Ivanhoe

Sir Walter Scott

The creator of the historical novel and one of the most popular writers of his era, Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on August 15, 1771. During his lifetime, Scott witnessed industrialization and worker rebellions, revolution and the Napoleonic wars. He saw Scotland rise from a fragmented backwater to become a sophisticated cultural center. His literary works consolidated national pride and materially contributed to Scotland’s cultural development. Despite the fascinating movements and upheavals of his own time, Scott found his true glory in the strife and striving of earlier eras. Inspired in his youth by ballads of his ancestors and their Border Wars with England, Scott spent his life looking to history to illuminate the present. Indeed, most of his works—including his greatest, and best-selling, novels such as Ivanhoe and Rob Roy—offer compelling images of times past.

As a solicitor and a writer to the signet, Scott’s father was well acquainted with land disputes among residents along the England-Scotland border that persisted well into the nineteenth century. His son experienced this storied area firsthand. After contracting polio when he was two years old, Walter was sent to his grandparents’ house in Sandy Knowe in the Border region to convalesce. There he developed a love of literature, gilded by his grandmother’s stories about the area. Permanently lamed but well enough to walk with a cane, Scott attended the High School in Edinburgh, where, along with the traditional ballads he loved, he favored the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto. Popular and intellectually promising, Scott studied the classics and law at Edinburgh University.

Although he worked throughout his life as an advocate and later as principal clerk to the Court of Session, Scott’s literary ambitions surfaced early in the form of ardent love poetry. He also developed a passion for collecting ballads; in 1802 he published a compendium, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. He also wrote tremendously popular narrative poems, including The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and The Lady of the Lake (1810).

During the second decade of the nineteenth century, Scott was offered the position of poet laureate, which he declined, and a baronetcy, which he accepted. Although his fame was assured by the popularity of his poems, he chose to publish his novels under a pseudonym—perhaps uncertain how they would be received. In 1814 the anonymously published Waverley sold out the entire first run in a matter of days. Critics and readers alike loved Scott’s historical romances; his subsequent novels, such as Guy Mannering (1815), Rob Roy (1817), and his master-piece, Ivanhoe (1819), set sales records and sparked fervent speculation about their authorship. Scott did not reveal that he had written the novels until 1827.

Sir Walter Scott was at the apex of his powers in the early 1820s, when he published one or more works each year; he entertained King George IV in Edinburgh and received honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. He had made a fortune publishing his work through a company he owned with childhood friend James Ballantyne, but even Scott was not immune to the recession that gripped Britain in 1825. By the end of 1826 he had lost everything, his wife had died, and his health was failing. Determined not to declare bankruptcy, Scott pledged the future earnings of his writings to pay off his debts. In addition to burdensome hack work he took to increase his income, he wrote at least one book a year, including Woodstock (1826), Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1827), and The Fair Maid of Perth (1828). At work on a complete collection of his writings, Scott had a stroke in 1831 and died on September 21, 1832, at his Scottish estate, Abbotsford.