Scottish Authors > Sir Walter Scott Novelist & Poet 1771-1832

Walter Scott was born on 15th August 1771 in the Old Town of Edinburgh. Later, the family moved (in a manner very reminiscent of Redguantlet) to the clean air of George Square where Scott grew up, with a brief but vital interlude in the Borders to help the sickly boy - though it did not prevent an attack of polio which gave him a lame leg for life. He grew up full of energy, pursued school and university with enthusiasm but even more enthusiasm went into his reading, collecting Scottish Border ballads (to become Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border), learning German (he was an early translator of Schiller and Bürger), and trying his own hand at poetry.

Scott was a man of prodigious energy as well as talent. All his adult life he was a working lawyer, but this did not prevent him from a social life which put him at the centre of literary Edinburgh (some would say, literary Scotland) and a steady involvement in prose writing, reviewing and periodical publication. Nor did it prevent his original writing, as well as ballad collections and translations, his earliest major success was in poetry: The Lay of the last minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808) and - outstandingly - The Lady of the lake (1810). "Hail Caledonia, stern and wild!", wrote Scott, and this was the country of his poems, wild, historical, bloody, romantic, mysterious: the poetry (which was widely translated and imitated) set in people's minds an idea of Scotland still hard to dislodge.

No one thing would ever satisfy Scott, however. He took to castle-building - his gothic pile of Abbotsford near Melrose - and to entertaining, and he saw the threat that Byron posed to his supremacy as poet. The answer was Waverley (1814), a tour de force which catapulted historical fiction into public consciousness and popularity, and made Scott world famous again, this time as the anonymous (though it was an open secret) "Author of Waverley". A stream of successes followed, including Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), Old mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1818), The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and - best of all - Redgauntlet (1824).

The dates tell their own story. This is a massive output of multi-volume novels by a hard-working public figure who travelled and entertained on a grand scale. Slowly the truth has emerged of how Scott would write at unbelievable speed - early mornings, often - and the result would be painstakingly transcribed for him, made legible and punctuated, the little slips caught and generally tidied up before the result - in a new handwriting, of course, to preserve the author's thin anonymity - went to the publisher. But the process was exhausting: so was the pace of Scott's life, and his appetite for money, which led him to the serious mistake of quietly buying a stake in both his printer and his publisher.

While things went well, he reaped a handsome reward: when both went down in the financial crash of 1826, Scott was cruelly exposed and bankrupted on a massive scale. The story of his response to ruin (nobly faced up to in his very readable Journal) is well known: he buckled to, and simply worked harder than ever for the six remaining years of his life. He produced a torrent of work, fiction and critical prose mostly, which slowly but steadily paid off his patient creditors, but at a terrible price to Scott's health. a series of strokes crippled him, and he died in 1832 - though the sale of his copyrights pretty well paid off his debts. Despite all, these late years produced wonderful work of the quality of The Chronicles of the Canongate, which included The Fair maid of Perth (1828).

The Story of Scott's life is little more incredible than his fiction. Yet despite the huge success of his poetry, and the real solid values of his massive output uncritical and controversial prose and biography, it is the fiction which is the basis of his enduring reputation. In the historical work he ranges far from a Scotland he knew intimately (though a rather sketchier Gaelic Scotland which he approached more timidly) to England, Europe, the East: in time he ranges from the mediaeval to the very recent.

A central, and very successful, strategy is to create a "Scott hero", and make him (it is usually him) experience events which are largely verifiable history, indeed meet real historical characters, while the central "Scott hero" remains pure fiction. Since the hero is often an outsider, it is necessary to explain everything to him, scenery, history, speech: in this way the outsider/reader can understand too and have battle scenes (like Prestonpans in Waverley) or domestic detail (like Edinburgh's New Town in Redgauntlet) or historical personages (like Argyle in The Heart of Midlothian) explained without holding up the flow of the narrative.

Scott excels in fast-paced battle scenes, sweeping scene setting (Edinburgh at the start of The Antiquary, Glasgow in Rob Roy) and interesting travel. He is slower in domestic settings and some of his female characters (Rose and Flora in Waverley, to name but two) can be wooden and mechanical. His working-class characters are often easier and lighter: Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian is an outstanding case, and like many of Scott's working-class characters she speaks an easy and unembarrassed Scots which is one of the great contributions he made to the history of the Scottish novel.

Scott's influence is not just in fiction: painting and opera are only two of the creative arts where his scenes and characters are much reproduced, and the whole picture of what Scotland is, and was, came to be heavily derived from Scott's work. His poetry is sadly neglected today: his novels, lengthy and often slow-moving at the outset are only now regaining their popular esteem. But publication of a proper modern edition (incredibly, the first) of his fiction is ensuring a steady renewal of his stature as a writer of the world class.

Ian Campbell

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