Sir Walter Scott(1771–1832)

Walter Scott was born at College Wynd in Edinburgh on 15 August 1771, the ninth of twelve children of Walter Scott, a Writer to the Signet, and Anne Rutherford, daughter of the Edinburgh professor of medicine. He survived a childhood case of polio that left his right leg permanently lame, and was sent at three to recover at his grandfather's farm at Sandyknowe in the Borders, where he listened from a tartan-wrapped bed to his Aunt Janet's recitals of the ballads of the Border reivers and his grandfather's stories of Culloden. The Borders made him: the country that had been a fighting ground for four centuries was already by the 1780s for him a country of memory, and he spent the rest of his life writing back what its people had been.

He returned to Edinburgh at eight, attended the High School and the University, and was apprenticed to his father's firm at fifteen. He passed advocate in 1792 and walked the Parliament Square that summer, but the practice of law was never his deep work. He had already begun collecting the Border ballads that would become Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802 to 1803, riding into the hill country with a notebook and a flask to sit with ploughmen and shepherds who could recite Otterburn or Kinmont Willie from memory. The Minstrelsy made his name. The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808) made him the most-read poet in English. He married Charlotte Carpenter, a French émigrée, in 1797, and bought a small farm at Ashestiel on the Tweed.

In the summer of 1814, having written himself out of the verse market with the rise of Byron, Scott published anonymously a novel he had begun ten years earlier and put aside. Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since told the story of an English officer caught up in the 1745 rising. The book reframed what a novel could be. Where Fielding and Smollett had set their fictions in the contemporary world, Waverley placed its characters in a historical moment researched as carefully as a court of session record and dramatised with the depth of a play. It sold out within five weeks. The next thirteen years produced Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, Quentin Durward and seventeen others. The Waverley Novels invented the historical novel as a form and shaped every nineteenth-century writer from Pushkin to Hugo to Manzoni to Tolstoy.

The Honours of Scotland, the medieval crown, sceptre and sword of the Scottish kings, had been walled up in a chamber of Edinburgh Castle in 1707 at the Union and not seen by living eyes since. In 1818 Scott led the commission, sanctioned by the Prince Regent, that broke the seals on the chamber door, found the Honours intact in a heap of dust under a folded cloth, and put them on public display where they have remained. Four years later, in August 1822, he managed the visit of George IV to Edinburgh, the first reigning monarch in Scotland since Charles II. Scott dressed the king in tartan, dressed the city in pageantry, and through three weeks of carefully stage-managed appearances set the modern image of a Highland Scotland that was substantially his own invention.

In January 1826 the Edinburgh printing house of Ballantyne, in which Scott was a silent partner, went down in the financial crash of that winter, taking Constable his publisher with it. Scott was personally liable for one hundred and twenty-six thousand pounds, an unimaginable sum. He was fifty-four, recently widowed, lame, and at the height of his fame. He refused to file for bankruptcy. Instead, in the six years he had left, he wrote himself out of the debt: Woodstock, the Life of Napoleon Bonaparte in nine volumes, Chronicles of the Canongate, The Fair Maid of Perth, Anne of Geierstein, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, the Tales of a Grandfather. He had a stroke at his desk in 1830 and another in 1831. He sailed for the Mediterranean for his health in October 1831 and was carried home by way of London the next summer, ruined in body and unable to read the manuscript pages his daughter held up. He died at Abbotsford on 21 September 1832. His creditors were paid in full from the posthumous royalties by 1847. He is buried at Dryburgh Abbey on the Tweed.