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Walter Scott

Edinburgh, 1771 - 1832, Roxburgh, Scotland

BiographyScott, Walter (Scottish novelist, designer, and collector, 1771-1832 )
Note: Designer of his own house in Scotland, Abbotsford.

LC name authority rec. n78095541
LC heading: Scott, Walter, 1771-1832

Biography (extract from DNB)

"...Scott's reputation
Scott was the most successful writer of his day. Not only did he sell more books, but he was the author most generally admired. His books sold right through the nineteenth century, and he retained his reputation until the 1890s. Of course other writers created space for themselves by distancing themselves from Scott and his achievement (such is the anxiety of influence), but for the most part they did not deny the greatness of that achievement. In the 1890s school editions of his works began to appear, and thereafter his popularity declined, reaching its nadir in the 1950s and 1960s. Scott suffered from enforced reading, but changes in critical taste and theory were also a major factor. The model of the well-wrought urn will not fit Scott. Late twentieth-century theory in its wariness of inherent meaning, and its recognition of the artificiality of literary form, worked in Scott's favour. In addition, the first critical edition of his novels, the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley novels (1993–2004), has shown an even more sophisticated use of linguistic polyphony than has ever previously been recognized.

Scott was subject to sustained twentieth-century hostility because he was a unionist and a tory, and allegedly responsible for all popular myths about Scotland, and for tartanry, tourism, and kitsch culture. But the objections are misconceived: what later generations have made of his work is not the fault of an author. Scott's creative impact on Scotland was to define Scottishness in cultural rather than political terms, and so to maintain the idea of nationhood in a country which for the following two centuries was without independent political institutions. That in itself has been a subject of attack by theorists of nationalism. Scott has no myths about national origins, founding fathers, iconic events, or an organic past. His theoretical interest in the writing of history prevented his works from ever providing a basis for a political programme.

In Europe, however, the impact was the reverse. Scott had been inspired by the German interest in national identity, folk culture, and medieval literature, but it was he more than anyone else who in his poetry and his novels created the means of dramatizing the past. Scott's life work was the propagation and preservation of the cultural difference of a national community in opposition to the hegemonic tendencies of the British state, but throughout Europe similar materials became the vehicle for political action. There has been little study of the conditions in which a desire to preserve the past is transformed into an active claim to the right of self-determination, but it is probable that Scott's images of nationhood were more powerful than even Rousseau's thinking.

Scott's impact on other arts is less contentious because so obvious. He was a radical inventor of literary forms, and he turned the novel into an expressive medium for a variety of period, class, and regional experience. All British, American, and European novelists of the nineteenth century learned from his ways of writing. He was the great inventor in opera too. The librettos of some ninety operas are based on Scott's poems and novels, including those of Rossini's La donna del lago (1819), Bellini's I puritani (1835), Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (1839), Bizet's La jolie fille de Perth (1867), and Sullivan's Ivanhoe (1891). Such composers recognized that the extraordinarily varied texture of Scott's novels, which combined narrative, dialogue, poetry, and song, in a medley of languages and dialects, could be successfully represented in music. More plays have been adapted from his works than those of any other writer. Pictures of scenes from Scott abound, and after the duke of Wellington he was the person most frequently painted, and whose image was most widely distributed in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Portraits of Sir Walter Scott (1987) Francis Russell records 233 separate representations.

Scott has always been considered collectable. His literary manuscripts were given to Archibald Constable by Scott in 1823. They were sold by Constable's trustees, re-collected by Robert Cadell, who added manuscripts from the post-1823 era, only to be dispersed once more in the 1860s. John Pierpont Morgan began collecting Scott manuscripts in the late nineteenth century, and his great collection is now found at the institution which bears his name, the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. In addition to letters and literary manuscripts, the National Library of Scotland possesses Scott's ‘interleaved set’, the interleaved, printed editions of his novels, on which he corrected the text and added notes, and in which are bound the manuscript introductions for the ‘Magnum opus’, Scott's own collection of the Waverley novels, published in 48 volumes from 1829 to 1833. Literary manuscripts are also widely dispersed throughout Britain and the United States.

As a man Scott was worldly. He had no religious beliefs. He was brought up in the Church of Scotland, came to hate the narrowness of the Presbyterian tradition he had experienced, and although he became an elder in Duddingston kirk he seldom attended church. The pew in his name in St John's Episcopal Church in Princes Street in Edinburgh was occupied by Charlotte. He was a most generous man, as his support of his brothers' sons and all the small gifts he made to indigent poets testify. He had a streak of the ruthlessness of the successful businessman: he found that the Revd Edward Forster had begun work on an edition of Dryden, suggested they join forces, and then pushed him out. He was selfish in the way that creative men are selfish: for all his sociability and his capacity to make other people laugh, he offered others very little intimacy. But what does this matter? Walter Scott changed the world's understanding of history."

(David Hewitt, ‘Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/24928, accessed 19 Oct 2015.)

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Last Updated8/7/24

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