in disguise, a constant presence and also a
benchmark of heroism in this novel. Not only is he a centre of passion in the novel,
his language is deeply poetic. In this way the reader experiences the failure of the
rising and the defeat of clan society as a tragic event.

Typically for Scott, Rob Roy is not the novel’s main character. That is the narrator
Frank Osbaldistone, son of a London merchant who refuses to join his father’s
successful business and is sent to live with his uncle in Northumberland, on the
border with Scotland. Instead of him, cousin Rashleigh enters the business. When
the latter steals money and disappears with it to Scotland, Frank follows him and so
meets MacGregor.

This English narrator takes the neutral place, the common ground – Osbaldistone’s
family lives on the Scottish border. At the end of the plot he marries his Catholic
cousin, Diana Vernon, who is closely associated with the Jacobins, thereby achieving
the union between Presbyterians and Catholics envisaged by Scott. Vernon is a
confident woman as is the indomitable Helen MacGregor. Both are highly intelligent
people who are in complete command of their scenes.

It is also important that Scott writes his extensive dialogue scenes in Scots dialect.
This establishes a bond between characters and Scottish readers. Before him Robert
Burns had also written in the vernacular. To this day, this dialect establishes
identification with ordinary Scots, as underlined by the two Scottish Man Booker
prize winners (James Kelman and Douglas Stuart). Scott even ventures into Gaelic,
translating these short expressions for the reader. Scott’s numerous annotations are
culturally and historically enlightening.

Class and ethnic conflict – The Heart of Midlothian

The novel following Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, is set over 20 years later, in
1736/37. Midlothian is an historic county with Edinburgh as its capital; the Heart of
Midlothian, however, is its prison. The novel opens with the Porteous riots. Porteous,
Captain of the City Watch ordered his men to bloodily suppress a riot during a public
execution in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh in April 1736. He was lynched by the
angry crowd for killing innocent civilians.

As Arnold Kettle has noted, Scott unfolds a large social spectrum here, ranging from
the urban underworld to the Queen. At the centre is Jeanie Deans, from a rural,
puritan background who speaks in Lowland Scots. This young peasant woman is
perhaps Scott’s greatest female character. Her unmarried sister Effie is accused of
infanticide. Merely keeping a pregnancy secret was punishable by death under
Scottish law at the time. Forced to conceal the birth to protect her father, Effie insists
that she has not harmed the new-born. Despite great empathy for her sister’s fate,
Jeanie’s puritan conscience forbids her to commit perjury that could save her sister.
This is simply historically true and not modernised. Effie is sentenced to death and
the penniless Jeanie sets off for London to seek a pardon from the Queen.

the heart of midlothian 12

The trial is the central event, revealing clashing values and worlds, the conflict
between David Dean’s old rural world and the world of the modern money centred
city. Jeanie’s struggle to save her sister reveals her deep humanity and courage. It
shows that in crisis situations a heroism can burst forth in ordinary people that is not
visible in everyday life and of which people themselves are often not even aware.
She proves what strength and heroism there is in the people when the situation calls
for it, as it happens time and again in history. Scott brings history to life with such a
portrayal of human resilience in a specific historical situation.
Scott’s hallmark is depicting personal experience as part of history. Readers
encounter an outraged people in the Porteous Riots. Scott conveys the genuine
conflict between the people and the guards, as well as the bitter hostility of the Scots
towards the English state. The events clearly involve more than seduction and
rescue.

The second half of the novel is less successful, as Scott depicts the world not from
the peasants’ point of view, but from that of the romanticised landowner, precluding
realism. Parallel to the central conflict between city and country runs that between
Scotland and England. Scott’s Edinburgh is not a random setting, but a Scottish city
in a concrete historical situation.

Scott’s characters are never outside their time. He reflects the complex relationship
between personal and social forces in a person’s life. With his portrayal of
historically specific circumstances and the vitality of his ordinary people, Scott
prepares the ground for Dickens. Dickens, who came from the impoverished petty
bourgeoisie, would a little later make the ordinary people of London the heroes and
heroines of his novels.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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; another version of the event appears in Literary
Beginnings.

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.[18]

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."[19] 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).[20] 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.[21]
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[22] 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.[23] 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.[24][16][25]

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".[26] 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".[26]

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".[27]
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.)[28] 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.[29]
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.[30] 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"[31]

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.[32] 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."[33] 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.[34]
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);[35] 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.[36][37]

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."[38] 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.[39]

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.[40][41]

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.[42] 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.[43] 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),[44] especially as it was a fairly open secret, but as he
himself said, with Shylock, "such was my humour."[45]
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).[46][47] 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.[48] 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."[49] 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."[50] 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.[51] 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.[52]

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]."[53] 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.[54] 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.[55]

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[56] 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,[57] 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".[58] 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.

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.[60] 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.[61]

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.[62]
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.[63] After he was
landed in England, Scott was transported back to die at Abbotsford on 21 September
1832.[64] 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.[65]

Although Scott died owing money, his novels continued to sell, and the debts
encumbering his estate were discharged shortly after his death.[62]

Religion

Scott was raised as a Presbyterian in the Church of Scotland. He was ordained as an

elder in Duddingston Kirk in 1806,[66] 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.[67]

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,[68]
albeit only after the death of his father.

Abbotsford House

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).[69]

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.[70] 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'[71] and 'a kind of
Conundrum Castle to be sure'.[72] 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.[70][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.[73] Ferguson commissioned Sir David Wilkie to paint the Scott
family[74] resulting in the painting The Abbotsford Family[75] 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,[76] is
behind.[77] The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818.[78]

Abbotsford later gave its name to the Abbotsford Club, founded in 1834 in memory
of Sir Walter Scott.[79]

Reputation

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Later assessment

Although he continued to be extremely popular and widely read, both at home and
abroad,[80] 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.[81] There is a statue of Scott in
New York City's Central Park.[82]

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).[83]

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.[84]

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.[85] 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.[86]

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).

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".[88] 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".[89] Also
highly influential were the early translations into French by Defauconpret.

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,[90] and Sir Walter Scott
in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1833.[91] 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.[92]

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.[93]

Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (1827) has similarities with Walter Scott's
historic novel Ivanhoe, although evidently distinct.[94]

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.
 References

 Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company,

1973.
 Bloom, Harold. Shelley's Mythmaking. New Haven, 1959.
 Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. London: Oxford University Press,
1963.
 Brisman, Susan Hawk. "'Unsaying His High Language': The Problem of Voice in
'Prometheus Unbound'." Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 16, No. 1, Romanticism and
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