Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (August 15, 1771 – September 21, 1832) was a prolific Scottish historical novelist and poet, popular throughout Europe during his time. In some ways, Scott was the first author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers all over Europe, Australia, and North America.
His novels and poetry remain popular, and many of his works are classics of both English-language literature and, specifically, Scottish literature. Scott was among the first to help popularize the historical novel, largely a creation of nineteenth century Romanticism. He used this technique in his novels of Scottish history, such as Waverley (1814) and Rob Roy (1818). In addition, his Ivanhoe (1820) gains credit for renewing interest in the Middle Ages. Many early historical novels played an important role in the rise of European popular interest in the history of the Middle Ages.
Historical fiction has also served to encourage movements of romantic nationalism. Scott's Waverley novels ignited interest in Scottish history and still illuminate it.
Early days
Born in College Wynd in the Old Town of Edinburgh, in 1771, the son of a solicitor, the young Walter Scott survived a childhood bout of polio, in 1773, that would leave him lame in his right leg for the rest of his life. To restore his health, he was sent to live for some years in the rural Scottish Borders region at his grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe. Here he learned the speech patterns and many of the tales and legends which characterized much of his work. Also, for his health, he spent a year in Bath, Somerset, England.
After studying law at the University of Edinburgh, he followed in his father's footsteps and became a lawyer in Edinburgh. This was not long after he was molested by a fierce gypsy. As a lawyer's clerk he made his first visit to the Scottish Highlands directing an eviction. He was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1792. He had an unsuccessful love interest in Williamina Belsches of Fettercairn, who married Sir William Forbes.
Literary career launched
At the age of 25, Scott dabbled at writing, translating works from German; his first publication was rhymed versions of ballads by Bürger in 1796. He then published a three-volume set of collected Scottish ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. This was the first sign of his interest in Scottish history from a literary standpoint.
Scott then became an ardent volunteer in the yeomanry and on one of his "raids" he met at Gilsland Spa Margaret Charlotte Charpentier (or Charpenter), daughter of Jean Charpentier of Lyon, France, whom he married in 1797. They had five children. In 1799, he was appointed Sheriff-Depute of the County of Selkirk, based in the Royal Burgh of Selkirk.
In his earlier married days, Scott made a decent living from his earnings at the law, his salary as Sheriff-Depute, his wife's income, some revenue from his writing, and his share of his father's rather meager estate.
After Scott had founded a printing press, his poetry, beginning with The Lay of the Last Minstrel, in 1805, brought him fame. He published a number of other poems over the next ten years, including the popular The Lady of the Lake, printed in 1810, and set in the Trossachs. Portions of the German translation of this work were later set to music by Franz Schubert. One of these songs, Ellens dritter Gesang, is popularly labeled as "Schubert's Ave Maria."
Another work from this time period, Marmion, produced some of his most quoted (and most often mis-attributed) lines. Canto VI. Stanza 17 reads:
- Yet Clare's sharp questions must I shun,
- Must separate Constance from the nun
- Oh! what a tangled web we weave
- When first we practice to deceive!
- A Palmer too! No wonder why
- I felt rebuked beneath his eye;
In 1809, his Tory sympathies led him to become a co-founder of the Quarterly Review, a review journal to which he made several anonymous contributions.
The novels
When the press became embroiled in pecuniary difficulties, Scott set out, in 1814, to write a cash-cow. The result was Waverley, an anonymously published novel. It was a tale of the "Forty-Five," the Jacobite rising in the Kingdom of Great Britain. Its English protagonist Edward Waverley, by his Tory upbringing sympathetic to Jacobitism, becomes enmeshed in events, eventually choosing Hanoverian respectability. The novel met with considerable success. There followed a succession of novels over the next five years, each with a Scottish historical setting. Mindful of his reputation as a poet, he maintained the habit he had begun with Waverley, always publishing the novels anonymously under the name "Author of Waverley" or attributed as Tales of…. Even when it was clear that there would be no harm in coming out into the open, he maintained the façade, apparently out of a sense of fun. During this time, the nickname The Wizard of the North was popularly applied to the mysterious best-selling writer. His identity as the author of the novels was widely rumored, and in 1815, Scott was given the honor of dining with George, Prince Regent, who wanted to meet "the author of Waverley."
In 1819, he broke away from writing about Scotland with Ivanhoe, a historical romance set in twelfth century England. It too was a runaway success and, as he did with his first novel, he unleashed a slew of books along the same lines. Among other things, the book is noteworthy for having a very sympathetic Jewish major character, Rebecca, considered by many critics to be the book's real heroine. The book was published at a time when the struggle for the Emancipation of the Jews in England was gathering momentum.
As his fame grew during this phase of his career, he was granted the title of baronet, becoming Sir Walter Scott. At this time he organized the visit of King George IV to Scotland, and when the King visited Edinburgh in 1822, the spectacular pageantry Scott had concocted to portray George as a rather tubby reincarnation of Bonnie Prince Charlie made tartans and kilts fashionable, turning them into symbols of Scottish national identity.
Scott included little in the way of punctuation in his drafts, which he left for the printers to supply.[1].
Ivanhoe
Ivanhoe was written in 1819, and set in twelfth century England, an example of historical fiction. Ivanhoe is sometimes given credit for helping to increase popular interest with the middle ages in nineteenth century Europe and America.
Plot introduction
Ivanhoe is the story of one of the remaining Saxon noble families at a time when the nobility was overwhelmingly Norman. It follows the Saxon protagonist, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, who is out of favor with his father owing to his courting of the Lady Rowena (promised to another man) and his allegiance to the Norman king, Richard the Lion-hearted, who is returning from the Crusades incognito amidst the plotting of Richard's brother, Prince John of England. The legendary Robin Hood, initially under the name of Locksley, is also a character in the story, as are his "merry men," including Friar Tuck and, less so, Alan-a-Dale (Little John, however, is barely mentioned). The character that Scott gave to Robin Hood in Ivanhoe helped shape the modern notion of this figure as a cheery, noble outlaw.
Other major characters include Ivanhoe's intractable Saxon father, the last descendant of the Saxon King Harold Godwinson; various Knights Templar and churchmen; the loyal serfs Gurth the swineherd and the jester, or fool, Wamba, whose not-so-foolish observations punctuate much of the action; and the Jewish moneylender, Isaac, who is torn between love of money and love of his beautiful and heroic daughter Rebecca, who, in turn, steals the story (and probably Scott's heart) from Ivanhoe and Rowena.
Plot summary
Ivanhoe himself spends much of the story out of action, having been seriously wounded in the opening chapters. He is nursed by Rebecca, daughter of Isaac the Jew, but there can never be a romance between them, partly because of her religion and partly because Ivanhoe is already committed to the beautiful Rowena, his childhood love. However, his great enemy, the Templar Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, finds Rebecca so irresistible that he is prepared to sacrifice everything for her. As noted by the author himself in the introduction, many of the book's critics prefer Rebecca as a heroine to the relatively-colorless Rowena.
The book was written and published during a period when the struggle for Emancipation of the Jews in England was starting to gather momentum.
Financial woes
Beginning in 1825, he fell into dire financial straits again, as his company nearly collapsed. That he was the author of his novels became general knowledge at this time as well. Rather than declare bankruptcy, he placed his home, Abbotsford House, and income into a trust belonging to his creditors, and proceeded to write his way out of debt. He kept up his prodigious output of fiction (as well as producing a biography of Napoléon Bonaparte) until 1831. By then his health was failing, and he died at Abbotsford in 1832. Though not in the clear by then, his novels continued to sell, and he made good on his debts from beyond the grave. He was buried in Dryburgh Abbey where nearby, fittingly, a large statue can be found of William Wallace—one of Scotland's most romantic historical figures.
Abbotsford House
When Sir Walter Scott was a boy, he sometimes traveled with his father from Selkirk to Melrose, in the Scottish Border Country, 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, Scotland (1526). Not far away was a little farm called Cartleyhole, and this he eventually purchased.
In due course, the farmhouse developed into a wonderful home that has been likened to a fairy palace. Through windows enriched with the insignia of heraldry, the sun shone on suits of armor, trophies of the chase, fine furniture, and still finer pictures. Paneling of oak and cedar and carved ceilings relieved by coats of arms in their correct color added to the beauty of the house. More land was purchased, until Scott owned nearly 1,000 acres (4 km²), and it is estimated that the building cost him over £25,000. A neighboring Roman road with a ford used in olden days by the abbots of Melrose suggested the name of Abbotsford.
Assessment
Alternate View
Among the early critics of Scott was Mark Twain, who blamed Scott's "romantacization of battle" for the South's decision to fight the Civil War. Twain's ridiculing of chivalry in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is argued to specifically target Scott's books.
From being one of the most popular novelists of the nineteenth century, Scott suffered from a disastrous decline in popularity after the First World War. The tone was set early on in E. M. Forster's classic work of literary criticism, "Aspects of the Novel" (1927). Forster savages Scott as a clumsy writer who wrote slapdash, badly plotted novels. Scott also suffered from the rising star of Jane Austen. Considered merely an entertaining "woman's novelist" in the nineteenth century, in the twentieth, Austen began to be seen as perhaps the major English novelist of the first few decades of the nineteenth century. As Austen's star rose, Scott's sank, although, ironically, he had been one of the few male writers of his time to recognize Austen's genius.
Scott's many literary flaws (ponderousness, prolixity, lack of humor) were fundamentally out of step with Modernist sensibilities. Nevertheless, Scott was responsible for two major trends that carry on to this day. First, he essentially invented the modern historical novel; an enormous number of imitators (and imitators of imitators) would appear in the nineteenth century. It is a measure of Scott's influence that Edinburgh's central railway station, opened in 1854 for the North British Railway, is called the Waverley Station. Second, his Scottish novels followed on from James Macpherson's Ossian cycle in rehabilitating the public perception of Scottish Highland culture after years in the shadows following southern distrust of hill bandits and the Jacobite rebellions. As enthusiastic chairman of the Celtic Society of Edinburgh, he contributed to the reinvention of Scottish culture. It is worth noting, however, that Scott was actually a Lowland Scot, and that his recreations of the Scottish Highlands were more than a little fanciful. His organization of the visit of King George IV to Scotland in 1822, was a pivotal event, leading Edinburgh tailors to invent many "clan tartans" out of whole cloth, so to speak.
After going essentially unstudied for many decades, a small revival of interest in Scott's work began in the 1970s and 1980s. Ironically, postmodern tastes (which favored discontinuous narratives, and the introduction of the first person perspective into works of fiction) were more favorable to Scott's work than Modernist tastes. Despite all the flaws, Scott is now seen as an important innovator, and a key figure in the development of Scottish and world literature.
Scott was also responsible, through a series of pseudonymous letters published in the Edinburgh Weekly News in 1826, for retaining the right of Scottish banks to issue their own banknotes, which is reflected to this day by his continued appearance on the front of all notes issued by the Bank of Scotland.
Many of his works were illustrated by his friend, the painter, William Allan.
Works
The Waverley Novels
- Waverley (1814)
- Guy Mannering (1815)
- The Antiquary (1816)
- Rob Roy (1818)
- Ivanhoe (1819)
- Kenilworth (1821)
- The Pirate (1822)
- The Fortunes of Nigel (1822)
- Peveril of the Peak (1822)
- Quentin Durward (1823)
- St. Ronan's Well (1824)
- Redgauntlet (1824)
- Tales of the Crusaders, consisting of The Betrothed and The Talisman (1825)
- Woodstock (1826)
- Chronicles of the Canongate, 2nd series, The Fair Maid of Perth (1828)
- Anne of Geierstein (1829)
Tales of My Landlord
- 1st series The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality (1816)
- 2nd series, The Heart of Midlothian (1818)
- 3rd series, The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose (1819)
- 4th series, Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous (1832)
Tales from Benedictine Sources
- The Abbot (1820)
- The Monastery (1820)
Short stories
- Chronicles of the Canongate, 1st series (1827). Collection of three short stories:
"The Highland Widow," "The Two Drovers," and "The Surgeon's Daughter."
- The Keepsake Stories (1828). Collection of three short stories:
"My Aunt Margaret's Mirror," "The Tapestried Chamber," and "Death Of The Laird's Jock."
Poems
- William and Helen, Two Ballads from the German (translator) (1796)
- The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-1803)
- The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)
- Ballads and Lyrical Pieces (1806)
- Marmion (1808)
- The Lady of the Lake (1810)
- The Vision of Don Roderick (1811)
- The Bridal of Triermain (1813)
- Rokeby (1813)
- The Field of Waterloo (1815)
- The Lord of the Isles (1815)
- Harold the Dauntless (1817)
- "Young Lochinvar"
- Bonnie Dundee (1830)
Other
- Introductory Essay to The Border Antiquities of England and Scotland (1814-1817)
- The Chase (translator) (1796)
- Goetz of Berlichingen (translator) (1799)
- Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk (1816)
- Provincial Antiquities of Scotland (1819-1826)
- Lives of the Novelists (1821-1824)
- Halidon Hall (1822)
- The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827)
- Religious Discourses (1828)
- Tales of a Grandfather, 1st series (1828)
- History of Scotland, 2 vols. (1829-1830)
- Tales of a Grandfather, 2nd series (1829)
- The Doom of Devorgoil (1830)
- Essays on Ballad Poetry (1830)
- Tales of a Grandfather, 3rd series (1830)
- Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1831)
- The Bishop of Tyre
Quote
- Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
- Who never to himself hath said,
- This is my own, my native land!
from The Lay of the Last Minstrel by Walter Scott
Notes
- ↑ Stuart Kelly, The Book of Lost Books. Retrieved November 26, 2007.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Buchan, John, Sir Walter Scott. New York: Coward-McCann, 1932.
- Hutton, Richard H. Sir Walter Scott. Echo Library, 2006. ISBN 978-1406801361
- Sutherland, John. The Life of Walter Scott: A Critical Biography. Blackwell Publishers, 1998. ISBN 978-0631203179
External links
- Walter Scott Digital Archive at the University of Edinburgh library: includes much primary material. Retrieved November 27, 2007.
- Sir Walter Scott, biography by Richard H. Hutton, 1878, from Project Gutenberg. Retrieved November 27, 2007.
- Works by Walter Scott. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved November 27, 2007.
- University of Pennsylvania e-texts of some of Walter Scott's works. Retrieved November 27, 2007.
- The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club. Retrieved November 27, 2007.
- Sir Walter Scott's death mask. Retrieved November 27, 2007.
- Dandie Dinmont Terriers named after a character in Guy Mannering. Retrieved November 27, 2007.
- The Keepsake Stories at Arthur's Classic Novels website. Retrieved November 27, 2007.
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