Sir Walter Scott: " The great romancer"

 

Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh on 15 August 1771 (a plaque at 8 Chambers St marks the approximate spot). His father (also called Walter) was a Writer to the Signet (solicitor); his mother Anne Rutherford was the daughter of a professor of medicine.

At the age of 18 months his right leg was rendered permanently lame by polio, and as an infant he was sent to his grandfather's farm in the Borders. He would divide his time between Edinburgh and the Borders for the rest of his life. In 1775 the family moved to a more spacious house at 25 George Square, where Scott was to live until 1797. He was educated at home until October 1779, when he was enrolled at the High School of Edinburgh. He also attended Kelso Grammar School during stays in the Borders.

He studied law at Edinburgh University from 1783, with interruptions because of his illness. He was indentured in his father's legal practice on 31 March 1786, but did not qualify as an advocate until 11 July 1792. Scott was to continue in his legal career until retiring in 1830.

Scott's interest in traditional ballads was formed in childhood, and during his stays in the Borders he began collecting them. He was also interested in German literature, and his first publications were translations of ballads by Gottfried Augustus Burger (1796), and of Goethe's "Gotz von Berlichingen" (1799).

He married Charlotte Carpenter on 24 December 1797, and their first homes were at 108 George St (lodgings), 10 South Castle St, and then 39 Castle St (a statuette of him can be seen above the door) which was to be their Edinburgh home from 1798 until March 1826.

Scott was appointed Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire on 16 December 1799 and went to Ashestiel in the Borders. Here he completed the ballad collection "The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" with the assistance of John Leyden, Richard Heber, William Laidlow and James Hogg. The first two volumes were printed by his Kelso friend James Ballantyne, and their success led Scott to lend Ballantyne £500 so that he could set up a printing works in Edinburgh. Scott became his partner and principal shareholder, and also backed the new publishing business of Ballantyne's brother John.

Scott's first wholly original publication was the ballad epic "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805), which was an immediate critical and financial success. He followed it with "Marmion" (1808) and the hugely popular six-canto narrative poem "The Lady of the Lake" (1810), set around Loch Katrine and the Trossachs. The fourth canto includes Ellen's "Hymn To The Virgin", which begins: "Ave Maria! maiden mild/ Listen to a maiden's prayer!". Translated into German by D. A. Storck, the "Hymne an die Jungfrau" was set to music in 1825 by Franz Schubert; it is the song everyone knows as "Ave Maria".

Aspiring to baronial country life, Scott began in 1811 to build himself a gothic castle, Abbotsford, near Galashiels, and it was partly to raise money for the project, and also so as to ensure his literary supremacy over Byron, that Scott turned to fiction. Another reason was a crisis in Ballantyne's business in 1813, which threatened Scott with bankruptcy. Scott wrote his way out of trouble with "Waverley" (1814), which defined a new literary genre and was to be followed by a stream of similar successes.

Scott published all his novels anonymously. Initially this may have been a precaution against the possible failure of "Waverley"; but even after its enormous success, Scott seems to have enjoyed prolonging the mystery (he was nicknamed "The Great Unknown" and "The Wizard Of The North"). His identity as the author of "Waverley" and its successors soon became an open secret, fairly widely known, but it was not until February 1827 that he officially "revealed" himself, at a public dinner in Edinburgh.

Though the novels were all published without his name (even after his "unmasking"), they were grouped into various series which associated them with a common author. Some were published as "By The Author of Waverley"; two appeared under the title "Tales From Benedictine Sources", another two as "Tales of the Crusaders", and four as "Chronicles of the Canongate". The remainder of Scott's novels were published under the heading "Tales of my Landlord", though there is no real connection between the various "Tales", other than the conceit (introduced in the prologue to "The Black Dwarf") that they were all written down by one Peter Pattison from stories told to him by the landlord of the Wallace Inn at Gandercleugh, then reworked and sold to the publisher by the village schoolmaster and parish clerk, Jedediah Cleishbotham.

Scott's novels made him one of Europe's most famous literary figures, and he was created a baronet in 1818. In 1820 his daughter Sophia married John Gibson Lockhart, who was later to write a vast biography of him. In 1823, with Lord Henry Thomas Cockburn (1779-1854), Scott founded the Edinburgh Academy, a school for boys. But the financial disaster he had averted in 1813 finally hit him in January 1826, when Ballantyne's business failed and Scott was declared bankrupt. His wife died on 14 May. Resolving to settle his debts in the only way he knew, Scott announced (according to Lord Cockburn) that his "right hand shall work it all off", so that in his last years there could be no letting up of his prodigious output, which he had maintained while continuing to practise as an advovate. He retired from the court in 1830, by which time his health was failing. In 1831 he cruised the Mediterranean, then in July of the following year he returned to Scotland. He died at Abbotsford on 21 September 1832 and is buried at Dryburgh Abbey.

Edinburgh's ScottMonument(1844), and the nearby Waverley Station, bear witness to his extraordinary status in Victorian Britain; it was Scott who largely defined Scotland's image in the nineteenth century, even including the clan tartans which he helped invent for the occasion of George IV's visit to Edinburgh in August 1822.
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~crumey/walter_scott.html
www.scandinavian.wisc.edu/hca/images/scott.html
 
 

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