Sir Walter Scott

Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh on the 15th August 1771 in a house in College Wynd near to the present day Guthrie Street off Chambers Street. Scott's father, also Walter Scott, was an Edinburgh solicitor but his family were originally from the Borders, farming land at Sandyknowes. His mother, Anne Rutherford, was the daughter of John Rutherford - chair of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh in the mid eighteenth century.

Scott suffered from polio in early childhood and the family moved out of the cramped conditions in College Wynd to one of the new houses being built in the rapidly growing south side of the city. Their house in George Square, a row of Georgian terraces, now forms the better part of the campus of the University of Edinburgh.

Scott left school at the age of twelve and immediately started his studies at the University in Latin and Moral Philosophy. In 1786 he started work as an apprentice in his father's law firm. When he became bored of study and work he would travel to his grandparent's home in the Borders. They fired his imagination with stories of Borders history, traditions and ballads. These songs and tales provided the basis for his first writing attempts: he was a great collector of folklore and ballads and his literary success was founded on heroic representations of Scotland's past.

Politically he was right-wing, viewing the French Revolution as a threat to civilisation. In 1794 he was involved in a fracas with Irish students at the theatre who had booed the national anthem. He was a staunch supporter of the Union between England and Scotland.

In 1797 Scott married Charlotte Charpentier, one of a family of French immigrants. They set up home at 39 North Castle Street in the New Town. Five years later Scott's first work was published, a collection of Border ballads and stories, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and his literary career began in earnest. He started work on The Lay of the Last Minstrel, a monumental and instantly successful work charting the death of oral traditions and the way of life of the great borders families. It was the right poem in the right place at the right time - for the Scot it was an evocation of pride and national identity, to the non-Scot it was an invitation to enter into the romance of this history without actually having to go to the inconvenience of experiencing it.

Scott's reputation as a writer was growing, and when he turned his attention to novel writing, with books such as Waverley, Guy Mannering, Rob Roy, Heart of Midlothian, Ivanhoe etc. he achieved an international recognition which lasts to the present day. However, his fame as a novelist was for some time an anonymous one. He had declined to put his name on the title page of Waverley and continued to deceive everyone until 1827 when he finally owned up to authorship at a dinner held in the Assembly Rooms on George Street in Edinburgh.

In 1825 Scott became bankrupt due to his business relationship with the publishers Constable who had been backing credit with bills and not real money. To Scott's shame 39 North Castle Street along with its furniture had to be sold. He saved his beloved Abbotsford, the mansion he had built in the Borders, but everything else went. His wife died in 1826 and Scott lived in a procession of lodgings in Edinburgh while he worked to pay off his debts. In 1832 he received the news that he was once again financially solvent. At the time he was staying in Naples on a winter holiday but found that his health was rapidly deteriorating. He travelled home to Scotland, arriving in Edinburgh in July. He went immediately to Abbotsford and died there on the 21st September at the age of sixty-one.

Abbotsford is open to the public throughout the year. Visitors to Edinburgh can see, and indeed climb up, the monument built to his memory in East Princes Street Gardens.

Sir Walter Scott's books and poems are widely available. There are thousands of critical works on Scott, but of the most readable are Robin Mayhead's Walter Scott (Cambridge University Press, 1973); and Alan Bold's Essays on Scott.

An interesting read is Trevor Royle's Precipitous City, The Story of Literary Edinburgh (Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh 1980) .

Also look out for the newly published Journals of Sir Walter Scott edited by Eric Sanderson (Canongate, Edinburgh 1998)