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Walter Scott瓦尔特·司各特简介

1771-1832 诗：The Minstrlsy of the Scottish Border苏格兰边区歌谣集;Marimion

玛里恩;The Lady of the Lake湖上夫人小说：Waverley威弗利;Guy Mannering盖·曼纳

令;Rob Roy罗布罗伊;The Heart of Midlothian米德洛西恩监狱;Ivanhoe艾凡

赫;Kenilworth坎尼尔华斯;Woodstock皇家猎馆;Queentin Durward昆廷·达沃

born August 15, 1771, Edinburgh

died September 21, 1832, Abbotsford, Roxburgh, Scotland

•

Sir Walter Scott, detail of an oil painting by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, 1824;

in the National …

Scottish novelist, poet, historian, and biographer who is often considered both

the inventor and the greatest practitioner of the historical novel.

Scott's father was a lawyer and his mother was the daughter of a physician.

From his earliest years, Scott was fond of listening to his elderly relatives' accounts

and stories of the Scottish Border, and he soon became a voracious reader of

poetry, history, drama, and fairy tales and romances. He had a remarkably

retentive memory and astonished visitors by his eager reciting of poetry. His

explorations of the neighbouring countryside developed in him both a love of

natural beauty and a deep appreciation of the historic struggles of his Scottish

forebears.

Scott was educated at the high school at Edinburgh and also for a time at the

grammar school at Kelso. In 1786 he was apprenticed to his father as writer to the

signet, a Scots equivalent of the English solicitor (attorney). His study and practice

of law were somewhat desultory, for his immense youthful energy was diverted

into social activities and into miscellaneous readings in Italian, Spanish, French,

German, and Latin. After a very deeply felt early disappointment in love, he

married, in December 1797, Charlotte Carpenter, of a French royalist family, with

whom he lived happily until her death in 1826.

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.

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

and

The Heart

of Midlothian

(both 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).

Additional Reading

J.G. Lockhart,

Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott

, 7 vol. (1836–38), is a full,

intimate, and fascinating biography by Scott's son-in-law. Edwin Muir,

Scott and

Scotland

(1936), is a very acute analysis of Scott's relation to Scottish literature and

of his use of the English and Scots languages. H.J.C. Grierson,

Sir Walter Scott

(1938, reissued 1973), criticizes and corrects Lockhart at various points. Donald

Davie,

The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott

(1961, reprinted 1971), analyzes Scott's debt

to Maria Edgeworth and others and critically analyzes some of the novels. Edgar

Johnson,

Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown

, 2 vol. (1970), is a very full and

detailed biography with extensive critical commentary. David Brown,

Walter Scott

and the Historical Imagination

(1979), makes a reevaluation of Scott as a historical

novelist; and James Kerr,

Fiction Against History: Scott as Storyteller

(1989), also

explores Scott's use of history in his fiction. Also of interest is Harry E. Shaw (ed.),

Critical Essays on Sir Walter Scott: The Waverley Novels

(1996).