The long road to Waverley: Walter Scott and the birth of the novel

I will conclude this short trilogy on Tuesday with a look at all the things which Scott did other than literature, but today I want to concentrate on his literary career which transformed the way people looked at Scotland as well as making the reading and writing of novels a respectable fashion, so much so that Scott is often described as the father of the historical novel.

Yet it was as a poet that Scott first made his name. As we saw last Tuesday, he was a scholar in Edinburgh when he met and was hugely impressed by Robert Burns.

Burns was certainly one of his chief influences, not least because Scott never feared to use Scots words and expressions in his works whenever he felt justified in doing so.

As we shall see on Tuesday, Scott became a Tory and a Unionist, but he never abandoned the culture, language and customs of his native land, and indeed massively helped to revive interest in Scotland and its history.

First of all he had to make a living, however, and he became a successful lawyer, following in his father’s footsteps. His legal career would take up much of his teens and twenties before he finally was able to devote time to poetry.

As I always say, I will leave the literary criticism to Alan Riach and I urge you to read his verdict on Scott which you can see online on The National’s website. I will confine myself to the facts and figures of Scott’s literary output.

By the 1790s, Scott began to be influenced by the works of European poets, particularly those of Germany – he would write in 1827 that he was once “German mad”, and in the literary circles in which he began to move in Edinburgh, German poetry was all the rage.

Thus it was that Scott’s first published works, achieved by the age of 25, were The Chase and William and Helen, translations of two ballads by the German GA Burger. A translation of Johan nWolfgang von Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen followed in 1799.

By then, Scott was already engaged in the collecting and editing of ballads from the Scottish Borders, a pursuit that was very much in the fashion of Romanticism that was becoming so prevalent across Europe. It was also an activity that Burns had undertaken for much of the latter part of his life before he died in 1796, the year that Scott came up with the idea of a book of Borders ballads, and again I think this collecting of words across the Borders shows the influence of Burns. It would lead to Scott’s first major success.

His book Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border: Consisting of Historical and Romantic Ballads, Collected in the Southern Counties of Scotland was published in 1802 by his old school friend James Ballantyne, who had previously published three original Scots ballads by Scott in other anthologies.

Minstrelsy was a huge success. The first edition contained 29 historical pieces and 24 romantic ballads, most of them edited or written by Scott. It sold so well that Ballantyne was able to set up in business as a printer, helped by a loan from Scott whose works were exclusively printed by Ballantyne’s presses from then on. Minstrelsy eventually ran to five volumes and contains a quarter of all known Scottish ballads. It is still in print today.

By the third edition, Scott was incorporating his own work and that of other poets. One of his ballads kept expanding and eventually became Scott’s first narrative poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, published on January 12, 1805.

This story of a Borders feud and supernatural intrusions was an immediate success and sold 27,000 copies within a few years – staggering figures for a poetic work.

Marmion followed in 1808, with Young Lochinvar coming out of the west. Again a massive public success, though the critics argued about it. Scott didn’t care, not least because the publisher Archibald Constable bought the copyright for the colossal sum of 1000 guineas, and was rewarded with huge sales.

In 1810, Scott’s third long narrative poem The Lady of the Lake was published to incredible public and critical acclaim. Its setting made Loch Katrine and the Trossachs a tourist attraction – the steamship Sir Walter Scott cruises on the Loch to this day. Two more long poems, Rokeby and The Lord of the Isles, completed his poetic works.

He had been asked by a big fan, the Prince Regent, to become poet laureate, but Scott was already at work on what would become his first novel, Waverley, started in 1805 then laid aside before it was published anonymously in 1814. He had seen the success of his friend Jane Porter with her book The Scottish Chiefs in 1810 and no doubt this influenced his decision to write novels.

They poured from his pen, designated as “by the author of Waverley” – all the great classics and, it must be said, a few potboilers. In order of publication these works included Guy Mannering, The Tale of Old Mortality, Rob Roy, The Heart of Midlothian, The Bride of Lammermoor, Ivanhoe – his first book wholly set in England – Kenilworth, Quentin Durward, St Ronan’s Well, The Fair Maid of Perth, and those are just the ones in my personal library.

In a relatively short space of time, Scott established the historical novel as a prestigious pursuit for reading and writing. Yet though their authorship was an open secret in Edinburgh, it was only in 1827 at a public dinner that he admitted openly that he was the novelist.