Scott, Walter

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SCOTT, WALTER

SCOTT, WALTER (1771–1832), Scottish poet and novelist.

If no longer lauded as "Scotland's Shakespeare," in the twenty-first century Walter Scott is recognized as a writer of immense talent, energy, and cultivation who single-handedly laid the way for the later glories of Victorian fiction. He was the founding genius of the British historical novel (and, via Victor Hugo, Alessandro Manzoni, and James Fenimore Cooper, those of France, Italy, and the United States).

Scott was born in Edinburgh's "Old Town" in 1771 (probably—he was never quite sure of his birth date), the third surviving son of a solicitor, or attorney, and the grandson on his mother's side of a professor of medicine at the city's university. His lineage, as he loved to recall, could be traced nobly back to the Scottish Middle Ages, but intellectually Scott was a mature product of the Scottish Enlightenment—that unique fusion of national, international, vernacular, and neoclassical cultures that made Edinburgh, for a few years, the "Athens of the North."

Scott was made lame, in his second year, by polio and was sent to recuperate at his paternal grandfather's farm, on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Here he picked up the rich folk-culture (legend, ballad, and border dialect) that underpinned his later creative writing. It was not, however, as a creative writer that he was trained. His father prudently enrolled him as an apprentice solicitor. After studying at Edinburgh's high school and university, young Walter rebelled against the "old trade" and struck out, in 1792, as an advocate, or barrister. His "infirmity" precluded him from the military career he yearned for. During the 1790s he was also writing and collecting ballads: something that would bear fruit in his monumental, three-volume, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802).

Scott married Charlotte Charpentier, a French woman with noble English connections, in 1797. The couple and their growing family occupied a number of town and country houses, culminating in the construction of his magnificent (and ruinously expensive) baronial pile, Abbotsford, near Melrose and Scott's beloved River Tweed. Over these years, Scott secured himself a series of semi-sinecurial legal posts, which set him up financially. He also formed a business relationship with the printers John and James Ballantyne. Literary fame came with the long poem, Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805). It was followed by others, equally popular, culminating in The Lady of the Lake (1810), a work that glamorized, forever, the Scottish highlands and its Celtic heritage (Scott was, as he proudly asserted, a lowland "Saxon"). Over these years—in which his literary, journalistic, and scholarly production was prodigious—Scott formed another partnership with the dynamic publisher, Archibald Constable.

Scott gave up poetry when trumped by Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, in 1812. He outdid even Byron, however, with his first historical romance, Waverley; or, 'tis Sixty Years Since (1814). There followed a spate of anonymously authored, hugely best-selling, romances. The first phase of his work contains the admired "Scottish Novels": Guy Mannering (1815), The Antiquary (1816), Rob Roy (1818), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818). In 1820, Scott struck into English history, with Ivanhoe—a tale set during the reign of Richard the Lionheart.

In 1818 Scott, whose politics were staunchly Tory and Unionist, accepted a baronetcy from the prince regent. On the regent's accession as George IV (r. 1820–1830), Scott supervised the monarch's visit to Scotland in 1822. Throughout the early 1820s he was producing fiction at an astonishing rate. The quality was palpably declining, but romances such as The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) and Quentin Durward (1823) sustained his reputation.

In 1826 Scott, together with his business partners the Ballantynes and Constable, was ruined in the disastrous crash that rocked the British publishing industry. Scott's last years—during which he was widowed and suffered a series of crippling strokes—were devoted to clearing his massive debts, and his honor, with his pen. His last great work was the multivolume Life of Napoleon (1827). He died at Abbotsford in 1832. His death was an occasion for national mourning in Scotland.

See alsoGreat Britain; Romanticism; Scotland.