A busy Edinburgh lawyer invented the historical novel boom
Sir Walter Scott (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) packed Clerk of Session duties and Selkirkshire shrievalty alongside the Waverley novels that remade European fiction. Tory Edinburgh grandee by day, he smuggled Scotland’s past into bestselling romance without abandoning the court calendar.
He was the ninth child of a Writer to the Signet, and six of his siblings died in infancy. Polio in 1773 left him permanently lame, so he was sent to his grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe beside the ruined Smailholm Tower, where his aunt Jenny taught him to read and filled him with Border speech, tales and legends. Water cures at Bath and Prestonpans followed. An 1820 description notes his high forehead, very blue eyes and one weak ankle; he walked doggedly but moved most freely on horseback.
At Kelso Grammar School he met James and John Ballantyne, later his printers and business partners. He entered the University of Edinburgh at 12 and at 14 began an apprenticeship in his father's office. At one literary salon, aged 15, he met Robert Burns for the only time and was the lone guest able to name the author of a poem under a print; the blind poet Thomas Blacklock introduced him to the Ossian poems. He became an advocate in 1792, lost Williamina Belsches to his friend Sir William Forbes, and joined a volunteer cavalry unit against French invasion in 1797, drilling from 5 in the morning.
Literature grew out of what he called being German-mad in the 1790s. He translated two ballads by Gottfried August Bürger in 1796, then roamed the Borders collecting songs from oral performance. With John Leyden he published the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802: 48 traditional ballads, 26 appearing in print for the first time, though he blended versions in a way he later disowned. Editions of Dryden in 18 volumes and Swift in 19 followed.
Marmion and The Lady of the Lake made his name as a poet before the Waverley novels, which stayed among Europe's most popular fiction for nearly a century. He presided over the Royal Society of Edinburgh from 1820 until his death, and his baronetcy died with his son in 1847.
Source: Walter Scott
