Results 1 - 16 of 17 The Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott: Volume I (Halcyon Classics). Aug 13 The Essential Sir Walter Scott Collection (31 books). Jul
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In March he began an apprenticeship in his father's office to become a Writer to the Signet. While at the university Scott had become a friend of Adam Ferguson, the son of Professor Adam Ferguson who hosted literary salons. Scott met the blind poet Thomas Blacklock , who lent him books and introduced him to James Macpherson 's Ossian cycle of poems.
During the winter of —87 the year-old Scott saw Robert Burns at one of these salons, for what was to be their only meeting. When Burns noticed a print illustrating the poem "The Justice of the Peace" and asked who had written the poem, only Scott knew that it was by John Langhorne , and was thanked by Burns.
After completing his studies in law, he became a lawyer in Edinburgh. As a lawyer's clerk he made his first visit to the Scottish Highlands directing an eviction. He was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in As a boy, youth and young man, Scott was fascinated by the oral traditions of the Scottish Borders. He was an obsessive collector of stories, and developed an innovative method of recording what he heard at the feet of local story-tellers using carvings on twigs, to avoid the disapproval of those who believed that such stories were neither for writing down nor for printing.
He then published an idiosyncratic three-volume set of collected ballads of his adopted home region, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. This was the first sign from a literary standpoint of his interest in Scottish history. As a result of his early polio infection, Scott had a pronounced limp.
He was described in as tall, well formed except for one ankle and foot which made him walk lamely , neither fat nor thin, with forehead very high, nose short, upper lip long and face rather fleshy, complexion fresh and clear, eyes very blue, shrewd and penetrating, with hair now silvery white. Unable to consider a military career, Scott enlisted as a volunteer in the 1st Lothian and Border yeomanry.
After three weeks of courtship, Scott proposed and they were married on Christmas Eve in St Mary's Church, Carlisle a church set up in the now destroyed nave of Carlisle Cathedral. They had five children, of whom four survived by the time of Scott's death, most baptized by an Episcopalian clergyman. In his early married days Scott had a decent living from his earnings at the law, his salary as Sheriff-Depute, his wife's income, some revenue from his writing, and his share of his father's rather meagre estate.
After their third son was born in , they moved to a spacious three-storey house built for Scott at 39 North Castle Street. This remained Scott's base in Edinburgh until , when he could no longer afford two homes.
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From Scott had spent the summers in a cottage at Lasswade , where he entertained guests including literary figures, and it was there that his career as an author began. There were nominal residency requirements for his position of Sheriff-Depute, and at first he stayed at a local inn during the circuit. In he ended his use of the Lasswade cottage and leased the substantial house of Ashestiel , 6 miles 9. It was sited on the south bank of the River Tweed , and the building incorporated an old tower house. John", and his poetry then began to bring him to public attention.
In , The Lay of the Last Minstrel captured wide public imagination, and his career as a writer was established in spectacular fashion. He published many other poems over the next ten years, including the popular The Lady of the Lake , printed in and set in the Trossachs. Portions of the German translation of this work were set to music by Franz Schubert. Marmion , published in , produced lines that have become proverbial. No wonder why I felt rebuked beneath his eye. In Scott persuaded James Ballantyne and his brother to move to Edinburgh and to establish their printing press there.
He became a partner in their business. As a political conservative, [21] Scott helped to found the Tory Quarterly Review , a review journal to which he made several anonymous contributions. Scott was also a contributor to the Edinburgh Review , which espoused Whig views. Scott was ordained as an elder in the Presbyterian Church of Duddington and sat in the General Assembly for a time as representative elder of the burgh of Selkirk. The farm had the nickname of " Clarty Hole", and when Scott built a family cottage there in he named it "Abbotsford". He continued to expand the estate, and built Abbotsford House in a series of extensions.
In Scott was offered the position of Poet Laureate. He declined, due to concerns that "such an appointment would be a poisoned chalice", as the Laureateship had fallen into disrepute, due to the decline in quality of work suffered by previous title holders, "as a succession of poetasters had churned out conventional and obsequious odes on royal occasions. Although Scott had attained worldwide celebrity through his poetry, he soon tried his hand at documenting his researches into the oral tradition of the Scottish Borders in prose fiction—stories and novels—at the time still considered aesthetically inferior to poetry above all to such classical genres as the epic or poetic tragedy as a mimetic vehicle for portraying historical events.
In an innovative and astute action, he wrote and published his first novel , Waverley , anonymously in It was a tale of the Jacobite rising of Its English protagonist, Edward Waverley, like Don Quixote a great reader of romances, has been brought up by his Tory uncle, who is sympathetic to Jacobitism , although Edward's own father is a Whig.
The youthful Waverley obtains a commission in the Whig army and is posted in Dundee. On leave, he meets his uncle's friend, the Jacobite Baron Bradwardine and is attracted to the Baron's daughter Rose. On a visit to the Highlands, Edward overstays his leave and is arrested and charged with desertion but is rescued by the Highland chieftain Fergus MacIvor and his mesmerizing sister Flora, whose devotion to the Stuart cause, "as it exceeded her brother's in fanaticism, excelled it also in purity".
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Through Flora, Waverley meets Bonnie Prince Charlie , and under her influence goes over to the Jacobite side and takes part in the Battle of Prestonpans. He escapes retribution, however, after saving the life of a Whig colonel during the battle. Waverley whose surname reflects his divided loyalties eventually decides to lead a peaceful life of establishment respectability under the House of Hanover rather than live as a proscribed rebel.
He chooses to marry the beautiful Rose Bradwardine, rather than cast his lot with the sublime Flora MacIvor, who, after the failure of the '45 rising, retires to a French convent. There followed a succession of novels over the next five years, each with a Scottish historical setting. Mindful of his reputation as a poet, Scott maintained the anonymity he had begun with Waverley , publishing the novels under the name "Author of Waverley" or as "Tales of During this time Scott became known by the nickname "The Wizard of the North".
In he was given the honour of dining with George, Prince Regent , who wanted to meet the "Author of Waverley". Scott's series Tales of my Landlord is sometimes considered a subset of the Waverley novels and was intended to illustrate aspects of Scottish regional life. Among the best known is The Bride of Lammermoor , a fictionalized version of an actual incident in the history of the Dalrymple family that took place in the Lammermuir Hills in In the novel, Lucie Ashton and the nobly born but now dispossessed and impoverished Edgar Ravenswood exchange vows.
But the Ravenswoods and the wealthy Ashtons, who now own the former Ravenswood lands, are enemies, and Lucie's mother forces her daughter to break her engagement to Edgar and marry the wealthy Sir Arthur Bucklaw. Lucie falls into a depression and on their wedding night stabs the bridegroom, succumbs to insanity, and dies. The prolonged, climactic coloratura mad scene for Lucia in Donizetti 's bel canto opera Lucia di Lammermoor is based on what in the novel were just a few bland sentences.
Tales of my Landlord includes the now highly regarded novel Old Mortality , set in —89 against the backdrop of the ferocious anti-Covenanting campaign of the Tory Graham of Claverhouse , subsequently made Viscount Dundee called "Bluidy Clavers" by his opponents but later dubbed " Bonnie Dundee " by Scott.
The Covenanters were presbyterians who had supported the Restoration of Charles II on promises of a Presbyterian settlement, but he had instead reintroduced Episcopalian church government with draconian penalties for Presbyterian worship. This led to the destitution of around ministers who had refused to take an oath of allegiance and submit themselves to bishops, and who continued to conduct worship among a remnant of their flock in caves and other remote country spots.
The relentless persecution of these conventicles and attempts to break them up by military force had led to open revolt. The story is told from the point of view of Henry Morton, a moderate Presbyterian, who is unwittingly drawn into the conflict and barely escapes summary execution. In writing Old Mortality Scott drew upon the knowledge he had acquired from his researches into ballads on the subject for The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.
A recent critic, who is a legal as well as a literary scholar, argues that Old Mortality not only reflects the dispute between Stuart's absolute monarchy and the jurisdiction of the courts, but also invokes a foundational moment in British sovereignty, namely, the Habeas Corpus Act also known as the Great Writ , passed by the English Parliament in Ivanhoe , set in 12th-century England, marked a move away from Scott's focus on the local history of Scotland.
Based partly on Hume's History of England and the ballad cycle of Robin Hood , Ivanhoe was quickly translated into many languages and inspired countless imitations and theatrical adaptations. Ivanhoe depicts the cruel tyranny of the Norman overlords Norman Yoke over the impoverished Saxon populace of England, with two of the main characters, Rowena and Locksley Robin Hood , representing the dispossessed Saxon aristocracy.
When the protagonists are captured and imprisoned by a Norman baron, Scott interrupts the story to exclaim:. It is grievous to think that those valiant barons, to whose stand against the crown the liberties of England were indebted for their existence, should themselves have been such dreadful oppressors, and capable of excesses contrary not only to the laws of England, but to those of nature and humanity.
The institution of the Magna Carta , which happens outside the time frame of the story, is portrayed as a progressive incremental reform, but also as a step towards the recovery of a lost golden age of liberty endemic to England and the English system. Scott puts a derisive prophecy in the mouth of the jester Wamba:. Norman saw on English oak. Although on the surface an entertaining escapist romance, alert contemporary readers would have quickly recognised the political subtext of Ivanhoe , which appeared immediately after the English Parliament, fearful of French-style revolution in the aftermath of Waterloo , had passed the Habeas Corpus Suspension acts of and and other extremely repressive measures, and when traditional English Charter rights versus revolutionary human rights was a topic of discussion.
Ivanhoe was also remarkable in its sympathetic portrayal of Jewish characters: Rebecca, considered by many critics the book's real heroine, does not in the end get to marry Ivanhoe, whom she loves, but Scott allows her to remain faithful to her own religion, rather than having her convert to Christianity. Likewise, her father, Isaac of York, a Jewish moneylender, is shown as a victim rather than a villain.
In Ivanhoe , which is one of Scott's Waverley novels, religious and sectarian fanatics are the villains, while the eponymous hero is a bystander who must weigh the evidence and decide where to take a stand. Scott's positive portrayal of Judaism, which reflects his humanity and concern for religious toleration, also coincided with a contemporary movement for the Emancipation of the Jews in England. Scott's fame grew as his explorations and interpretations of Scottish history and society captured popular imagination.
During the years of the Protectorate under Cromwell the Crown Jewels 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 Thereafter, the honours were stored in Edinburgh Castle, but the large locked box in which they were stored was not opened for more than years, and stories circulated that they had been "lost" or removed.
In , Scott and a small team of military men opened the box, and "unearthed" the honours from the Crown Room in the depths of Edinburgh Castle. After George's accession to the throne, the city council of Edinburgh invited Scott, at the King's behest, to stage-manage the visit of King George IV to Scotland. He used the event to contribute to the drawing of a line under an old world that pitched his homeland into regular bouts of bloody strife. He, along with his "production team", mounted what in modern days could be termed a PR event, in which the King was dressed in tartan , and was greeted by his people, many of whom were also dressed in similar tartan ceremonial dress.
This form of dress, proscribed after the rebellion against the English, became one of the seminal, potent and ubiquitous symbols of Scottish identity. In his novel Kenilworth , Elizabeth I is welcomed to the castle of that name by means of an elaborate pageant, the details of which Scott was well qualified to itemize. Much of Scott's autograph work shows an almost stream-of-consciousness approach to writing. He included little in the way of punctuation in his drafts, leaving such details to the printers to supply.
He kept up his prodigious output of fiction, as well as producing a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte , until By then his health was failing, but he nevertheless undertook a grand tour of Europe, and was welcomed and celebrated wherever he went. He returned to Scotland and, in September , during the epidemic in Scotland that year, died of typhus [32] at Abbotsford, the home he had designed and had built, near Melrose in the Scottish Borders.
His wife, Lady Scott, had died in and was buried as an Episcopalian. Two Presbyterian ministers and one Episcopalian officiated at his funeral.
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Scott's eldest son, Lt Walter Scott, inherited his father's estate and possessions. Scott was raised a Presbyterian but later also adhered to the Scottish Episcopal Church. Many have suggested this demonstrates both his nationalistic and unionistic tendencies. His distant cousin was the poet Randall Swingler. 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 During the summers from , Scott made his home at the large house of Ashestiel, on the south bank of the River Tweed 6 miles 9. When his lease on this property expired in , Scott bought Cartley Hole Farm, downstream on the Tweed nearer Melrose.
Scott was a pioneer of the Scottish Baronial style of architecture, therefore 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, 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. More land was purchased until Scott owned nearly 1, acres 4. A Roman road with a ford near Melrose used in olden days by the abbots of Melrose suggested the name of Abbotsford.
Scott was buried in Dryburgh Abbey , where his wife had earlier been interred. Nearby is a large statue of William Wallace , one of Scotland's many romanticised historical figures. Although he continued to be extremely popular and widely read, both at home and abroad, [44] 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 , E. 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 the 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 recognized. 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 suppressed as barbaric, and viewed in the southern mind as a breeding ground of hill bandits, religious fanaticism, and Jacobite rebellions.
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, despite his extensive travels around his native country. The novel met with considerable success. There followed a succession of novels over the next five years, each with a Scottish historical setting. Mindful of his reputation as a poet, he maintained the anonymous habit he had begun with Waverley, always publishing the novels under the name "Author of Waverley" or attributed as "Tales of Even when it was clear that there would be no harm in coming out into the open he maintained the facade, apparently out of a sense of fun.
During this time the nickname "The Wizard of the North" was popularly applied to the mysterious best-selling writer. His identity as the author of the novels was widely rumoured, and in Scott was given the honour of dining with George, Prince Regent, who wanted to meet "the author of Waverley".
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In he broke away from writing about Scotland with Ivanhoe , a historical romance set in 12th-century England. It too was a runaway success and, as he did with his first novel, he unleashed a slew of books along the same lines. As his fame grew during this phase of his career, he was granted the title of baronet, becoming Sir Walter Scott. At this time he organised the visit of King George IV to Scotland, and when the King visited Edinburgh in the spectacular pageantry Scott had concocted to portray George as a rather tubby reincarnation of Bonnie Prince Charlie made tartans and kilts fashionable and turned them into symbols of national identity.
Financial woes Beginning in he went into dire financial straits again, as his company nearly collapsed. That he was the author of his novels became general knowledge at this time as well. Rather than declare bankruptcy he placed his home, Abbotsford House, and income into a trust belonging to his creditors, and proceeded to write his way out of debt. He kept up his prodigious output of fiction as well as producing a non-fiction biography of Napoleon Bonaparte until By then his health was failing, and he died at Abbotsford in Though not in the clear by then, his novels continued to sell, and he made good his debts from beyond the grave.
He was buried in Dryburgh Abbey where nearby, fittingly, a large statue can be found of William Wallace- one of Scotland's most romantic historical figures. Assessment From being one of the most popular novelists of the 19th century, Scott suffered from a disastrous decline in popularity after the First World War.
The tone was set early on in E. Forster's classic "Aspects of the Novel" , where Scott was savaged as being a clumsy writer who wrote slapdash, badly plotted novels. Scott also suffered from the rising star of Jane Austen. Considered merely an entertaining "woman's novelist" in the 19th century, in the 20th Austen began to be seen as perhaps the major English novelist of the first few decades of the 19th century.
Walter Scott
As Austen's star rose, Scott's sank, although, ironically, he had been one of the few male writers of his time to recognize Austen's genius. Scott's many flaws ponderousness, prolixity, lack of humor were fundamentally out of step with Modernist sensibilities. Nevertheless, Scott was responsible for two major trends that carry on to this day. First, he essentially invented the modern historical novel; an enormous number of imitators and imitators of imitators would appear in the 19th century.
It is a measure of Scott's influence that Edinburgh's central railway station, opened in for the North British Railway, is called the Waverley Station. Second, his Scottish novels followed on from James Macpherson's Ossian cycle in rehabilitating the public perception of Highland culture after years in the shadows following southern distrust of hill bandits and the Jacobite rebellions. As enthusiastic chairman of the Celtic Society of Edinburgh he contributed to the reinvention of Scottish culture.
It is worth noting, however, that Scott was a Lowland Scot, and that his re-creations of the Highlands were more than a little fanciful. His organisation of the visit of King George IV to Scotland in was a pivotal event, leading Edinburgh tailors to invent many "clan tartans" out of whole cloth, so to speak. After being essentially unstudied for many decades, a small revival of interest in Scott's work began in the s and s.
Ironically, postmodern tastes which favoured discontinuous narratives, and the introduction of the 'first person' into works of fiction were more favourable to Scott's work than Modernist tastes.