Scott, Sir Walter 1771-1832
Scottish novelist and poet

Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh. His father was Walter Scott, a Writer to the Signet, and his mother was Anne Rutherford, a daughter of the Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University. As a young boy he contracted polio in his right leg, which lamed him for life, and was sent to his grandfather's farm at Sandyknowe in Tweedale to recuperate, thus coming to know the Border country which figures often in his work. He studied at the High School, Edinburgh (1779-83), and at the University, but his real education came from people and from books such as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Edmund Spenser and Ariosto and, above all, Bishop Percy's Reliques (1765) and German ballad poetry. He entered his father's office as a law clerk, did well and rose to become an advocate in 1792.

His first publication consisted of rhymed versions of ballads by Gottfried B�rger in 1796. The following year he was a volunteer in the yeomanry during the Napoleonic Wars, and married Charlotte Charpentier, the daughter of a French �migr�, in Carlisle on Christmas Eve. In 1799 he was appointed Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire.

The ballad meanwhile absorbed all his literary interest: a translation of Goethe's G�etz von Berlichingen (1799) was followed by his first original ballads, Glenfinlas and The Eve of St John. His earlier 'raids' into the western Borders, especially Liddesdale, to collect ballads led to the publication by James Ballantyne, a printer in Kelso, of Scott's first major work, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (vols 1 and 2, 1802; vol 3, 1803). The Border ballads collected in these volumes had often been edited, or 'improved', by Scott. The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), which grew from a ballad he had composed for the third volume of The Minstrelsy, made him the most popular author of the day. The other romances which followed - Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810) - enhanced his fame, but the lukewarm reception of Rokeby (1813), The Lord of the Isles (1815) and Harold the Dauntless (1817) turned his attention away from the ballad form and toward writing novels. Some years later, he admitted in a letter to a friend that he had 'felt the prudence of giving way before the more forcible and powerful genius of Byron'.

In 1811 he bought some land and began to build his country seat, Abbotsford, near Galashiels, in the Borders. Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, the publishing firm which he had set up (although his involvement had not been made public) with James Ballantyne and his brother John following the success of The Minstrelsy, was expanding. However, Scott's and the firm's connections with publisher Archibald Constable and his London agents were to be their undoing: Scott lost all control over the financial side of the extensive publication programme on which he now embarked. He was declared bankrupt, along with Ballantyne's and Constable, in 1826 - in the middle of his great career as a novelist. Only following this bankruptcy did he publicly acknowledge the authorship of his novels, which had been published under the name of 'The Author of Waverley'.

The Waverley novels fall into three groups: first, from Waverley (1814) to The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) and A Legend of Montrose (1819); next, from Ivanhoe (1820) to The Talisman (1825), the year before his bankruptcy; Woodstock (1826) opens the last period, which closes with Castle Dangerous and Count Robert of Paris (1832), in the year of his death. The first period established the historical novel based, in Scott's case, on religious dissension and the clash of English and Scottish, and Highland and Lowland cultures, his aim being to illustrate manners but also to soften animosities. In Guy Mannering (1815) and The Antiquary (1816) his great humorous characters first appear; these are also found in Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818).

Scott turned to medieval England in Ivanhoe, a novel whose enormous contemporary popularity has sometimes obscured the more lasting appeal of his Scottish novels. With The Monastery and The Abbot (1820), both set in Scotland, he moved to Reformation times. These and his later works are distinguished by their portraits of queens, kings and princes, such as James VI and I in The Fortunes of Nigel (1822). The highlights in his last period include Woodstock (1826) and The Fair Maid of Perth (1828), where again the ballad motif appears.

Scott's shorter verse worked best on a traditional or ballad theme, as in Madge Wildfire's song, 'Proud Maisie', in The Heart of Midlothian, and 'Jock o' Hazeldean'. But Highland themes, as in Pibroch of Donuil Dhu (1816), equally proved his lyric powers. He was also writing and editing other books, much of which was simply hack work - the editions of John Dryden (1808), of Jonathan Swift (1814), and the Life of Napoleon (9 vols, 1827). However, the Tales of a Grandfather (1828-30), a history of Scotland written for his grandson, has a lasting charm, and his three letters 'from Malachi Malagrowther' (1826), are remembered for their patriotic assertion of Scottish interests.

A national figure, Scott helped to supervise the celebration for George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822. His last years were plagued by illness, and in 1831-32 he toured the Mediterranean in a government frigate. He died at Abbotsford soon after his return, and was buried in the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey. Publication of a definitive edition of the Waverley Novels was begun in 1993 by Edinburgh University Press. The project is scheduled to take 10 years to complete, and the texts will incorporate a mass of textual corrections, and undo the substitution and excisions of Scott's original editors.

Bibliography: W E K Anderson (ed), The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (1972); Sir E Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: the Great Unknown (2 vols, 1970); J G Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart (10 vols, 1839).