780- ] English Literature
Walter Scott
The novelist
Gothic novel
Scott was influenced by Gothic romance , and had
collaborated in 1801 with 'Monk' Lewis on Tales of Wonder.
Historic romances
Scott's
career as a novelist was attended with uncertainty. The first few chapters of
Waverley were complete by roughly 1805, but the project was abandoned as a
result of unfavourable criticism from a friend. Soon after, Scott was asked by
the publisher John Murray to posthumously edit and complete the last chapter of
an unfinished romance by Joseph Strutt. Published in 1808 and set in
15th-century England, Queenhoo Hall was not a success due to its archaic
language and excessive display of antiquarian information. The success of
Scott's Highland narrative poem The Lady of the Lake in 1810 seems to have put
it into his head to resume the narrative and have his hero Edward Waverley
journey to Scotland. Although Waverley was announced for publication at that
stage, it was again laid by and not resumed until late 1813, then published in
1814. Only a thousand copies were printed, but the work was an immediate
success and 3,000 more were added in two further editions the same year.
Waverley turned out to be the first of 27 novels (eight published in pairs),
and by the time the sixth of them, Rob Roy, was published, the print run for
the first edition had been increased to 10,000 copies, which became the norm.
Given
Scott's established status as a poet and the tentative nature of Waverley's
emergence, it is not surprising that he followed a common practice in the
period and published it anonymously. He continued this until his financial ruin
in 1826, the novels mostly appearing as "By the Author of Waverley"
(or variants thereof) or as Tales of My Landlord. It is not clear why he chose
to do this (no fewer than eleven reasons have been suggested), especially as it
was a fairly open secret, but as he himself said, with Shylock, "such was
my humour."
Scott
was an almost exclusively historical novelist. Only one of his 27 novels –
Saint Ronan's Well – has a wholly modern setting. The settings of the others
range from 1794 in The Antiquary back to 1096 or 1097, the time of the First
Crusade, in Count Robert of Paris. Sixteen take place in Scotland. The first
nine, from Waverley (1814) to A Legend of Montrose (1819), all have Scottish
locations and 17th- or 18th-century settings. Scott was better versed in his
material than anyone: he could draw on oral tradition and a wide range of
written sources in his ever-expanding library (many of the books rare and some
unique copies). In general it is these pre-1820 novels that have drawn the
attention of modern critics – especially: Waverley, with its presentation of
the 1745 Jacobites drawn from the Highland clans as obsolete and fanatical
idealists; Old Mortality (1816) with its treatment of the 1679 Covenanters as
fanatical and often ridiculous (prompting John Galt to produce a contrasting
picture in his novel Ringan Gilhaize in 1823); The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818)
with its low-born heroine Jeanie Deans making a perilous journey to Richmond in
1737 to secure a promised royal pardon for her sister, falsely accused of
infanticide; and the tragic The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), with its stern
account of a declined aristocratic family, with Edgar Ravenswood and his
fiancée as victims of the wife of an upstart lawyer in a time of political
power-struggle before the Act of Union in 1707.
In
1820, in a bold move, Scott shifted period and location for Ivanhoe (1820) to
12th-century England. This meant he was dependent on a limited range of
sources, all of them printed: he had to bring together material from different
centuries and invent an artificial form of speech based on Elizabethan and
Jacobean drama. The result is as much myth as history, but the novel remains
his best-known work, the most likely to be found by the general reader. Eight
of the subsequent 17 novels also have medieval settings, though most are set
towards the end of the era, for which Scott had a better supply of
contemporaneous sources. His familiarity with Elizabethan and 17th-century
English literature, partly resulting from editorial work on pamphlets and other
minor publications, meant that four of his works set in the England of that
period – Kenilworth (1821), The Fortunes of Nigel and Peveril of the Peak
(1821), and Woodstock (1826) – present rich pictures of their societies. The
most generally esteemed of Scott's later fictions, though, are three short stories:
a supernatural narrative in Scots, "Wandering Willie's Tale" in
Redgauntlet (1824), and "The Highland Widow" and "The Two
Drovers" in Chronicles of the Canongate (1827).
Crucial
to Scott's historical thinking is the concept that very different societies can
move through the same stages as they develop, and that humanity is basically
unchanging, or as he puts it in the first chapter of Waverley that there are
"passions common to men in all stages of society, and which have alike
agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corslet of the
fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and
white dimity waistcoat of the present day." It was one of Scott's main
achievements to give lively, detailed pictures of different stages of Scottish,
British, and European society while making it clear that for all the
differences in form, they took the same human passions as those of his own
age.[48] His readers could therefore appreciate the depiction of an unfamiliar
society, while having no difficulty in relating to the characters.
Scott
is fascinated by striking moments of transition between stages in societies.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in a discussion of Scott's early novels, found that
they derive their "long-sustained interest" from "the contest
between the two great moving Principles of social Humanity – religious
adherence to the Past and the Ancient, the Desire & the admiration of
Permanence, on the one hand; and the Passion for increase of Knowledge, for
Truth as the offspring of Reason, in short, the mighty Instincts of Progression
and Free-agency, on the other." This is clear, for example, in Waverley,
as the hero is captivated by the romantic allure of the Jacobite cause embodied
in Bonnie Prince Charlie and his followers before accepting that the time for
such enthusiasms has passed and accepting the more rational, humdrum reality of
Hanoverian Britain. Another example appears in 15th-century Europe in the
yielding of the old chivalric world view of Charles, Duke of Burgundy to the
Machiavellian pragmatism of Louis XI. Scott is intrigued by the way different
stages of societal development can exist side by side in one country. When
Waverley has his first experience of Highland ways after a raid on his Lowland
host's cattle, it "seemed like a dream ... that these deeds of violence
should be familiar to men's minds, and currently talked of, as falling with the
common order of things, and happening daily in the immediate neighbourhood,
without his having crossed the seas, and while he was yet in the otherwise
well-ordered island of Great Britain." A more complex version of this
comes in Scott's second novel, Guy Mannering (1815), which "set in 1781‒2,
offers no simple opposition: the Scotland represented in the novel is at once
backward and advanced, traditional and modern – it is a country in varied
stages of progression in which there are many social subsets, each with its own
laws and customs."
Scott's
process of composition can be traced through the manuscripts (mostly
preserved), the more fragmentary sets of proofs, his correspondence, and
publisher's records. He did not create detailed plans for his stories, and the
remarks by the figure of "the Author" in the Introductory Epistle to
The Fortunes of Nigel probably reflect his own experience: "I think there
is a dæmon who seats himself on the feather of my pen when I begin to write,
and leads it astray from the purpose. Characters expand under my hand;
incidents are multiplied; the story lingers, while the materials increase – my
regular mansion turns out a Gothic anomaly, and the work is complete long
before I have attained the point I proposed." Yet the manuscripts rarely
show major deletions or changes of direction, and Scott could clearly keep
control of his narrative. That was important, for as soon as he had made fair
progress with a novel he would start sending batches of manuscript to be copied
(to preserve his anonymity), and the copies were sent to be set up in type. (As
usual at the time, the compositors would supply the punctuation.) He received
proofs, also in batches, and made many changes at that stage, but these were
almost always local corrections and enhancements.
As
the number of novels grew, they were republished in small collections: Novels
and Tales (1819: Waverley to A Tale of Montrose); Historical Romances (1822:
Ivanhoe to Kenilworth); Novels and Romances (1824 [1823]: The Pirate to Quentin
Durward); and two series of Tales and Romances (1827: St Ronan's Well to
Woodstock; 1833: Chronicles of the Canongate to Castle Dangerous). In his last
years Scott marked up interleaved copies of these collected editions to produce
a final version of what were now officially the Waverley Novels, often called
his 'Magnum Opus' or 'Magnum Edition'. Scott provided each novel with an
introduction and notes and made mostly piecemeal adjustments to the text.
Issued in 48 smart monthly volumes between June 1829 and May 1833 at a modest
price of five shillings (25p) these were an innovative and profitable venture
aimed at a wide readership: the print run was an astonishing 30,000.
In
a "General Preface" to the "Magnum Edition", Scott wrote
that one factor prompting him to resume work on the Waverley manuscript in 1813
had been a desire to do for Scotland what had been done in the fiction of Maria
Edgeworth, "whose Irish characters have gone so far to make the English
familiar with the character of their gay and kind-hearted neighbours of
Ireland, that she may be truly said to have done more towards completing the Union,
than perhaps all the legislative enactments by which it has been followed up
[the Act of Union of 1801]." Most of Scott's readers were English: with
Quentin Durward (1823) and Woodstock (1826), for example, some 8000 of the
10,000 copies of the first edition went to London. In the Scottish novels the
lower-class characters normally speak Scots, but Scott is careful not to make
the Scots too dense, so that those unfamiliar with it can follow the gist
without understanding every word. Some have also argued that although Scott was
formally a supporter of the Union with England (and Ireland) his novels have a
strong nationalist subtext for readers attuned to that wavelength.
Scott's
new career as a novelist in 1814 did not mean he abandoned poetry. The Waverley
Novels contain much original verse, including familiar songs such as
"Proud Maisie" from The Heart of Mid-Lothian (Ch. 41) and "Look
not thou on Beauty's charming" from The Bride of Lammermoor (Ch. 3). In
most of the novels Scott preceded each chapter with an epigram or
"motto"; most of these are in verse, and many are of his own
composition, often imitating other writers such as Beaumont and Fletcher.
Recovery
of the Crown Jewels, baronetcy, and ceremonial pageantry
Prompted
by Scott, the Prince Regent (the future George IV) gave Scott and other
officials permission in a Royal Warrant dated 28 October 1817 to conduct a
search for the Crown Jewels ("Honours of Scotland"). During the
Protectorate under Cromwell these had been hidden away, but had subsequently
been used to crown Charles II. They were not used to crown subsequent monarchs,
but were regularly taken to sittings of Parliament, to represent the absent
monarch, until the Act of Union 1707. So the honours were stored in Edinburgh
Castle, but their large locked box was not opened for more than 100 years, and
stories circulated that they had been "lost" or removed. On 4
February 1818, Scott and a small military team opened the box and
"unearthed" the honours from the Crown Room of Edinburgh Castle. On
19 August 1818 through Scott's effort, his friend Adam Ferguson was appointed
Deputy Keeper of the "Scottish Regalia". The Scottish patronage
system swung into action and after elaborate negotiations the Prince Regent granted
Scott the title of baronet: in April 1820 he received the baronetcy in London,
becoming Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet.
After
George's accession, the city council of Edinburgh invited Scott, at the
sovereign's behest, to stage-manage the 1822 visit of King George IV to
Scotland. In spite of having only three weeks to work with, Scott created a
spectacular, comprehensive pageant, designed not only to impress the King, but
in some way to heal the rifts that had destabilised Scots society. Probably fortified
by his vivid depiction of the pageant staged for the reception of Queen
Elizabeth in Kenilworth he and his "production team" mounted what in
modern days would be a PR event, with the King dressed in tartan and greeted by
his people, many of them also in similar tartan ceremonial dress. This form of
dress, proscribed after the Jacobite rising of 1745, became one of the seminal,
potent and ubiquitous symbols of Scottish identity.
Financial
problems and death
In
1825, a UK-wide banking crisis resulted in the collapse of the Ballantyne
printing business, of which Scott was the only partner with a financial
interest. Its debts of £130,000 (equivalent to £11,400,000 in 2021) caused his
very public ruin. Rather than declare himself bankrupt or accept any financial
support from his many supporters and admirers (including the King himself), he
placed his house and income in a trust belonging to his creditors and set out
to write his way out of debt. To add to his burdens, his wife Charlotte died in
1826.
Despite
these events or because of them, Scott kept up his prodigious output. Between
1826 and 1832 he produced six novels, two short stories and two plays, eleven
works or volumes of non-fiction, and a journal, along with several unfinished
works. The non-fiction included the Life of Napoleon Buonaparte in 1827, two
volumes of the History of Scotland in 1829 and 1830, and four instalments of
the series entitled Tales of a Grandfather – Being Stories Taken From Scottish
History, written one per year over the period 1828–1831, among several others.
Finally, Scott had recently been inspired by the diaries of Samuel Pepys and
Lord Byron, and he began keeping a journal over the period, which, however,
would not be published until 1890, as The Journal of Sir Walter Scott.
By
then Scott's health was failing, and on 29 October 1831, in a vain search for
improvement, he set off on a voyage to Malta and Naples on board HMS Barham, a
frigate put at his disposal by the Admiralty. He was welcomed and celebrated
wherever he went. On his journey home he boarded the steamboat Prins Frederik
going from Cologne to Rotterdam. While on board he had a final stroke near
Emmerich. After local treatment, a steamboat took him to the steamship
Batavier, which left for England on 12 June. By pure coincidence, Mary Martha
Sherwood was also on board. She would later write about this encounter. After
he was landed in England, Scott was transported back to die at Abbotsford on 21
September 1832. He was 61.
Scott
was buried in Dryburgh Abbey, where his wife had earlier been interred. Lady
Scott had been buried as an Episcopalian; at Scott's own funeral, three
ministers of the Church of Scotland officiated at Abbotsford and the service at
Dryburgh was conducted by an Episcopal clergyman.
Although
Scott died owing money, his novels continued to sell, and the debts encumbering
his estate were discharged shortly after his death.
Religion
Scott
was raised as a Presbyterian in the Church of Scotland. He was ordained as an
elder in Duddingston Kirk in 1806, and sat in the General Assembly for a time
as representative elder of the burgh of Selkirk. In adult life he also adhered
to the Scottish Episcopal Church: he seldom attended church but read the Book
of Common Prayer services in family worship.
Freemasonry
Scott's
father was a Freemason, being a member of Lodge St David, No. 36 (Edinburgh),
and Scott also became a Freemason in his father's Lodge in 1801, albeit only
after the death of his father.
Abbotsford
House
When
Scott was a boy, he sometimes travelled with his father from Selkirk to
Melrose, where some of his novels are set. At a certain spot, the old gentleman
would stop the carriage and take his son to a stone on the site of the Battle
of Melrose (1526).
During
the summers from 1804, Scott made his home at the large house of Ashestiel, on
the south bank of the River Tweed, 6 miles (9.7 km) north of Selkirk. When his
lease on this property expired in 1811, he bought Cartley Hole Farm, downstream
on the Tweed nearer Melrose. The farm had the nickname of "Clarty
Hole", and Scott renamed it "Abbotsford" after a neighbouring
ford used by the monks of Melrose Abbey. Following a modest enlargement of the
original farmhouse in 1811–12, massive expansions took place in 1816–19 and
1822–24. Scott described the resulting building as 'a sort of romance in
Architecture' and 'a kind of Conundrum Castle to be sure'. With his architects
William Atkinson and Edward Blore Scott was a pioneer of the Scottish Baronial
style of architecture, and Abbotsford is festooned with turrets and stepped
gabling. Through windows enriched with the insignia of heraldry the sun shone
on suits of armour, trophies of the chase, a library of more than 9,000
volumes, fine furniture, and still finer pictures. Panelling of oak and cedar
and carved ceilings relieved by coats of arms in their correct colours added to
the beauty of the house.
It
is estimated that the building cost Scott more than £25,000 (equivalent to
£2,200,000 in 2021). More land was purchased until Scott owned nearly 1,000
acres (4.0 km2). In 1817 as part of the land purchases Scott bought the nearby
mansion-house of Toftfield for his friend Adam Ferguson to live in along with
his brothers and sisters and on which, at the ladies' request, he bestowed the
name of Huntlyburn. Ferguson commissioned Sir David Wilkie to paint the Scott
family resulting in the painting The Abbotsford Family in which Scott is seated
with his family represented as a group of country folk. Ferguson is standing to
the right with the feather in his cap and Thomas Scott, Scott's Uncle, is
behind. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818.
Abbotsford
later gave its name to the Abbotsford Club, founded in 1834 in memory of Sir
Walter Scott.
What
did Sir Walter Scott write?
In
the mid-1790s Scott became interested in German Romanticism, Gothic novels, and
Scottish border ballads. His first published work, The Chase, and William and
Helen (1796), was a translation of two ballads by the German Romantic balladeer
G.A. Bürger. A poor translation of Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen followed in
1799. Scott’s interest in border ballads finally bore fruit in his collection
of them entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 3 vol. (1802–03). His
attempts to “restore” the orally corrupted versions back to their original
compositions sometimes resulted in powerful poems that show a sophisticated
Romantic flavour. The work made Scott’s name known to a wide public, and he
followed up his first success with a full-length narrative poem, The Lay of the
Last Minstrel (1805), which ran into many editions. The poem’s clear and
vigorous storytelling, Scottish regionalist elements, honest pathos, and vivid
evocations of landscape were repeated in further poetic romances, including
Marmion (1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810), which was the most successful of
these pieces, Rokeby (1813), and The Lord of the Isles (1815).
Scott
led a highly active literary and social life during these years. In 1808 his
18-volume edition of the works of John Dryden appeared, followed by his
19-volume edition of Jonathan Swift (1814) and other works. But his finances
now took the first of several disastrous turns that were to partly determine
the course of his future career. His appointment as sheriff depute of the
county of Selkirk in 1799 (a position he was to keep all his life) was a
welcome supplement to his income, as was his appointment in 1806 as clerk to
the Court of Session in Edinburgh. But he had also become a partner in a
printing (and later publishing) firm owned by James Ballantyne and his
irresponsible brother John. By 1813 this firm was hovering on the brink of
financial disaster, and although Scott saved the company from bankruptcy, from
that time onward everything he wrote was done partly in order to make money and
pay off the lasting debts he had incurred. Another ruinous expenditure was the
country house he was having built at Abbotsford, which he stocked with enormous
quantities of antiquarian objects.
By
1813 Scott had begun to tire of narrative poetry, and the greater depth and
verve of Lord Byron’s narrative poems threatened to oust him from his position
as supreme purveyor of this kind of literary entertainment. In 1813 Scott
rediscovered the unfinished manuscript of a novel he had started in 1805, and
in the early summer of 1814 he wrote with extraordinary speed almost the whole
of his novel, which he titled Waverley. It was one of the rare and happy cases
in literary history when something original and powerful was immediately
recognized and enjoyed by a large public. A story of the Jacobite rebellion of
1745, it reinterpreted and presented with living force the manners and
loyalties of a vanished Scottish Highland society. The book was published
anonymously, as were all of the many novels he wrote down to 1827.
In
Waverley and succeeding novels Scott’s particular literary gifts could be
utilized to their fullest extent. First and foremost, he was a born storyteller
who could place a large cast of vivid and varied characters in an exciting and
turbulent historical setting. He was also a master of dialogue who felt equally
at home with expressive Scottish regional speech and the polished courtesies of
knights and aristocrats. His deep knowledge of Scottish history and society and
his acute observation of its mores and attitudes enabled him to play the part
of a social historian in insightful depictions of the whole range of Scottish
society, from beggars and rustics to the middle classes and the professions and
on up to the landowning nobility. The attention Scott gave to ordinary people
was indeed a marked departure from previous historical novels’ concentration on
royalty. His flair for picturesque incidents enabled him to describe with equal
vigour both eccentric Highland personalities and the fierce political and religious
conflicts that agitated Scotland during the 17th and 18th centuries. Finally,
Scott was the master of a rich, ornate, seemingly effortless literary style
that blended energy with decorum, lyric beauty with clarity of description.
Scott
followed up Waverley with a whole series of historical novels set in Scotland
that are now known as the “Waverley” novels. Guy Mannering (1815) and The
Antiquary (1816) completed a sort of trilogy covering the period from the 1740s
to just after 1800. The first of four series of novels published under the
title Tales of My Landlord was composed of The Black Dwarf and the masterpiece
Old Mortality (1816). These were followed by the masterpieces Rob Roy (1817)
and The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and then by The Bride of Lammermoor and A
Legend of Montrose (both 1819). It was only after writing these novels of
Scottish history that Scott, driven by the state of his finances and the need
to satisfy the public appetite for historical fiction that he himself had
created, turned to themes from English history and elsewhere. He thus wrote
Ivanhoe (1819), a novel set in 12th-century England and one that remains his
most popular book. The Monastery and The Abbot followed in 1820, and The Pirate
and The Fortunes of Nigel appeared in 1822. Two more masterpieces were
Kenilworth (1821), set in Elizabethan England, and the highly successful
Quentin Durward (1823), set in 15th-century France. The best of his later
novels are Redgauntlet (1824) and The Talisman (1825), the latter being set in
Palestine during the Crusades.
In
dealing with the recent past of his native country, Scott was able to find a
fictional form in which to express the deep ambiguities of his own feeling for
Scotland. On the one hand he welcomed Scotland’s union with England and the
commercial progress and modernization that it promised to bring, but on the
other he bitterly regretted the loss of Scotland’s independence and the steady
decline of its national consciousness and traditions. Novel after novel in the
“Waverley” series makes clear that the older, heroic tradition of the Scottish
Jacobite clans (supporters of the exiled Stuart king James II and his
descendants) had no place in the modern world; the true heroes of Scott’s
novels are thus not fighting knights-at-arms but the lawyers, farmers,
merchants, and simple people who go about their business oblivious to the
claims and emotional ties of a heroic past. Scott became a novelist by bringing
his antiquarian and romantic feeling for Scotland’s past into relation with his
sense that Scotland’s interests lay with a prudently commercial British future.
He welcomed civilization, but he also longed for individual heroic action. It
is this ambivalence that gives vigour, tension, and complexity of viewpoint to
his best novels.
Scott’s
immense earnings in those years contributed to his financial downfall. Eager to
own an estate and to act the part of a bountiful laird, he anticipated his
income and involved himself in exceedingly complicated and ultimately
disastrous financial agreements with his publisher, Archibald Constable, and
his agents, the Ballantynes. He and they met almost every new expense with
bills discounted on work still to be done; these bills were basically just
written promises to pay at a future date. This form of payment was an accepted
practice, but the great financial collapse of 1825 caused the four men’s
creditors to demand actual and immediate payment in cash. Constable was unable
to meet his liabilities and went bankrupt, and he in turn dragged down the
Ballantynes and Scott in his wake because their financial interests were
inextricably intermingled. Scott assumed personal responsibility for both his
and the Ballantynes’ liabilities and thus courageously dedicated himself for
the rest of his life to paying off debts amounting to about £120,000.
Everyone
paid tribute to the selfless honesty with which he set himself to work to pay
all his huge debts. Unfortunately, though, the corollary was reckless haste in
the production of all his later books and compulsive work whose strain
shortened his life. After the notable re-creation of the end of the Jacobite
era in Redgauntlet, he produced nothing equal to his best early work, though
his rapidity and ease of writing remained largely unimpaired, as did his popularity.
Scott’s creditors were not hard with him during this period, however, and he
was generally revered as the grand old man of English letters. In 1827 Scott’s
authorship of the “Waverley” novels was finally made public. In 1831 his health
deteriorated sharply, and he tried a continental tour with a long stay at
Naples to aid recovery. He was taken home and died in 1832.
Scott
gathered the disparate strands of contemporary novel-writing techniques into
his own hands and harnessed them to his deep interest in Scottish history and
his knowledge of antiquarian lore. The technique of the omniscient narrator and
the use of regional speech, localized settings, sophisticated character
delineation, and romantic themes treated in a realistic manner were all combined
by him into virtually a new literary form, the historical novel. His influence
on other European and American novelists was immediate and profound, and though
interest in some of his books declined somewhat in the 20th century, his
reputation remains secure. Scott wrote articles on “Chivalry,” “Romance,” and
“Drama” for Encyclopædia Britannica’s fourth edition (1801–09). Scott wrote
articles on “Chivalry,” “Romance,” and “Drama” for the supplement to
Britannica’s fourth, fifth, and sixth editions (1815–24).
Sir
Walter Scott’s early work consisted of poetic romances such as The Lady of the
Lake (1810). He later wrote The Waverley Novels, a series of historical novels
published anonymously between 1814 and 1832 that were popular in his day. The
earlier books are set in Scotland and demonstrate Scott’s knowledge of Scottish
history and society.
Scott’s
earliest published work was largely poetry. After translating a few German
texts, he went on to publish a three-volume anthology entitled Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border (1802–03), the product of his long-term interest in Scottish
border ballads. In this collection Scott attempted to “restore” orally
corrupted versions of ballads, often creating works of art in their own right.
After his ballad anthology, which made his name known to a wide public, he
published several poetic romances such as Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the
Lake. Within a few years he tired of narrative poetry, and in 1814 he published
his first novel, Waverley. The novel tells the story of the Jacobite rebellion
of 1745 in Scotland. It was an instant success, although it was published
anonymously. A series of novels followed that came to be known as The Waverley
Novels, many of which are also set in historical Scotland. In these Scott demonstrates
his deep knowledge of Scottish history and culture, masterfully portraying the
manners, speech, and customs of his native country and capturing the different
echelons of Scottish society. As demand for his historical novels increased,
Scott began to reach outside of Scotland for his source material. In 1819 he
published his most popular work, Ivanhoe, set in 12th-century England. He also
wrote Quentin Duward (1823), set in 15th-century France , and The Talisman
(1825), set in Palestine during the Crusades. Scott had a profound influence on
other European and American novelists, and he is often credited with inventing
the historical novel.
Reputation
Later
assessment
Although
he continued to be extremely popular and widely read, both at home and abroad,
Scott's critical reputation declined in the last half of the 19th century as
serious writers turned from romanticism to realism, and Scott began to be
regarded as an author suitable for children. This trend accelerated in the 20th
century. For example, in his classic study Aspects of the Novel (1927), E. M.
Forster harshly criticized Scott's clumsy and slapdash writing style,
"flat" characters, and thin plots. In contrast, the novels of Scott's
contemporary Jane Austen, once appreciated only by a discerning few (including,
as it happened, Scott himself) rose steadily in critical esteem, though Austen,
as a female writer, was still faulted for her narrow ("feminine")
choice of subject matter, which, unlike Scott, avoided the grand historical
themes traditionally viewed as masculine.
Nevertheless,
Scott's importance as an innovator continued to be recognised. He was acclaimed
as the inventor of the genre of the modern historical novel (which others trace
to Jane Porter, whose work in the genre predates Scott's) and the inspiration
for enormous numbers of imitators and genre writers both in Britain and on the
European continent. In the cultural sphere, Scott's Waverley novels played a
significant part in the movement (begun with James Macpherson's Ossian cycle)
in rehabilitating the public perception of the Scottish Highlands and its
culture, which had been formerly been viewed by the southern mind as a barbaric
breeding ground of hill bandits, religious fanaticism, and Jacobite risings.
Scott
served as chairman of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was also a member of
the Royal Celtic Society. His own contribution to the reinvention of Scottish
culture was enormous, even though his re-creations of the customs of the
Highlands were fanciful at times. Through the medium of Scott's novels, the
violent religious and political conflicts of the country's recent past could be
seen as belonging to history—which Scott defined, as the subtitle of Waverley
("'Tis Sixty Years Since") indicates, as something that happened at
least 60 years earlier. His advocacy of objectivity and moderation and his
strong repudiation of political violence on either side also had a strong,
though unspoken, contemporary resonance in an era when many conservative
English speakers lived in mortal fear of a revolution in the French style on
British soil. Scott's orchestration of King George IV's visit to Scotland, in
1822, was a pivotal event intended to inspire a view of his home country that
accentuated the positive aspects of the past while allowing the age of
quasi-medieval blood-letting to be put to rest, while envisioning a more
useful, peaceful future.
After
Scott's work had been essentially unstudied for many decades, a revival of
critical interest began in the middle of the 20th century. While F. R. Leavis
had disdained Scott, seeing him as a thoroughly bad novelist and a thoroughly
bad influence (The Great Tradition [1948]), György Lukács (The Historical Novel
[1937, trans. 1962]) and David Daiches (Scott's Achievement as a Novelist [1951])
offered a Marxian political reading of Scott's fiction that generated a great
deal of interest in his work. These were followed in 1966 by a major thematic
analysis covering most of the novels by Francis R. Hart (Scott's Novels: The
Plotting of Historic Survival). Scott has proved particularly responsive to
Postmodern approaches, most notably to the concept of the interplay of multiple
voices highlighted by Mikhail Bakhtin, as suggested by the title of the volume
with selected papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference held in
Edinburgh in 1991, Scott in Carnival. Scott is now increasingly recognised not
only as the principal inventor of the historical novel and a key figure in the
development of Scottish and world literature, but also as a writer of a depth
and subtlety who challenges his readers as well as entertaining them.
Memorials
and commemoration
During
his lifetime, Scott's portrait was painted by Sir Edwin Landseer and fellow
Scots Sir Henry Raeburn and James Eckford Lauder. In Edinburgh, the
61.1-metre-tall Victorian Gothic spire of the Scott Monument was designed by
George Meikle Kemp. It was completed in 1844, 12 years after Scott's death, and
dominates the south side of Princes Street. Scott is also commemorated on a
stone slab in Makars' Court, outside The Writers' Museum, Lawnmarket,
Edinburgh, along with other prominent Scottish writers; quotes from his work
are also visible on the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament building in
Holyrood. There is a tower dedicated to his memory on Corstorphine Hill in the
west of the city and Edinburgh's Waverley railway station, opened in 1854,
takes its name from his first novel.
In
Glasgow, Walter Scott's Monument dominates the centre of George Square, the
main public square in the city. Designed by David Rhind in 1838, the monument
features a large column topped by a statue of Scott.[81] There is a statue of
Scott in New York City's Central Park.
Numerous
Masonic Lodges have been named after Scott and his novels. For example: Lodge
Sir Walter Scott, No. 859 (Perth, Australia) and Lodge Waverley, No. 597,
(Edinburgh, Scotland).
The
annual Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction was created in 2010 by the
Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, whose ancestors were closely linked to Sir
Walter Scott. At £25,000, it is one of the largest prizes in British
literature. The award has been presented at Scott's historic home, Abbotsford
House.
Scott
has been credited with rescuing the Scottish banknote. In 1826, there was
outrage in Scotland at the attempt of Parliament to prevent the production of
banknotes of less than five pounds. Scott wrote a series of letters to the
Edinburgh Weekly Journal under the pseudonym "Malachi Malagrowther"
for retaining the right of Scottish banks to issue their own banknotes. This
provoked such a response that the Government was forced to relent and allow the
Scottish banks to continue printing pound notes. This campaign is commemorated
by his continued appearance on the front of all notes issued by the Bank of
Scotland. The image on the 2007 series of banknotes is based on the portrait by
Henry Raeburn.
During
and immediately after World War I there was a movement spearheaded by President
Wilson and other eminent people to inculcate patriotism in American school
children, especially immigrants, and to stress the American connection with the
literature and institutions of the "mother country" of Great Britain,
using selected readings in middle school textbooks. Scott's Ivanhoe continued
to be required reading for many American high school students until the end of
the 1950s.
A
bust of Scott is in the Hall of Heroes of the National Wallace Monument in
Stirling. Twelve streets in Vancouver, British Columbia are named after Scott's
books or characters.
In
The Inch district of Edinburgh, some 30 streets developed in the early 1950s
are named for Scott (Sir Walter Scott Avenue) and for characters and places
from his poems and novels. Examples include Saddletree Loan (after Bartoline
Saddletree, a character in The Heart of Midlothian), Hazelwood Grove (after
Charles Hazelwood, a character in Guy Mannering) and Redgauntlet Terrace (after
the 1824 novel of that name).
Influence
On
novelists
Walter
Scott had an immense impact throughout Europe. "His historical fiction ...
created for the first time a sense of the past as a place where people thought,
felt and dressed differently". His historical romances "influenced
Balzac, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dumas, Pushkin, and many others; and his
interpretation of history was seized on by Romantic nationalists, particularly
in Eastern Europe". Also highly influential were the early translations
into French by Defauconpret.
Wikisource
has original text related to this article:
'On
Walter Scott',
a
poem by L. E. L.
Wikisource
has original text related to this article:
'Sir
Walter Scott',
a
poetical illustration
by
L. E. L.
Letitia
Elizabeth Landon was a great admirer of Scott and, on his death, she wrote two
tributes to him: On Walter Scott in the Literary Gazette, and Sir Walter Scott
in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1833. Towards the end of her life she
began a series called The Female Picture Gallery with a series of character
analyses based on the women in Scott's works.
Victor
Hugo, in his 1823 essay, Sir Walter Scott: Apropos of Quentin Durward , writes:
Surely
there is something strange and marvelous in the talent of this man who disposes
of his reader as the wind disposes of a leaf; who leads him at his will into
all places and into all times; unveils for him with ease the most secret
recesses of the heart, as well as the most mysterious phenomena of nature, as
well as the obscurest pages of history; whose imagination caresses and
dominates all other imaginations, clothes with the same astonishing truth the
beggar with his rags and the king with his robes, assumes all manners, adopts
all garbs, speaks all languages; leaves to the physiognomy of the ages all that
is immutable and eternal in their lineaments, traced there by the wisdom of
God, and all that is variable and fleeting, planted there by the follies of
men; does not force, like certain ignorant romancers, the personages of the
past to colour themselves with our brushes and smear themselves with our
varnish; but compels, by his magic power, the contemporary reader to imbue himself,
at least for some hours, with the spirit of the old times, today so much
scorned, like a wise and adroit adviser inviting ungrateful children to return
to their father.
Alessandro
Manzoni's The Betrothed (1827) has similarities with Walter Scott's historic
novel Ivanhoe, although evidently distinct.
In
Charles Baudelaire's La Fanfarlo (1847), poet Samuel Cramer says of Scott:
Oh
that tedious author, a dusty exhumer of chronicles! A fastidious mass of
descriptions of bric-a-brac ... and castoff things of every sort, armor,
tableware, furniture, gothic inns, and melodramatic castles where lifeless
mannequins stalk about, dressed in leotards.
In
the novella, however, Cramer proves as deluded a romantic as any hero in one of
Scott's novels.
Jane
Austen, in a letter to her nephew James Edward Austen on 16 December 1816,
writes:
Uncle
Henry writes very superior Sermons.– You & I must try to get hold of one or
two, & put them into our Novels;– it would be a fine help to a volume;
& we could make our Heroine read it aloud of a Sunday Evening, just as well
as Isabella Wardour in the Antiquary, is made to read the History of the Hartz
Demon in the ruins of St Ruth– tho' I beleive, upon recollection, Lovell is the
Reader.
In
Jane Austen's Persuasion (1817) Anne Elliot and Captain James Benwick discuss
the "richness of the present age" of poetry, and whether Marmion or
The Lady of the Lake is the more preferred work.
Mary
Shelley, while researching for her historical novel The Fortunes of Perkin
Warbeck (1830), wrote a letter to Walter Scott on 25 May 1829, asking him for
information on any works or manuscripts he knew about Perkin Warbeck, she
concludes the letter:
I
hope you will forgive my troubling you. It is almost impertinent to say how
foolish it appears to me that I should intrude on your ground, or to compliment
one all the world so highly appreciates. But as every traveller when they visit
the Alps endeavours, however imperfectly, to express their admiration in the
Inn's album, so it is impossible to address the Author of Waverley without
thanking him for the delight and instruction derived from the inexhaustible
source of his genius, and trying to express a part of the enthusiastic
admiration his works inspire.
In
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) St. John Rivers gives a copy of Marmion to
Jane to provide her "evening solace" during her stay in her small
lodging.
Emily
Brontë's Wuthering Heights was influenced by the novels of Walter Scott. In
particular, according to Juliet Barker, Rob Roy (1817) had a significant
influence on Brontë's novel, which, though "regarded as the archetypal
Yorkshire novel ... owed as much, if not more, to Walter Scott's Border
country". Rob Roy is set "in the wilds of Northumberland, among the
uncouth and quarrelsome squirearchical Osbaldistones", while Cathy
Earnshaw " has strong similarities with Diana Vernon, who is equally out
of place among her boorish relations" (Barker p. 501).
In
Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) the narrator, Gilbert Markham,
brings an elegantly bound copy of Marmion as a present to the independent
"tenant of Wildfell Hall" (Helen Graham) whom he is courting, and is
mortified when she insists on paying for it.
In
George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871), Mr. Trumbull remarks to Mary Garth:
"You
have an interesting work there, I see, Miss Garth," he observed, when Mary
re-entered. "It is by the author of Waverley: that is Sir Walter Scott. I
have bought one of his works myself—a very nice thing, a very superior
publication, entitled Ivanhoe. You will not get any writer to beat him in a
hurry, I think—he will not, in my opinion, be speedily surpassed. I have just
been reading a portion at the commencement of Anne of Jeersteen [sic]. It
commences well."
Thomas
Hardy, in his 1888 essay, The Profitable Reading of Fiction, writes:
Tested
by such considerations as these there are obviously many volumes of fiction
remarkable, and even great, in their character-drawing, their feeling, their
philosophy, which are quite second-rate in their structural quality as
narratives Their fewness is remarkable, and bears out the opinion expressed
earlier in this essay, that the art of novel-writing is as yet in its tentative
stage only.... The Bride of Lammermoor is an almost perfect specimen of form,
which is the more remarkable in that Scott, as a rule, depends more upon
episode, dialogue, and description, for exciting interest, than upon the
well-knit interdependence of parts.
The
many other British novelists whom Scott influenced included Edward
Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Kingsley, and Robert Louis Stevenson. He also shaped
children's writers like Charlotte Yonge and G. A. Henty.
Nathaniel
Hawthorne, in a letter to his sister Elizabeth on 31 October 1820, writes:
I
have bought the Lord of the Isles and intend either to send or bring it to you.
I like it as well as any of Scott's other poems... I shall read The Abbot, by
the author of Waverley, as soon as I can hire it. I have read all of Scott's
novels except that , I wish I had not, that I might have the pleasure of
reading them again.
Edgar
Allan Poe, an admirer of Scott, was particularly captivated with The Bride of
Lammermoor, calling it "that purest, and most enthralling of
fictions", and "the master novel of Scott."
In
a speech delivered at Salem, Massachusetts, on 6 January 1860, to raise money
for the families of the executed abolitionist John Brown and his followers,
Ralph Waldo Emerson calls Brown an example of true chivalry, which consists not
in noble birth but in helping the weak and defenseless and declares that
"Walter Scott would have delighted to draw his picture and trace his
adventurous career."
Henry
James, in his 1864 essay, Fiction and Sir Walter Scott, writes:
Scott
was a born story-teller: we can give him no higher praise. Surveying his works,
his character, his method, as a whole, we can liken him to nothing better than
to a strong and kindly elder brother, who gathers his juvenile public about him
at eventide, and pours out a stream of wondrous improvisation. Who cannot
remember an experience like this? On no occasion are the delights of fiction so
intense. Fiction ? These are the triumphs of fact. In the richness of his
invention and memory, in the infinitude of his knowledge, in his improvidence
for the future, in the skill with which he answers, or rather parries, sudden
questions, in his low-voiced pathos and his resounding merriment, he is
identical with the ideal fireside chronicler. And thoroughly to enjoy him, we
must again become as credulous as children at twilight.
In
his 1870 memoir, Army Life in a Black Regiment, New England abolitionist Thomas
Wentworth Higginson (later editor of Emily Dickinson), described how he wrote
down and preserved Negro spirituals or "shouts" while serving as a
colonel in the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first authorized Union Army
regiment recruited from freedmen during the Civil War. He wrote that he was
"a faithful student of the Scottish ballads, and had always envied Sir
Walter the delight of tracing them out amid their own heather, and of writing
them down piecemeal from the lips of aged crones."
According
to Marx's daughter Eleanor, Scott was "an author to whom Karl Marx again
and again returned, whom he admired and knew as well as he did Balzac and
Fielding."
Mark
Twain, in his 1883 Life on the Mississippi, satirized the impact of Scott's
writings, declaring with humorous hyperbole that Scott "had so large a
hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the [American Civil]
war" that he is "in great measure responsible for the war."[107]
He goes on to coin the term "Sir Walter Scott disease", describing a
respect for aristocracy, a social acceptance of duels and vendettas, and a
taste for fantasy and romanticism, which he blames for the South's lack of
advancement. Twain also targeted Scott in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where
he names a sinking boat the "Walter Scott" (1884); and, in A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), the main character repeatedly
utters "Great Scott!" as an oath; by the end of the book, however, he
has become absorbed in the world of knights in armour, reflecting Twain's
ambivalence on the topic.
In
Anne of Green Gables (1908) by Lucy Maude Montgomery, as Anne is bringing in
the cows from pasture:
The
cows swung placidly down the lane, and Anne followed them dreamily, repeating
aloud the battle canto from Marmion—which had also been part of their English
course the preceding winter and which Miss Stacy had made them learn off by
heart—and exulting in its rushing lines and the clash of spears in its imagery.
When she came to the lines
The
stubborn spearsmen still made good
Their
dark impenetrable wood,
she
stopped in ecstasy to shut her eyes that she might the better fancy herself one
of that heroic ring.
The
idyllic Cape Cod retreat of suffragists Verena Tarrant and Olive Chancellor in
Henry James's The Bostonians (1886) is called Marmion, evoking what James
considered the Quixotic idealism of such social reformers.
In
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Ramsey glances at her husband:
He
was reading something that moved him very much ... He was tossing the pages
over. He was acting it – perhaps he was thinking himself the person in the
book. She wondered what book it was. Oh, it was one of old Sir Walter's she
saw, adjusting the shade of her lamp so that the light fell on her knitting.
For Charles Tansley had been saying (she looked up as if she expected to hear
the crash of books on the floor above) – had been saying that people don't read
Scott any more. Then her husband thought, "That's what they'll say of
me;" so he went and got one of those books? ... It fortified him. He clean
forgot all the little rubs and digs of the evening... and his being so
irritable with his wife and so touchy and minding when they passed his books
over as if they didn't exist at all ... [Scott's] feeling for straight forward
simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed creature in Mucklebackit's
cottage [in The Antiquary] made him feel so vigorous, so relieved of something
that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke back his tears. Raising
the book a little to hide his face he let them fall and shook his head from
side to side and forgot himself completely (but not one or two reflections
about morality and French novels and English novels and Scott's hands being
tied but his view perhaps being as true as the other view), forgot his own
bothers and failures completely in poor Steenie's drowning and Mucklebackit's
sorrow (that was Scott at his best) and the astonishing delight and feeling of
vigor that it gave him. Well, let them improve upon that, he thought as he
finished the chapter ... The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with
a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and
the French novel.
Virginia
Woolf, in a letter to Hugh Walpole on 12 September 1932, writes:
I
don't know him [Scott] accurately and minutely as you do, but only in a warm,
scattered, amourous way. Now you have put an edge on my love, and if it weren't
that I must read MSS—how they flock! I should plunge—you urge me almost beyond
endurance to plunge once more—yes, I say to myself, I shall read the Monastery
again and then I shall go back to [The Heart of] Midlothian. I cant read the
Bride [of Lammermoor], because I know it almost by heart: also the Antiquary (I
think those two, as a whole, are my favourites). Well—to inspire a harassed
hack to this wish to kick up her heels—what greater proof could there be of
your powers of persuasion and illumination? My only complaint is that you pay
too much attention to the arid gulls who can't open their beaks wide enough to
swallow Sir Walter. One of the things I want to write about one day is the
Shakespearean talk in Scott: the dialogues: surely that is the last appearance
in England of the blank verse of Falstaff and so on! We have lost the art of
the poetic speech.
John
Cowper Powys described Walter Scott's romances as "by far the most
powerful literary influence of my life". This can be seen particularly in
his two historical novels, Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages, set during the
end of Roman rule in Britain, and Owen Glendower.
In
1951, science-fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote Breeds There a Man...?, a short
story with a title alluding vividly to Scott's The Lay of the Last Minstrel
(1805). In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the protagonist's brother
is made to read Walter Scott's book Ivanhoe to the ailing Mrs. Henry Lafayette
Dubose. In Mother Night (1961) by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., memoirist and playwright
Howard W. Campbell Jr. prefaces his text with the six lines beginning
"Breathes there the man..." In Knights of the Sea (2010) by Canadian
author Paul Marlowe, there are several references to Marmion, as well as an inn
named after Ivanhoe, and a fictitious Scott novel entitled The Beastmen of Glen
Glammoch.
The
other arts
Further
information: Opera in Scotland § Operas inspired by Walter Scott
Although
Scott's own appreciation of music was basic, to say the least, he had a
considerable influence on composers. Some 90 operas based to some extent on his
poems and novels have been traced, the most celebrated being Rossini's La donna
del lago (1819, based on The Lady of the Lake) and Donizetti's Lucia di
Lammermoor (1835, based on The Bride of Lammermoor). Others include Donizetti's
1829 opera Il castello di Kenilworth based on Kenilworth, Georges Bizet's La
jolie fille de Perth (1867, based on The Fair Maid of Perth), and Arthur
Sullivan's Ivanhoe (1891).
Many
of Scott's songs were set to music by composers throughout the 19th century.
Seven from The Lady of the Lake were set in German translations by Schubert,
one of them being 'Ellens dritter Gesang' popularly known as 'Schubert's Ave
Maria'. Three lyrics, also in translation, appear from Beethoven in his
Twenty-Five Scottish Songs, Op. 108. Other notable musical responses include
three overtures: Waverley (1828) and Rob Roy (1831) by Berlioz, and The Land of
the Mountain and the Flood (1887, alluding to The Lay of the Last Minstrel) by
Hamish MacCunn. "Hail to the Chief" from "The Lady of the
Lake" was set to music around 1812 by the songwriter James Sanderson
(c. 1769 – c. 1841). See the Wikipedia article "Hail to the Chief."
The
Waverley Novels are full of eminently paintable scenes and many 19th-century
artists responded to them. Among the outstanding paintings of Scott subjects
are: Richard Parkes Bonington's Amy Robsart and the Earl of Leicester (c. 1827)
from Kenilworth in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Delacroix's L'Enlèvement de
Rebecca (1846) from Ivanhoe in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and
Millais's The Bride of Lammermoor (1878) in Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.
Walter
Scott features as a character in Sara Sheridan's novel The Fair Botanists
(2021).
Works
Novels
The
Waverley Novels is the title given to the long series of Scott novels released
from 1814 to 1832 which takes its name from the first novel, Waverley. The
following is a chronological list of the entire series: 1814: Waverley , 1815:
Guy Mannering , 1816: The Antiquary , 1816: The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality
or The Tale of Old Mortality – the 1st instalment from the subset series, Tales
of My Landlord , 1817: Rob Roy , 1818: The Heart of Mid-Lothian – the 2nd
instalment from the subset series, Tales of My Landlord , 1819: The Bride of
Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose or A Legend of the Wars of Montrose – the
3rd instalment from the subset series, Tales of My Landlord , 1819 (dated
1820): Ivanhoe , 1820: The Monastery , 1820: The Abbot , 1821: Kenilworth , 1822:
The Pirate , 1822: The Fortunes of Nigel , 1822: Peveril of the Peak , 1823:
Quentin Durward , 1824: St. Ronan's Well or Saint Ronan's Well , 1824:
Redgauntlet , 1825: The Betrothed and The Talisman – a subset series, Tales of
the Crusaders , 1826: Woodstock
1827:
Chronicles of the Canongate — containing two short stories ("The Highland
Widow" and "The Two Drovers") and a novel (The Surgeon's
Daughter) , 1828: The Fair Maid of Perth – the 2nd instalment from the subset
series, Chronicles of the Canongate , 1829: Anne of Geierstein
1832:
Count Robert of Paris and Castle Dangerous – the 4th instalment from the subset
series, Tales of My Landlord
Other
novels:
1831–1832:
The Siege of Malta – a finished novel published posthumously in 2008, 1832:
Bizarro – an unfinished novel (or novella) published posthumously in 2008
Short
stories
1811:
"The Inferno of Altisidora", 1817: "Christopher Corduroy" ,
1818: "Alarming Increase of Depravity Among Animals" , 1818:
"Phantasmagoria"
1827:
"The Highland Widow" and "The Two Drovers" (see Chronicles
of the Canongate above) , 1828: "My Aunt Margaret's Mirror",
"The Tapestried Chamber", and "Death of the Laird's Jock" –
from the series The Keepsake Stories
1832:
"A Highland Anecdote"
Poetry
Many
of the short poems or songs released by Scott (or later anthologized) were
originally not separate pieces but parts of longer poems interspersed
throughout his novels, tales, and dramas.
1796:
The Chase, and William and Helen: Two Ballads, translated from the German of
Gottfried Augustus Bürger
1800:
Glenfinlas , 1802–1803: Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border , 1805: The Lay of
the Last Minstrel , 1806: Ballads and Lyrical Pieces , 1808: Marmion: A Tale of
Flodden Field , 1810: The Lady of the Lake , 1811: The Vision of Don Roderick ,
1813: The Bridal of Triermain , 1813: Rokeby , 1815: The Field of Waterloo , 1815:
The Lord of the Isles , 1817: Harold the Dauntless
1825:
Bonnie Dundee
Plays
1799:
Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand: A Tragedy – an English-language
translation of the 1773 German-language play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
entitled Götz von Berlichingen
1822:
Halidon Hill , 1823: MacDuff's Cross , 1830: The Doom of Devorgoil
1830:
Auchindrane
Non-fiction
1814–1817:
The Border Antiquities of England and Scotland – a work co-authored by Luke
Clennell and John Greig with Scott's contribution consisting of the substantial
introductory essay, originally published in 2 volumes from 1814 to 1817
1815–1824:
Essays on Chivalry, Romance, and Drama – a supplement to the 1815–1824 editions
of the Encyclopædia Britannica
1816:
Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk
1819–1826:
Provincial Antiquities of Scotland
1821–1824:
Lives of the Novelists
1825–1832:
The Journal of Sir Walter Scott — first published in 1890
1826:
The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther
1827:
The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French. With a Preliminary View
of the French Revolution . Published in 9 volumes .
1828:
Religious Discourses. By a Layman
1828:
Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from Scottish History – the 1st
instalment from the series, Tales of a Grandfather
1829:
The History of Scotland: Volume I
1829:
Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from Scottish History – the 2nd
instalment from the series, Tales of a Grandfather
1830:
The History of Scotland: Volume II
1830:
Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from Scottish History – the 3rd
instalment from the series, Tales of a Grandfather
1830:
Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft
1831:
Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from the History of France – the
4th instalment from the series, Tales of a Grandfather
1831:
Tales of a Grandfather: The History of France (Second Series) — unfinished;
published 1996
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