Walter Scott

Sir Walter Scott (Edinburgh, 1771 - Abbotsford, 1832) was a Scottish novelist, poet and historian who wrote during the Romantic era. Trained as a lawyer, he shaped the modern historical novel, a form that found a wide readership across Europe and America. Many of his works remain classics of English and Scottish literature, although they are read far less today than in his own lifetime.

He was born in College Wynd, in the Old Town of Edinburgh, the son of a lawyer. A bout of polio in childhood left him lame in one leg for the rest of his life. To help his health, he spent long spells on his grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe, in the Scottish Borders, where he picked up the local speech and the tales and legends that would later feed much of his writing. He also spent time with his aunt at the spa town of Bath.

He studied law at the University of Edinburgh and practised as an advocate in the Scottish capital, admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1792. In those years he grew fascinated by fashionable German literature and by the old traditions of ballad singing. Around 1796 he published English versions of poems by Gottfried August Burger, and in 1802 came The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of border ballads that showed his growing interest in Scottish history seen through literature. In 1797 he married Charlotte Charpentier, daughter of a Frenchman from Lyon, and they had five children. In 1799 he was appointed sheriff of Selkirk. His reputation as a poet rose with The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810).

In 1814 he published Waverley anonymously. Set during the Jacobite rising of 1745, it follows an English officer raised in a Tory household who is caught up in events and in the end chooses the respectability of the House of Hanover. It was a considerable success. Further novels followed, most of them set in Scotland, and for years Scott kept his authorship quiet, which fed the nickname the Wizard of the North. In 1819 he published Ivanhoe, set in medieval England with Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood among its characters, and which also took up the contemporary debate over the emancipation of English Jews. In 1823 came Quentin Durward, set in the France of Louis XI. He became a baronet in 1820 and was known thereafter as Sir Walter Scott.

His career also had a public and political side. He organised King George IV's visit to Scotland in 1822, an event that helped make tartan and kilts into emblems of Scottish national identity. In 1825 his publishing ventures ran into serious trouble. Rather than declare bankruptcy, he placed his house at Abbotsford and his income in a trust managed by his creditors, and he kept writing at an exhausting pace until 1831. His health declined, and he died at Abbotsford in 1832. He was buried at Dryburgh Abbey.

His legacy is twofold. He set the pattern for the historical novel, which influenced writers in Europe and America and the way many people imagined their national past. He also rescued oral traditions through his ballad collecting and editing. His fame declined over time, but his name remains tied to Romanticism and to the idea that history can be told as a novel.