Sir Walter Scott
b. 1771, Edinburgh, Scotland - 
d. 1832, Abbotsford, Scotland 

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Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was born "a sickly child and contracted a lameness that remained with him through life. He chose the profession of law and practiced it with success for a time, but his interests were in literature. He published the first of the 'Waverley' novels anonymously in 1815, but it became known, as others of the series appeared, that he was the author, and his fame was at once established. In 1826 he became associated with a friend in a publishing enterprise in Edinburgh, which failed and he became bankrupted. To liquidate the heavy indebtedness in which this involved him he turned his abilities as a writer to account. Within two years' time, he had paid over to his creditors the sum of nearly $200,000. His strength was overtaxed and in 1830 he had a stroke of paralysis and two years later died at Abbotsford. As a novelist he ranks with the foremost in this field [of writing Historical Fiction]. "Although many of his works are lax and careless in structure, yet if a final test in greatness in the field of novel writing be the power to vitalize character, very few writers can be held to surpass Sir Walter Scott. [From Oxford]"

Scott turned from poetry to prose, and in 1814 published his first novel Waverly, "the beginning of a long and famous series" and "in many ways the birth of the historical novel."  "Over the next few years he produced a stream of titles such as Guy Mannering, The Antiquary, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, Ivanhoe and Redgauntlet. They were written anonymously - appearing variously as 'by the writer of Waverley', and by the fictitious Jedediah Cleishbotham. He seemed to feel that novel writing was not a fit profession for someone in his position but was also a lover of mystery and saw the value of it a a promotional device."

"Scott had been made a baronet in 1818 and was instrumental in organising the successful visit to Scotland of King George IV in 1822, the first reigning monarch to do so since Charles I in 1641. When they met the king is said to have exclaimed 'Sir Walter Scott: the man in Scotland I most wish to see.' The visit created a much improved degree of popularity for the monarchy largely due to Scott's stage-management - for instance the king wore a kilt of Royal Stuart Tartan, a custom which has continued - and it is said that the event drew the Highlands and Lowlands closer together than had previously been the case. Through his work and campaigning Scott gave Scotland back an identity and pride that had been missing since the Union of 1707 - he had researched and rediscovered the Honours of Scotland (The Scottish Crown Jewels) which had lain forgotten in a sealed room in Edinburgh Castle and negotiated the return to the castle of the famous seige gun Mons Meg, which had been taken to the Tower of London many years earlier. He also arranged for the restoration of the peerages forfeited during the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745.

"In 1825 he began to keep a journal - considered by many to be amongst his best work - in which he details his life and work and describes the world in which he moved. His descriptions of Edinburgh capture the city at the height of its renaissance, with the New Town not long built and expanding and filled with some of the finest thinkers of the day."  Financial and personal disaster struck the next year, but Scott resolved to pay off a debt of over £100,000 through his writing. "By the time of his death in 1832 he had paid off £70,000 and the rest was resolved from his copyrights, though the effort had undoubtedly contributed to the failure of his health - he frequently rose at 5am in order to find time for his writing.

"His output in this period was prodigious. As well as his novels he had produced in 1827 a biography of Napoleon in nine volumes, which was praised by Goethe, and in the same year Tales of a Grandfather was published. This was a history of Scotland as told to his young grandson and aimed primarily at children, although it was so well-received that three more versions were produced. At the same time he produced an adult History of Scotland in two volumes which was also highly successful." 

Scott's health began to fail in 1831, and when he died in 1832, "[h]e was buried with great ceremony and national mourning in Dryburgh Abbey."  "Scott's legacy to his country was not just that of a body of great literature that was to be known and loved all over the world. He was also instrumental in giving Scotland back the pride and sense of identity that had been missing since the traumas of the Union and the Jacobite Risings. Without him it is doubtful if the rest of the world would look upon Scotland with quite the same romantic affection, or the Scots look back with quite the same confidence."

Works by Scott

Black Dwarf

Guy Mannering

Ivanhoe

Kenilworth

Old Mortality

Poetical Works

Redgauntlet

Saint Ronan's Well

Two Drovers and Other Stories

Waverley

Works about Scott

"Perhaps one reason for the relatively good health of the historical novel in our time is that the sort of deep conflict to which fiction is typically drawn can be more freely studied in the past, even the quite recent past, than in the present. For, whatever we hear to the contrary, we live in an age of stern orthodoxies: true, our academies and our news media permit and encourage (indeed exploit) conflicting views, but only on approved topics and only along predictable lines. And, despite our rhapsodic millenarianism (based mostly on the microchip and the internet), it has been quite a long time since anything has changed in a really profound (as distinct from influential) way. Is this why so many of our most talented novelists seem to find it easier to understand our age by looking back thirty or fifty or a hundred years than by looking directly at the world around them? Are we really in an endless loop nowadays rather than rocketing down the information highway toward an empowered future? Is our postmodern malaise the result of living not in an age of rapid and violent transition but in an age close to Matthew Arnold's formula the old world dead and the new powerless to be born?"

According to Davenport, "[t]his is what a good historical novelist does: he sees the present by looking at the past (and vice-versa). And of course he is as likely to see revealing differences as he is to see parallels."  In "the best historical novels, the present and the past inform each other . . . , thus affording the contemporary world a vision of itself and conferring on the fictional past the reality--or surreality--of present-day experience."  "[A] genuine historical novel" generates a "sense of identity between past and present." 

The best historical novelists, like Tolstoy, are able "to write convincingly on a panoramic scale and then turn with equal authority to the idiosyncratic inner life of the individual" (Caroline Cordon cited in Davenport).  For example, "historical accuracy and fictional authenticity" would coalesce in characterization of both those "taken from actual history" and the fictionalized "'decent and average.'" And perhaps "the natural subject of the historical novel" is "a local event with universal implications"--and "the only way to the universal is through the local--what the writer knows intimately...."

"Sir Walter Scott . . . has used those fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind them in a manner which may well excite their envy," Macaulay observed in 1828, "But a truly great historian would reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated."[1] Scott's novel Redgauntlet, published in 1824, anticipates this objection to his fiction as a usurpation of material properly exhibited by historians. Redgauntlet celebrates narrative but foregrounds problems of historical composition, from the potential unreliability of sources to the subjectivity inherent in their interpretation; these issues alone make Redgauntlet particularly pertinent in the early nineteenth century, when historiography as a discipline was becoming increasingly self-conscious. But the elaborate mixture of fact and fancy in Redgauntlet, itself the story of an event that never took place, complicates its critique of historiography by insistently worrying the distinctions between historical and fictional narratives on which arguments like Macaulay's depend. Unlike Macaulay, Scott does not claim that history and fiction should be mutually exclusive but that, at the level of narrative, this distinction is impossible to sustain--and that even at the level of reference any representation of the past may benefit from its dissolution. Refusing a teleological or deterministic philosophy of history, Redgauntlet presents a complex and heterogeneous vision of the past, not as the triumphant linear progression towards the present so dear to Whig historians, but as the interspersion and collision of disparate desires and ambitions.[2] Some of these emerge as the constituent events of 'what actually happened,' but at the inevitable expense of alternative possibilities which, though equally real, are never realized. In the novel, a lost or aborted desire plays itself out in a project at once historical and imaginative, and in the process Redgauntlet proposes a special role for fiction in historical understanding, a move with implications Macaulay's defensiveness begins to foreshadow.[3]

"In his essay 'Narrative Form as Cognitive Instrument,' Louis Mink proposes that 'narrative is the form in which we make comprehensible the many successive interrelationships that are comprised by a career.' From his perspective, narrative is not a limiting and limited form, as some contemporary discourse suggests; rather, it stands as 'a primary and irreducible form of human comprehension.' [4] Throughout, Redgauntlet explores and appreciates this power of narrative to explain and clarify the mass of details, episodes, and relationships that make up human lives. For Scott's characters, narrative is not artifice or bondage but a liberating force which helps them figure out (in both senses) their experience."

Maitzen draws parallels between George Eliot and Walter Scott, citing this famous passage from Eliot's  Middlemarch:

Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel . . . will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.[15]

". . . Scott argues against effacing the narrator's participation in the form of his own narrative. The imaginative acts of authorship that link and arrange the miscellanea of the past into a story are an essential aspect of the historian's operations, something only the spectral 'bad' historicist would deny or pretend to work without. . . . The activity of a historical narrator may indeed resemble in innumerable ways the work of a novelist, but the fact remains that a historian can only hypothesize connections or relationships between events recorded as having taken place, while a novelist can, as Scott did in Redgauntlet, invent the events themselves. Historiography in Redgauntlet cannot be confidently distinguished from other forms of narrative explanation, including fiction. But, unlike many of the philosophers of history whose work has flourished in the late twentieth century, Scott does not then turn to analyzing historical writing as if it is only a special kind of story-telling, treating the difference between history and fiction as a 'common sense'--and hence analytically or thematically uninteresting--distinction.[18] Instead, Redgauntlet focuses on that difference, examining its implications for the role of history in fiction and, more provocatively, of fiction in historiography.

"Scott illustrates a thesis in which much contemporary theory is heavily invested: by narrating possibilities as well as actualities, a historian can avoid privileging the winners, the dominant groups, and restore to those who conventionally appear only on the margins their full importance and presence in the historical moment. "We want historians," says Foucault, "to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events."[23] It seems true, if unexpected, that in Redgauntlet Scott participates in at least one of the goals of New Historicism: the novel "disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself."[24] Darsie's and Redgauntlet's worlds are at once simultaneous and incompatible, and their juxtaposition reveals the heterogeneity, the fragmentation, that each individual narrative conceals.[25]

"Scott also anticipates Foucauldian historicism in his refusal to privilege origins. By writing about an ending that is inseparable from a beginning--the fading of the Jacobite spirit and the confirmation of the Hanoverian dynasty--he accedes to Foucault's demand for a genealogy that will "never neglect as inaccessible the vicissitudes of history" but rather "cultivate[s] the details and accidents that accompany every beginning."[26] One crucial effect of this tactic is, again, to complicate a deterministic historiographical model by highlighting the "dissension of other things" that characterizes every historical moment.[27] Its other, equally important, effect is that, in pursuit of this history of an ending, Scott's rhetoric is one of mourning, most noticeably in the poignancy imbuing the failure of Redgauntlet's rebellion. Redgauntlet narrates a loss, the fulfillment of one set of historical possibilities at the expense of the others."