Theme: walter scott is the founder of historical novels content

CHAPTER I. Walter Scott and the historical novel

1.1.Walter Scott and the historical novel
Walter Scott was admired by his contemporaries Goethe, Pushkin and Balzac, and celebrated by Lukács as the founder of the historical novel. He was born in Edinburgh 250 years ago on 15 August 1771. Born into the upper middle class, his family preserved a sense of tradition from one of the great Scottish clans, including folk heritage. Like Robert Burns, Scott grew up with the songs and legends of Scotland. He collected them and reflected them in his own work. This cultural awareness was accompanied by a deep sense of national identity.
Scott read European literature of popular, patriotic spirit fluently and was familiar with the English realistic novel. He studied Scottish law and took a lively interest in the historical relations between Scotland and England. In 1797 he married Charlotte Carpenter of French royalist stock. Scott was a landowner and staunch Tory – yet his work goes beyond this.
Scott’s interest in Scottish border ballads led to his collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03), in which he endeavoured to restore orally corrupted versions to their original wording. This publication made Scott known to a wide audience. His epic poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), was followed by further lyrical romances. During these years Scott led a very active literary and social life. At the same time, he was deputy sheriff of Selkirkshire from 1799 and clerk of the court in Edinburgh from 1806, as well as part-owner of a printing press and later publishing house, which he saved from bankruptcy. Personal financial crises increasingly impacted on the course of his career and his writing became determined by the need to pay off debts. His estate in Abbotsford, furnished with many antiquarian objects, also consumed vast sums.
In 1813 Scott rediscovered the unfinished manuscript of a novel he had begun in 1805, which he rapidly finished in the early summer of 1814. This novel Waverley, about the Jacobite uprising of 1745, was enthusiastically received. Like all of Scott’s novels written before 1827, Waverley was published anonymously.
A born storyteller and master of dialogue in both Scots dialect and aristocratic etiquette, he was able to portray sensitively the whole range of Scottish society, from beggars and farm labourers to the bourgeoisie, the professions and the landowning aristocracy. Scott’s sensitivity to ordinary people was a new orientation. He convincingly portrayed outlandish highlanders as well as the political and religious conflicts that shook Scotland in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Scott’s masterpieces include Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and his most popular novel, Ivanhoe (1819).
Unfortunately, the haste with which he wrote his later books affected Scott’s health, as well as his writing. In 1827 his authorship of the Waverley novels became known. In 1831 his health deteriorated badly and he died on 21 September 1832.
Scott’s Times
Scott lived and wrote in an era of enormous upheaval – revolutions in France and North America, uprisings in Haiti and Ireland, the Napoleonic wars, the expansion of the British Empire and its domination of the seas, the slave trade, the uprooting of large sections of Britain’s peasantry through enclosure for the purpose of sheep farming, increasing capitalist “rationalisation” of the countryside, and large-scale highland clearances and evictions.
The beginnings of the Industrial Revolution consolidated the power of the bourgeoisie and the first political organisations of the working class emerged. Such density of dramatic events suddenly made the course of history, the progression from one society to another, directly tangible. History unfolded before everyone’s eyes and, it seemed, could be influenced. This is the shifting ground on which Scott’s historical novels are set.
In addition, literary production in Scotland and Ireland flourished. Here, on the colonial edges, questions of history and cultural identity, colonialism and anti-colonialism sharply crystallised. This begins in Ireland with Swift and his magnificent writings against British colonial power from the perspective of the Irish people as early as the 1720s. In Scott’s time, the Irish people speak in their idiom in Maria Edgeworth’s novels.
While England in the 18th century is preparing for the Industrial Revolution, politically it is already a post-revolutionary country, following the bourgeois English Revolution in the 1640s.
On August 15, 1771, Scottish historical novelist, poet, playwright, and historian Sir Walter Scott was born. He was one of the most widely read authors of his time – not only in Europe – and is traditionally considered the founder of the historical novel. Many of his historical novels have become classics and have served as models for numerous plays, operas and films. I remember as a child that I was watching the 1952 Hollywood adaption of Ivanhoe as a perfect Sunday afternoon entertainment on tv. Years later I’ve read the famous novel which by far was better than the Hollywood spectacle.
“A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.”
– Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering (1815)