Theme: walter scott is the founder of historical novels content

Sir Walter Scott – Family Background and Career

Scott was born as the ninth of twelve siblings, six of whom died at an early age. In the second year of his life he was infected with polio and therefore had a paralyzed leg for the rest of his life. His father, also Walter Scott, was a lawyer and, as Writer to the Signet, a solicitor with extended skills. His mother, Anne Rutherford, was the daughter of a professor of medicine. After an apprenticeship with his father, he changed his professional direction, studied law at the University of Edinburgh and became a trial lawyer at the age of 21. Despite his later extensive literary work, he remained active as a lawyer throughout his life: 14 years as an advocate, 33 years as a sheriff and 24 years as a Clerk of Session (overlapping periods).

First Poetry

He began his literary career at the age of 25 with poetic translations of German ballads: The Chase and William and Helen. His great interest in the traditions of his homeland had led him to collect folk ballads since his youth; from 1802 he published as a three-volume work The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, with ballads arranged by him and also with his own ballads. Scott achieved broad recognition through his epic verses, which were extraordinarily successful from the beginning, “the first bestsellers in verse form” with astonishingly large editions, beginning with The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, followed by Marmion in 1808 and others.

1.2.The Heart of Mid-Lothian
“Now I protest to thee, gentle reader, that I entirely dissent from Francisco de Ubeda in this matter, and hold it the most useful quality of my pen, that it can speedily change from grave to gay, and from description and dialogue to narrative and character. So that, if my quill display no other propertoies of its mothergoose than her mutability, truly I shall be well pleased; and I conceive that you, my worthy friend, will have no occasion for discontent. From the jargon, therefore, of the Highland gillies, I pass to the character of their Chief. It is an important examination, and therefore, like Dogberry, we must spare no wisdom.”
– Sir Walter Scott, Waverley (1814)
Scott’s first work as a novelist was the novel Waverley, published anonymously in 1814, whose plot is set in the last Jacobite uprising, an uprising that started in Scotland in 1745 and was aimed at restoring the House of Stuart against the House of Hanover, which ruled London. The novel immediately caused a furore; with it, Scott practically founded the modern historical novel, at least for the English-speaking world. In rapid succession, he wrote in the following 10 years a wealth of other historical novels and stories with Scottish themes that is hardly surpassed in the annals of literary history: Guy Mannering, Old Mortality, Rob Roy and more, all of them (and later) published without his name, only with the indication “Author of Waverley” or under a pseudonym.