Walter Scott

Early life

Walter Scott was born on 15 August 1771 in a third-floor apartment on College Wynd in the Old Town, Edinburgh, a narrow alleyway leading from the Cowgate to the gates of the old University of Edinburgh. He was the ninth child (of which six died in infancy) of Walter Scott Senior (1729 – 1799), who was a member of a cadet branch of the Clan Scott and a Writer to the Signet. His mother was Anne Rutherford, who was a sister of Daniel Rutherford, who was a descendant both of the Clan Swinton and of the Scottish Haliburton family (whose prominent English members were to shorten their surname to 'Burton'). His maternal ancestry granted Scott the hereditary right of burial in Dryburgh Abbey.

Scott was, through his mother's Haliburton ancestry, a cousin of the eminent London property-developer James Burton, who had shortened his surname to 'Burton', and of his son, the architect Decimus Burton. Scott became a member of the London Clarence Club, of which the Burtons were members.

A childhood bout of polio in 1773 left Scott lame, a condition that would greatly affect his life and writing.

To improve his lameness, he was sent in 1773 to live in the rural Scottish Borders, at his paternal grandparents' farm at Sandyknowe, by the ruin of Smailholm Tower, the earlier family home. There, he was taught to read by his aunt Jenny Scott, and learned from her the speech patterns and many of the tales and legends that later marked much of his work. In January 1775, he returned to Edinburgh, and that summer with his aunt Jenny took spa treatment at Bath in Somerset, southern England, where they lived at 6 South Parade. In the winter of 1776, he went back to Sandyknowe, with another attempt at a water cure at Prestonpans the following summer.

In 1778, Scott returned to Edinburgh for private education to prepare him for school. He joined his family in their new house, one of the first to be built in George Square. In October 1779, he began at the Royal High School in Edinburgh (in High School Yards). He was by then able to walk and explore the city and the surrounding countryside. His reading included chivalric romances, poems, history, and travel books. He was given private tuition by James Mitchell in arithmetic and writing, and learned from him the history of the Church of Scotland with emphasis on the Covenanters.

Appearance

As a result of his early polio infection, Scott had a pronounced limp. He was described in 1820 as "tall, well formed (except for one ankle and foot which made him walk lamely), neither fat nor thin, with forehead very high, nose short, upper lip long and face rather fleshy, complexion fresh and clear, eyes very blue, shrewd and penetrating, with hair now silvery white". Although a determined walker, he experienced greater freedom of movement on horseback.

Student

Scott began studying classics at the University of Edinburgh in November 1783, at the age of 12, a year or so younger than most fellow students. In March 1786, aged 14, he began an apprenticeship in his father's office to become a Writer to the Signet. At school and university, Scott befriended Adam Ferguson, whose father, Professor Adam Ferguson, hosted literary salons. Scott met the blind poet Thomas Blacklock, who lent him books and introduced him to the Ossian cycle of poems by James Macpherson. During the winter of 1786–1787, the 15-year-old Scott met the Scots poet Robert Burns at one of these salons, their only meeting. When Burns noticed a print illustrating the poem "The Justice of the Peace" and asked who had written it, Scott alone named the author as John Langhorne and was thanked by Burns. Scott describes the event in his memoirs, where he whispers the answer to his friend Adam, who tells Burns. Another version of the event appears in Literary Beginnings.

When it was decided he would become a lawyer, he returned to the university to study law, first taking classes in moral philosophy under Dugald Stewart and universal history under Alexander Fraser Tytler in 1789–1790. During this second university spell, Scott became prominent in student intellectual activities: he co-founded the Literary Society in 1789 and was elected to the Speculative Society the following year, becoming librarian and secretary-treasurer a year after.

After completing his law studies, Scott took up law in Edinburgh. He made his first visit as a lawyer's clerk to the Scottish Highlands, directing an eviction. He was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1792. He had an unsuccessful love suit with Williamina Belsches of Fettercairn, who married Scott's friend, Sir William Forbes, 7th Baronet. In February 1797, the threat of a French invasion persuaded Scott and many of his friends to join the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, where he served into the early 1800s, and was appointed quartermaster and secretary. The daily drill practices that year, starting at 5 am, indicate the determination with which the role was undertaken.

Literary career, marriage and family

Scott was prompted to take up a literary career by enthusiasm in Edinburgh in the 1790s for modern German literature. Recalling the period in 1827, Scott said he "was German-mad." In 1796, he produced English versions of two poems by Gottfried August Bürger, Der wilde Jäger and Lenore, published as The Chase, and William and Helen. Scott responded to the German interest at the time in national identity, folk culture, and medieval literature, which linked with his own developing passion for traditional balladry. A favourite book since childhood was Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. During the 1790s, he would search in manuscript collections and on Border "raids" for ballads from oral performance. With help from John Leyden, he produced a two-volume Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802, containing 48 traditional ballads and two imitations apiece by Leyden and himself. Of the 48 traditionals, 26 were published for the first time. An enlarged edition appeared in three volumes the following year. With many of the ballads, Scott fused different versions into more coherent texts, a practice he later repudiated. The Minstrelsy was the first and most important of a series of editorial projects over the next two decades, including the medieval romance Sir Tristrem (which Scott attributed to Thomas the Rhymer) in 1804, the works of John Dryden (18 vols, 1808), and the works of Jonathan Swift (19 vols, 1814).

On a trip to the English Lake District with old college friends, he met Charlotte Charpentier (Anglicised to "Carpenter"), a daughter of Jean Charpentier of Lyon in France and a ward of Lord Downshire in Cumberland, an Anglican. After three weeks' courtship, Scott proposed and they were married on Christmas Eve 1797 in St Mary's Church, Carlisle (now the nave of Carlisle Cathedral). After renting a house in Edinburgh's George Street, they moved to nearby South Castle Street. Their eldest child, Sophia, was born in 1799, and later married John Gibson Lockhart. Four of their five children survived Scott himself. His eldest son, Sir Walter Scott, 2nd Baronet (1801–1847), inherited his father's estates and possessions: on 3 February 1825 he married Jane Jobson, only daughter of William Jobson of Lochore (died 1822) by his wife Rachel Stuart (died 1863), heiress of Lochore and a niece of Lady Margaret Ferguson. In 1799, Scott was appointed Sheriff of Selkirk, based at the courthouse in the Royal Burgh of Selkirk. In his early married days, Scott earned a decent living from his work as a lawyer, his salary as Sheriff-Depute, his wife's income, some revenue from his writing, and his share of his father's modest estate.

The poet

Between 1805 and 1817 Scott produced five long, six-canto narrative poems, four shorter independently published poems, and many small metrical pieces. Scott was by far the most popular poet of the time until Lord Byron published the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812 and followed them up with his exotic oriental verse narratives.

The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), in medieval romance form, grew out of Scott's plan to include a long original poem of his own in the second edition of the Minstrelsy: it was to be "a sort of Romance of Border Chivalry & inchantment". He owed the distinctive irregular accent in four-beat metre to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Christabel, which he had heard recited by John Stoddart. (It was not to be published until 1816.) Scott was able to draw on his unrivalled familiarity with Border history and legend acquired from oral and written sources beginning in his childhood to present an energetic and highly coloured picture of 16th-century Scotland, which both captivated the general public and with its voluminous notes also addressed itself to the antiquarian student. The poem has a strong moral theme, as human pride is placed in the context of the last judgment with the introduction of a version of the "Dies irae" at the end. The work was an immediate success with almost all the reviewers and with readers in general, going through five editions in one year. The most celebrated lines are the ones that open the final stanza:

Three years after The Lay Scott published Marmion (1808) telling a story of corrupt passions leading up as a disastrous climax to the Battle of Flodden in 1513. The main innovation involves prefacing each of the six cantos with an epistle from the author to a friend: William Stewart Rose, The Rev. John Marriot, William Erskine, James Skene, George Ellis, and Richard Heber: the epistles develop themes of moral positives and special delights imparted by art. In an unprecedented move, the publisher Archibald Constable purchased the copyright of the poem for a thousand guineas at the beginning of 1807, when only the first had been completed. Constable's faith was justified by the sales: the three editions published in 1808 sold 8,000 copies. The verse of Marmion is less striking than that of The Lay, with the epistles in iambic tetrameters and the narrative in tetrameters with frequent trimeters. The reception by the reviewers was less favourable than that accorded The Lay: style and plot were both found faulty, the epistles did not link up with the narrative, there was too much antiquarian pedantry, and Marmion's character was immoral. The most familiar lines in the poem sum up one of its main themes: "O what a tangled web we weave,/ When first we practice to deceive"

The novelist

Gothic novel

Scott was influenced by Gothic romance, and had collaborated in 1801 with 'Monk' Lewis on Tales of Wonder.

Historic romances

Scott's career as a novelist was attended with uncertainty. The first few chapters of Waverley were complete by roughly 1805, but the project was abandoned as a result of unfavourable criticism from a friend. Soon after, Scott was asked by the publisher John Murray to posthumously edit and complete the last chapter of an unfinished romance by Joseph Strutt. Published in 1808 and set in 15th-century England, Queenhoo Hall was not a success due to its archaic language and excessive display of antiquarian information. The success of Scott's Highland narrative poem The Lady of the Lake in 1810 seems to have put it into his head to resume the narrative and have his hero Edward Waverley journey to Scotland. Although Waverley was announced for publication at that stage, it was again laid by and not resumed until late 1813, then published in 1814. Only a thousand copies were printed, but the work was an immediate success and 3,000 more were added in two further editions the same year. Waverley turned out to be the first of 27 novels (eight published in pairs), and by the time the sixth of them, Rob Roy, was published, the print run for the first edition had been increased to 10,000 copies, which became the norm.

Given Scott's established status as a poet and the tentative nature of Waverley's emergence, it is not surprising that he followed a common practice in the period and published it anonymously. He continued this until his financial ruin in 1826, the novels mostly appearing as "By the Author of Waverley" (or variants thereof) or as Tales of My Landlord. It is not clear why he chose to do this (no fewer than eleven reasons have been suggested), especially as it was a fairly open secret, but as he himself said, with Shylock, "such was my humour."

Scott was an almost exclusively historical novelist. Only one of his 27 novels – Saint Ronan's Well – has a wholly modern setting. The settings of the others range from 1794 in The Antiquary back to 1096 or 1097, the time of the First Crusade, in Count Robert of Paris. Sixteen take place in Scotland. The first nine, from Waverley (1814) to A Legend of Montrose (1819), all have Scottish locations and 17th- or 18th-century settings. Scott was better versed in his material than anyone: he could draw on oral tradition and a wide range of written sources in his ever-expanding library (many of the books rare and some unique copies). In general it is these pre-1820 novels that have drawn the attention of modern critics – especially: Waverley, with its presentation of the 1745 Jacobites drawn from the Highland clans as obsolete and fanatical idealists; Old Mortality (1816) with its treatment of the 1679 Covenanters as fanatical and often ridiculous (prompting John Galt to produce a contrasting picture in his novel Ringan Gilhaize in 1823); The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818) with its low-born heroine Jeanie Deans making a perilous journey to Richmond in 1737 to secure a promised royal pardon for her sister, falsely accused of infanticide; and the tragic The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), with its stern account of a declined aristocratic family, with Edgar Ravenswood and his fiancée as victims of the wife of an upstart lawyer in a time of political power-struggle before the Act of Union in 1707.

Recovery of the Crown Jewels, baronetcy, and ceremonial pageantry

Prompted by Scott, the Prince Regent (the future George IV) gave Scott and other officials permission in a Royal Warrant dated 28 October 1817 to conduct a search for the Crown Jewels ("Honours of Scotland"). During the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell these had been hidden away, but had subsequently been used to crown Charles II. They were not used to crown subsequent monarchs, but were regularly taken to sittings of Parliament, to represent the absent monarch, until the Act of Union 1707. So the honours were stored in Edinburgh Castle, but their large locked box was not opened for more than 100 years, and stories circulated that they had been "lost" or removed. On 4 February 1818, Scott and a small military team opened the box and "unearthed" the honours from the Crown Room of Edinburgh Castle. On 19 August 1818 through Scott's effort, his friend Adam Ferguson was appointed Deputy Keeper of the "Scottish Regalia". The Scottish patronage system swung into action and after elaborate negotiations the Prince Regent granted Scott the title of baronet: in April 1820 he received the baronetcy in London, becoming Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet.

After George's accession, the city council of Edinburgh invited Scott, at the sovereign's behest, to stage-manage the 1822 visit of George IV to Scotland. In spite of having only three weeks to work with, Scott created a comprehensive pageant, designed not only to impress the King, but in some way to heal the rifts that had destabilised Scots society. Probably fortified by his vivid depiction of the pageant staged for the reception of Queen Elizabeth in Kenilworth he and his "production team" mounted what in modern days would be a public-relations event, with the King dressed in tartan and greeted by his people, many of them also in similar tartan ceremonial dress. This form of dress, proscribed after the Jacobite rising of 1745, became one of the seminal, potent and ubiquitous symbols of Scottish identity.

Financial problems and death

In 1825 a British banking crisis resulted in the collapse of the Ballantyne printing business, of which Scott was the only partner with a financial interest. Its debts of £130,000 (equivalent to £10,500,000 in 2025) caused his very public ruin. Rather than declare himself bankrupt or accept any financial support from his many supporters and admirers (including the King himself), he placed his house and income in a trust belonging to his creditors and set out to write his way out of debt. To add to his burdens, his wife Charlotte died in 1826.

Despite these events or because of them, Scott kept up his prodigious output. Between 1826 and 1832 he produced six novels, two short stories and two plays, eleven works or volumes of non-fiction, and a journal, along with several unfinished works. The non-fiction included The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte in 1827, two volumes of the History of Scotland in 1829 and 1830, and four instalments of the series entitled Tales of a Grandfather – Being Stories Taken From Scottish History, written one per year over the period 1828–1831, among several others. Finally, Scott had recently been inspired by the diaries of Samuel Pepys and Lord Byron, and he began keeping a journal over the period, which was published in 1890 as The Journal of Sir Walter Scott.

By then Scott's health was failing, and on 29 October 1831, in a vain search for improvement, he set off on a voyage to Malta and Naples aboard HMS Barham, a frigate put at his disposal by the Admiralty. He was welcomed and celebrated wherever he went. On his journey home he boarded the steamboat Prins Frederik going from Cologne to Rotterdam. While on board he had a final stroke near Emmerich. After local treatment, a steamboat took him to the steamship Batavier, which left for England on 12 June. By coincidence, the writer Mary Martha Sherwood was also on board. She would later write about this encounter. After he was landed in England, Scott was transported back to die at Abbotsford on 21 September 1832. He was 61.

Scott was buried in Dryburgh Abbey, where his wife had earlier been interred. Lady Scott had been buried as an Episcopalian; at Scott's own funeral, three ministers of the Church of Scotland officiated at Abbotsford and the service at Dryburgh was conducted by an Episcopal clergyman.

Although Scott died owing money, his novels continued to sell, and the debts encumbering his estate were discharged shortly after his death.

Religion

Scott was raised as a Presbyterian in the Church of Scotland. He was ordained as an elder in Duddingston Kirk in 1806, and sat in the General Assembly for a time as representative elder of the burgh of Selkirk. In adult life he also adhered to the Scottish Episcopal Church: he seldom attended church but read the Book of Common Prayer services in family worship.

Scott was one of the last individuals cursed by the Muggletonian movement on account of his reviling Muggletonianism.

Freemasonry

Scott's father was a Freemason, being a member of Lodge St David, No. 36 (Edinburgh), and Scott also became a Freemason in his father's Lodge in 1801, albeit only after the death of his father.

Abbotsford House

When Scott was a boy, he sometimes travelled with his father from Selkirk to Melrose, where some of his novels are set. At a certain spot, the old gentleman would stop the carriage and take his son to a stone on the site of the Battle of Melrose (1526).

During the summers from 1804, Scott made his home at the large house of Ashestiel, on the south bank of the River Tweed, 6 miles (9.7 km) north of Selkirk. When his lease on this property expired in 1811, he bought Cartley Hole Farm, downstream on the Tweed nearer Melrose. The farm had the nickname of "Clarty Hole", and Scott renamed it "Abbotsford" after a neighbouring ford used by the monks of Melrose Abbey. Following a modest enlargement of the original farmhouse in 1811–12, massive expansions took place in 1816–19 and 1822–24. Scott described the resulting building as 'a sort of romance in Architecture' and 'a kind of Conundrum Castle to be sure'. With his architects William Atkinson and Edward Blore Scott was a pioneer of the Scottish Baronial style of architecture, and Abbotsford is festooned with turrets and stepped gabling. Through windows enriched with the insignia of heraldry the sun shone on suits of armour, trophies of the chase, a library of more than 9,000 volumes, fine furniture, and still finer pictures. Panelling of oak and cedar and carved ceilings relieved by coats of arms in their correct colours added to the beauty of the house.

It is estimated that the building cost Scott more than £25,000 (equivalent to £2,000,000 in 2025). More land was purchased until Scott owned nearly 1,000 acres (4.0 km2). In 1817 as part of the land purchases Scott bought the nearby mansion-house of Toftfield for his friend Adam Ferguson to live in along with his brothers and sisters and on which, at the ladies' request, he bestowed the name of Huntlyburn. Ferguson commissioned Sir David Wilkie to paint the Scott family resulting in the painting The Abbotsford Family in which Scott is seated with his family represented as a group of country folk. Ferguson is standing to the right with the feather in his cap and Thomas Scott, Scott's Uncle, is behind. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818.

Abbotsford later gave its name to the Abbotsford Club, founded in 1834 in memory of Sir Walter Scott.

Reputation

Later assessment

Although he continued to be extremely popular and widely read, both at home and abroad, Scott's critical reputation declined in the last half of the 19th century as serious writers turned from romanticism to realism, and Scott began to be regarded as an author suitable for children. This trend accelerated in the 20th century. For example, in his classic study Aspects of the Novel (1927), E. M. Forster harshly criticized Scott's clumsy and slapdash writing style, "flat" characters, and thin plots. In contrast, the novels of Scott's contemporary Jane Austen, once appreciated only by a discerning few (including, as it happened, Scott himself) rose steadily in critical esteem, though Austen, as a female writer, was still faulted for her narrow ("feminine") choice of subject matter, which, unlike Scott, avoided the grand historical themes traditionally viewed as masculine.

Nevertheless, Scott's importance as an innovator continued to be recognised. He was acclaimed as the inventor of the genre of the modern historical novel (which others trace to Jane Porter, whose work in the genre predates Scott's) and the inspiration for enormous numbers of imitators and genre writers both in Britain and on the European continent. In the cultural sphere, Scott's Waverley novels played a significant part in the movement (begun with James Macpherson's Ossian cycle) in rehabilitating the public perception of the Scottish Highlands and its culture, which had formerly been viewed by the southern mind as a barbaric breeding ground of hill bandits, religious fanaticism, and Jacobite risings.

Scott served as chairman of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was also a member of the Royal Celtic Society. His own contribution to the reinvention of Scottish culture was enormous, even though his re-creations of the customs of the Highlands were fanciful at times. Through the medium of Scott's novels, the violent religious and political conflicts of the country's recent past could be seen as belonging to history—which Scott defined, as the subtitle of Waverley ("'Tis Sixty Years Since") indicates, as something that happened at least 60 years earlier. His advocacy of objectivity and moderation and his strong repudiation of political violence on either side also had a strong, though unspoken, contemporary resonance in an era when many conservative English speakers lived in mortal fear of a revolution in the French style on British soil. Scott's orchestration of King George IV's visit to Scotland, in 1822, was a pivotal event intended to inspire a view of his home country that accentuated the positive aspects of the past while allowing the age of quasi-medieval blood-letting to be put to rest, while envisioning a more useful, peaceful future.

Memorials and commemoration

During his lifetime, Scott's portrait was painted by Sir Edwin Landseer and his fellow-Scots Sir Henry Raeburn and James Eckford Lauder, and in 1824 by the American painter Charles Robert Leslie, later engraved by M I Danforth in 1829. After Watts Souvenir of 1829 was published Close friends and family said "That it was the best engraving that had yet appeared of the likeness of the author of Waverley".

Post Scott's life, 1833, W J Thompson painted a miniature for a gold memorial locket shown in William John Thompson.

In Edinburgh, the 61.1-metre-tall Victorian Gothic spire of the Scott Monument was designed by George Meikle Kemp. It was completed in 1844, 12 years after Scott's death, and dominates the south side of Princes Street. Scott is also commemorated on a stone slab in Makars' Court, outside The Writers' Museum, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh, along with other prominent Scottish writers; quotes from his work are also visible on the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament building in Holyrood. There is a tower dedicated to his memory on Corstorphine Hill in the west of the city and Edinburgh's Waverley railway station, opened in 1854, takes its name from his first novel.

In Glasgow, Walter Scott's Monument dominates the centre of George Square, the main public square in the city. Designed by David Rhind in 1838, the monument features a large column topped by a statue of Scott. There is a statue of Scott in Central Park in New York City.

In 1837 his son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart published his nine-volume Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, one of the two most influential literary biographies of the decade along with Thomas Moore's Life of Lord Byron.

Numerous Masonic Lodges have been named after Scott and his novels. For example: Lodge Sir Walter Scott, No. 859 (Perth, Australia) and Lodge Waverley, No. 597, (Edinburgh, Scotland).

The annual Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction was created in 2010 by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, whose ancestors were closely linked to Sir Walter Scott. At £25,000, it is one of the largest prizes in British literature. The award has been presented at Scott's historic home, Abbotsford House.

Influence

Walter Scott had an immense impact throughout Europe. "His historical fiction ... created for the first time a sense of the past as a place where people thought, felt and dressed differently". His historical romances "influenced Balzac, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dumas, Pushkin, and many others; and his interpretation of history was seized on by Romantic nationalists, particularly in Eastern Europe". Also highly influential were the early translations into French by Auguste Defauconpret.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon was a great admirer of Scott and, on his death, she wrote two tributes to him: On Walter Scott in the Literary Gazette, and Sir Walter Scott in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1833. Towards the end of her life she began a series called The Female Picture Gallery with a series of character analyses based on the women in Scott's works.

Victor Hugo, in his 1823 essay, Sir Walter Scott: Apropos of Quentin Durward, writes:

Surely there is something strange and marvelous in the talent of this man who disposes of his reader as the wind disposes of a leaf; who leads him at his will into all places and into all times; unveils for him with ease the most secret recesses of the heart, as well as the most mysterious phenomena of nature, as well as the obscurest pages of history; whose imagination caresses and dominates all other imaginations, clothes with the same astonishing truth the beggar with his rags and the king with his robes, assumes all manners, adopts all garbs, speaks all languages; leaves to the physiognomy of the ages all that is immutable and eternal in their lineaments, traced there by the wisdom of God, and all that is variable and fleeting, planted there by the follies of men; does not force, like certain ignorant romancers, the personages of the past to colour themselves with our brushes and smear themselves with our varnish; but compels, by his magic power, the contemporary reader to imbue himself, at least for some hours, with the spirit of the old times, today so much scorned, like a wise and adroit adviser inviting ungrateful children to return to their father.

Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed (1827) has similarities with Scott's historic novel Ivanhoe, although evidently distinct.

In Charles Baudelaire's La Fanfarlo (1847), poet Samuel Cramer says of Scott:

The other arts

Although Scott's own appreciation of music was basic, to say the least, he had a considerable influence on composers. Some 90 operas based to some extent on his poems and novels have been traced, the most celebrated being Rossini's La donna del lago (1819, based on The Lady of the Lake) and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor (1835, based on The Bride of Lammermoor). Others include Donizetti's 1829 opera Il castello di Kenilworth based on Kenilworth, Georges Bizet's La jolie fille de Perth (1867, based on The Fair Maid of Perth), and Arthur Sullivan's Ivanhoe (1891).

Many of Scott's songs were set to music by composers throughout the 19th century. Seven from The Lady of the Lake were set in German translations by Franz Schubert, one of them being 'Ellens dritter Gesang' popularly known as 'Schubert's Ave Maria'. Three lyrics, also in translation, appear from Ludwig van Beethoven in his Twenty-Five Scottish Songs, Op. 108. Other notable musical responses include three overtures: Waverley (1828) and Rob Roy (1831) by Hector Berlioz, and The Land of the Mountain and the Flood (1887, alluding to The Lay of the Last Minstrel) by Hamish MacCunn. "Hail to the Chief" from "The Lady of the Lake" was set to music around 1812 by the songwriter James Sanderson (c. 1769 – c. 1841). See the Wikipedia article "Hail to the Chief."

The Waverley Novels are full of eminently paintable scenes and many 19th-century artists responded to them. Among the outstanding paintings of Scott subjects are: Richard Parkes Bonington's Amy Robsart and the Earl of Leicester (c. 1827) from Kenilworth in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Eugène Delacroix's L'Enlèvement de Rebecca (1846) from Ivanhoe in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and John Everett Millais's The Bride of Lammermoor (1878) in Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

Walter Scott features as a character in Sara Sheridan's novel The Fair Botanists (2021).

Works

Novels

The Waverley novels is the title given to the long series of Scott novels released from 1814 to 1832, which takes its name from the first novel, Waverley. The following is a chronological list of the entire series:

1814: Waverley

1815: Guy Mannering

1816: Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk

1816: The Antiquary

1816: The Black Dwarf and Old Mortality or The Tale of Old Mortality – the 1st instalment from the subset series, Tales of My Landlord

1817: Rob Roy

1818: The Heart of Mid-Lothian – the 2nd instalment from the subset series, Tales of My Landlord

1819: The Bride of Lammermoor and A Legend of Montrose or A Legend of the Wars of Montrose – the 3rd instalment from the subset series, Tales of My Landlord

1819 (dated 1820): Ivanhoe

1820: The Monastery

1820: The Abbot

1821: Kenilworth

1822: The Pirate

1822: The Fortunes of Nigel

1822: Peveril of the Peak

1823: Quentin Durward

1824: St. Ronan's Well or Saint Ronan's Well

1824: Redgauntlet

1825: The Betrothed and The Talisman – a subset series, Tales of the Crusaders

Short stories

1811: "The Inferno of Altisidora"

1817: "Christopher Corduroy"

1818: "Alarming Increase of Depravity Among Animals"

1818: "Phantasmagoria"

1827: "The Highland Widow" and "The Two Drovers" (see Chronicles of the Canongate above)

1828: "My Aunt Margaret's Mirror", "The Tapestried Chamber", and "Death of the Laird's Jock" – from the series The Keepsake Stories

1832: "A Highland Anecdote"

Poetry

Many of the short poems or songs released by Scott (or later anthologised) were originally not separate pieces but parts of longer poems interspersed throughout his novels, tales, and dramas.

1796: The Chase, and William and Helen: Two Ballads, translated from the German of Gottfried Augustus Bürger

1800: Glenfinlas

1802–1803: Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border

1805: The Lay of the Last Minstrel

1806: Ballads and Lyrical Pieces

1808: Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field

1810: The Lady of the Lake

1811: The Vision of Don Roderick

1813: The Bridal of Triermain

1813: Rokeby

1815: The Field of Waterloo

1815: The Lord of the Isles

1817: Harold the Dauntless

1825: Bonnie Dundee

Plays

1799: Goetz of Berlichingen, with the Iron Hand: A Tragedy – an English-language translation of the 1773 German-language play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe entitled Götz von Berlichingen

1822: Halidon Hill

1823: MacDuff's Cross

1830: The Doom of Devorgoil

1830: Auchindrane

Non-fiction

1814–1817: The Border Antiquities of England and Scotland – a work co-authored by Luke Clennell and John Greig with Scott's contribution consisting of the substantial introductory essay, originally published in 2 volumes from 1814 to 1817

1815–1824: Essays on Chivalry, Romance, and Drama – a supplement to the 1815–1824 editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica

1819–1826: Provincial Antiquities of Scotland

1821–1824: Lives of the Novelists

1825–1832: The Journal of Sir Walter Scott — first published in 1890

1826: The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther

1827: The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French. With a Preliminary View of the French Revolution. Published in 9 volumes.

1828: Religious Discourses. By a Layman

1828: Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from Scottish History – the 1st instalment from the series, Tales of a Grandfather

1829: The History of Scotland: Volume I

1829: Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from Scottish History – the 2nd instalment from the series, Tales of a Grandfather

1830: The History of Scotland: Volume II

1830: Tales of a Grandfather; Being Stories Taken from Scottish History – the 3rd instalment from the series, Tales of a Grandfather

1830: Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft

Collections

In 1925 Scott's manuscripts, letters and papers were donated to the National Library of Scotland by the Advocates Library of the Faculty of Advocates.

University College London holds about 300 books relating to Scott. The collection originated with a donation from Arthur MacNalty.