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| He then published a
three-volume set of collected Scottish ballads, The
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. This was the
first sign of his interest in Scottish history from
a literary standpoint. Scott then became an ardent volunteer in the yeomanry and on one of his "raids" he met at Gilsland Spa Margaret Charlotte Charpentier (or Charpenter), daughter of Jean Charpentier of Lyon in France whom he married in 1797. They had five children. In 1799 he was appointed Sheriff-Deputy of the County of Selkirk, based in the Royal Burgh of Selkirk. In his earlier married days, Scott had a decent living from his earnings at the law, his salary as Sheriff-Deputy, his wife's income, some revenue from his writing, and his share of his father's rather meager estate. After Scott had founded a printing press, his poetry, beginning with The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, brought him fame. He published a number of other poems over the next ten years, including the popular The Lady of the Lake, printed in 1810 and set in the Trossachs. Portions of the German translation of this work were later set to music by Franz Schubert. One of these songs, Ellens dritter Gesang, is popularly labeled as "Schubert's Ave Maria". Another work from this period, Marmion, produced some of his most quoted (and most often mis-attributed) lines. Canto VI. Stanza 17 reads:
Yet Clare's sharp
questions must I shun, In 1809 his Tory sympathies led him to become a co-founder of the Quarterly Review, a review journal to which he made several anonymous contributions. When the press became embroiled in pecuniary difficulties, Scott set out, in 1814, to write a cash-cow. The result was Waverley, a novel which did not name its author. It was a tale of the "Forty-Five" Jacobite rising in the Kingdom of Great Britain with its English protagonist Edward Waverley, by his Tory upbringing sympathetic to Jacobitism, becoming enmeshed in events but eventually choosing Hanoverian respectability. The novel met with considerable success. There followed a succession of novels over the next five years, each with a Scottish historical setting. Mindful of his reputation as a poet, he maintained the anonymous habit he had begun with Waverley, always publishing the novels under the name Author of Waverley or attributed as "Tales of..." with no author. Even when it was clear that there would be no harm in coming out into the open he maintained the façade, apparently out of a sense of fun. During this time the nickname The Wizard of the North was popularly applied to the mysterious best-selling writer. His identity as the author of the novels was widely rumored, and in 1815 Scott was given the honor of dining with George, Prince Regent, who wanted to meet "the author of Waverley". In 1819 he broke away from writing about Scotland with Ivanhoe, a historical romance set in 12th-century England. It too was a runaway success and, as he did with his first novel, he unleashed a slew of books along the same lines. Among other things, the book is noteworthy for having a very sympathetic Jewish major character, Rebecca, considered by many critics to be the book's real heroine - relevant to the fact that the book was published at a time when the struggle for the Emancipation of the Jews in England was gathering momentum. |
|
As his fame grew during this
phase of his career, he was granted the title of baronet,
becoming Sir Walter Scott. At this time he organized the visit
of King George IV to Scotland, and when the King visited
Edinburgh in 1822 the spectacular pageantry Scott had concocted
to portray George as a rather tubby reincarnation of Bonnie
Prince Charlie made tartans and kilts fashionable and turned
them into symbols of Scottish national identity.
Scott included little in the way of punctuation in his drafts
which he left to the printers to supply.
Beginning in 1825 he went into dire financial straits again, as
his company nearly collapsed. That he was the author of his
novels became general knowledge at this time as well. Rather
than declare bankruptcy he placed his home, Abbotsford House,
and income into a trust belonging to his creditors, and
proceeded to write his way out of debt. He kept up his
prodigious output of fiction (as well as producing a biography
of Napoléon Bonaparte) until 1831. By then his health was
failing, and he died at Abbotsford in 1832. Though not in the
clear by then, his novels continued to sell, and he made good
his debts from beyond the grave. He was buried in Dryburgh Abbey
where nearby, fittingly, a large statue can be found of William
Wallace—one of Scotland's most romantic historical figures.
Scott was also responsible, through a series of pseudonymous
letters published in the Edinburgh Weekly News in 1826, for
retaining the right of Scottish banks to issue their own
banknotes, which is reflected to this day by his continued
appearance on the front of all notes issued by the Bank of
Scotland.
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