The letters of Sir Walter Scott, the novelist and poet, range in date from September 1788, when he was aged 17, to June 1832, a few weeks before his death. [1] [nb 1] About 7000 letters from Scott are known, and about 6500 letters addressed to him. The major repository of both is the National Library of Scotland. H. J. C. Grierson's The Letters of Sir Walter Scott (1932–1937), though it includes only about 3500, remains the standard edition.
Scott's letters do not read like literary documents intended one day to be published, but like spontaneous and unstudied expressions of Scott's thoughts; [4] writing to his future wife Scott himself admitted that "I never read my letters a second time". [5] His intention seems to have been simply to entertain his correspondent, and the result can sometimes be genuinely witty. [6] [7] He does not write about his novels or his business concerns, since he had chosen to keep his involvement in both confidential, nor on the whole about his private feelings, [4] though letters to his closest friends can sometimes be revelatory of his inner life, disclosing sharply contrasting aspects of his personality depending on the character of his correspondent. Even then they can be misleading as autobiographical documents, for as Scott himself wrote, "letters...exhibit the writers less as they really are, than as they desire their friends should believe them to be." [8]
Scott had a wide range of correspondents, reflecting his diverse literary and business interests and his close family life. They include writers, artists, scientists, and the great political figures of his day. [9] Figures to whom he wrote most often include his wife, Margaret Charlotte Scott; his sons Walter and Charles Scott; his son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart; his sister-in-law Elizabeth McCulloch Scott; his steward William Laidlaw; his clan chief Charles Scott, Duke of Buccleuch; society figures Anne Hamilton, Marchioness of Abercorn and Henry James Montagu-Scott, Lord Montagu; the politicians John Wilson Croker and J. B. S. Morritt; the lawyers Charles Erskine, John Gibson, John Richardson, and James Skene; the printer James Ballantyne; the publishers John Ballantyne, Robert Cadell, Archibald Constable, and John Murray; the poets Joanna Baillie, George Ellis, and Margaret Douglas-Maclean-Clephane, Marchioness of Northampton; the novelist Maria Edgeworth; the antiquaries Richard Heber, David Laing, and Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe; and the actor Daniel Terry. [10]
Some 7000 letters from Scott are known to survive, widely scattered across the world. [9] [11] About half of them are now in the National Library of Scotland; [12] other institutions with large holdings include National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh University Library, the Beinecke Library, the Fales Library, and the Morgan Library & Museum. Over 450 letters are known to be in private hands. [13] [1]
There are also over 6500 surviving letters addressed to Scott. About 6000 of them were collected together by Scott himself and bound into letter-books; these were kept at Abbotsford by his descendants until 1921, when they were sold by auction to the novelist Hugh Walpole. [14] [9] Walpole bequeathed them to the National Library of Scotland, where the 46 volumes, commonly known as the Walpole collection, are officially designated NLS MSS 3874–3919. [15]
The seven-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart (1837–1838), by J. G. Lockhart, includes a large number of Scott's letters. More appeared in various publications later in the 19th century, in particular David Douglas's attractive two-volume Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott (1894), though Douglas's editorial practices, like Lockhart's, do not meet modern standards. Selections from the Walpole collection of letters received by Scott were published in Wilfred Partington's The Private Letter-Books of Sir Walter Scott (1930) and Sir Walter Scott's Post-Bag (1932). From 1932 to 1937 H. J. C. Grierson produced his twelve-volume Letters of Sir Walter Scott, which put some 3500 letters into print, about half the number now known to exist [16] . This edition has never been superseded, [9] and is now available online. [17] There is also a comprehensive online catalogue of all Scott's outgoing and incoming letters, which is published by the National Library of Scotland. [9]
Abbotsford is a historic country house in the Scottish Borders, near Galashiels, on the south bank of the River Tweed. Now open to the public, it was built as the residence of historical novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott between 1817 and 1825. It is a Category A Listed Building and the estate is listed in the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland.
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish novelist, poet and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels Ivanhoe (1819), Rob Roy (1817), Waverley (1814), Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), along with the narrative poems Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810). He had a major impact on European and American literature.
John Gibson Lockhart was a Scottish writer and editor. He is best known as the author of the seminal, and much-admired, seven-volume biography of his father-in-law Sir Walter Scott: Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. He produced four novels in the early 1820s including Adam Blair and Reginald Dalton.
Archibald David Constable was a Scottish publisher, bookseller and stationer.
Susan Edmonstone Ferrier was a Scottish novelist. Her novels, giving vivid accounts of Scottish life and presenting sharp views on women's education, remained popular throughout the 19th century.
Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field is a historical romance in verse of 16th-century Scotland and England by Sir Walter Scott, published in 1808. Consisting of six cantos, each with an introductory epistle, and copious antiquarian notes, it concludes with the Battle of Flodden in 1513.
Edie Ochiltree is a character in Sir Walter Scott's 1816 novel The Antiquary, a licensed beggar of the legally protected class known as Blue-gowns or bedesmen, who follows a regular beat around the fictional Scottish town of Fairport. Scott based his character on Andrew Gemmels, a real beggar he had known in his childhood. Along with Jonathan Oldbuck, the novel's title-character, Ochiltree is widely seen as one of Scott's finest creations.
Jonathan Oldbuck is the leading character in Sir Walter Scott's 1816 novel The Antiquary. In accordance with Scottish custom he is often addressed by the name of his house, Monkbarns. He is devoted to the study and collection of old coins, books and archaeological relics, and has a marked tendency to misogyny due to disappointment in an early love affair. His characteristics have been traced back to several men known to Scott, and to the author himself, an enthusiastic antiquary. Many critics have considered him one of Scott's finest creations.
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is an anthology of Border ballads, together with some from north-east Scotland and a few modern literary ballads, edited by Walter Scott. It was first published by Archibald Constable in Edinburgh in 1802, but was expanded in several later editions, reaching its final state in 1830, two years before Scott's death. It includes many of the most famous Scottish ballads, such as Sir Patrick Spens, The Young Tamlane, The Twa Corbies, The Douglas Tragedy, Clerk Saunders, Kempion, The Wife of Usher's Well, The Cruel Sister, The Dæmon Lover, and Thomas the Rhymer. Scott enlisted the help of several collaborators, notably John Leyden, and found his ballads both by field research of his own and by consulting the manuscript collections of others. Controversially, in the editing of his texts he preferred literary quality over scholarly rigour, but Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border nevertheless attracted high praise from the first. It was influential both in Britain and on the Continent, and helped to decide the course of Scott's later career as a poet and novelist. In recent years it has been called "the most exciting collection of ballads ever to appear."
Sir Adam Ferguson (1770–1854) was deputy keeper of the regalia in Scotland.
The Journal of Sir Walter Scott is a diary which the novelist and poet Walter Scott kept between 1825 and 1832. It records the financial disaster which overtook him at the beginning of 1826, and the efforts he made over the next seven years to pay off his debts by writing bestselling books. Since its first complete publication in 1890 it has attracted high praise, being considered by many critics one of the finest diaries in the language.
The Siege of Malta is a historical novel by Walter Scott written from 1831 to 1832 and first published posthumously in 2008. It tells the story of events surrounding the Great Siege of Malta by the Ottoman Turks in 1565.
Rokeby (1813) is a narrative poem in six cantos with voluminous antiquarian notes by Walter Scott. It is set in Teesdale during the English Civil War.
The Writers’ Museum, housed in Lady Stair's House at the Lawnmarket on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, presents the lives of three of the foremost Scottish writers: Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Run by the City of Edinburgh Council, the collection includes portraits, works and personal objects. Beside the museum lies the Makars' Court, the country's emerging national literary monument.
The Field of Waterloo is a poem by Walter Scott, written and published in 1815. It is in iambic tetrameters and trimeters with a few Spenserian stanzas at the end. The work moves from a depiction of the site of the battle, with farm life renewing in the autumn, to an account of the conflict, highlighting Napoleon and Wellington, and a roll-call of prominent British casualties.
“Glenfinlas; or, Lord Ronald's Coronach” by Walter Scott, written in 1798 and first published in 1800, was, as Scott remembered it, his first original poem as opposed to translations from the German. A short narrative of 264 lines, it tells a supernatural story based on a Highland legend. Though highly appreciated by many 19th century readers and critics it is now overshadowed by his later and longer poems.
The Hon. Mary Monica Maxwell-Scott was a Scottish author of historical novels and non-fiction and the great-granddaughter of the novelist Walter Scott.
Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Addressed to J. G. Lockhart, Esq. (1830) was a study of witchcraft and the supernatural by Sir Walter Scott. A lifelong student of folklore, Scott was able to draw on a wide-ranging collection of primary and secondary sources. His book found many readers throughout the 19th century, and exercised a significant influence in promoting the Victorian vogue for Gothic and ghostly fiction. Though on first publication it met with mixed reviews, it is now recognised as a pioneering work of scientific anthropology, treating of its subject in an acute and analytical way which prefigures later scholarship on the subject, as well as presenting a highly readable collection of supernatural anecdotes.
Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (1814), or to give its full title Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, from the Earlier Teutonic and Scandinavian Romances; Being an Abstract of the Book of Heroes, and Nibelungen Lay; with Translations of Metrical Tales, from the Old German, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic Languages; with Notes and Dissertations, was a pioneering work of comparative literature which provided translations and abstracts of various works written in medieval Germany and Scandinavia. Its three authors were Henry Weber, who précised the Nibelungenlied and Heldenbuch; Robert Jamieson, who translated Danish and other ballads, stressing their close connection with Scottish ballads; and Walter Scott, who provided an abstract of Eyrbyggja saga. It significantly extended British readers' access to early Germanic literature.
Walter Scott's "Memoirs", first published as "Memoir of the Early Life of Sir Walter Scott, Written by Himself" and also known as the Ashestiel fragment, is a short autobiographical work describing the author's ancestry, parentage, and life up to the age of 22. It is the most important source of information we have on Scott's early life. It was mainly written between 1808 and 1811, then revised and completed in 1826, and first published posthumously in 1837 as Chapter 1 of J. G. Lockhart's multi-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. It was re-edited in 1981 by David Hewitt.
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