Sir Walter Scott

Walter Scott is the best selling author who ever lived, and that includes Stephen King and Harold Robbins. Now that’s ridiculous just on the basis-of modern printing. Both Stephen King and Harold Robbins must outsell Scott by millions. Well maybe, but that’s only one way to measure best sellers. That doesn’t take into account categories and Scott did it in four categories: poetry; biography; novels; and collected works. I can’t imagine anyone buying the collected works of Stephen King or Harold Robbins.

Then again, I can’t imagine anyone buying a book by Stephen King or Harold Robbins. Walter Scott worked long hours, but it seems that he really liked to just sit and write. Later in life he had a bankruptcy and I have read that he then worked himself to death to pay it off. That doesn’t appear to be true based on Hesketh Pearson’s biography Sir Walter Scott, subtitled His Life and Personality. It was his personality to work hard and he just kept on doing it. There are hundreds of works about Scott, but the Hesketh biography is well written and relatively short. However, it seems to me Scott is easy to write about. Just pick up any Scott paperback and read the afterword or forward – they’re all excellent.

There are 26 Waverley novels, probably the best of which, or at least the most exciting, are Rob Roy and Red Gauntlet. These are probably his best because they are on Scottish themes. You have to know “Bonnie Prince Charlie.” You have to know “Jacobites” and their enemies. Then again, you don’t have to know anything except who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, Scott will take care of the rest.

Now, in the Monarch Notes to Ivanhoe, a Professor Dunleavy says that Scott’s prose is dull and wooden. In Rob Roy I found it well-nigh Shakespearean, but we could both be right. He probably has read all 26 novels and I’ve probably read only three. In Rob Roy Scott may have put his best foot forward. He was friends with James Fenimore Cooper, who is the American Scott. If you read The Last of the Mohicans you’ll think Cooper is Shakespearean. Read Pathfinder and you’ll feel that you wish the words would stop so· we can get to the action. Regardless, when Scott has it going, his prose is beautiful. Scott wasn’t only loved in England and Scotland, but in France, Italy, and Germany. He was loved by kings and commoners.

What was Scott trying to do? The battle of Culloden was fought in 1745. It is the last great battle fought on English soil. The British defeated the Scottish Highlanders. Previously, in 1707, an act was signed uniting England and Scotland. Scotland lost its independence and parliament. Culloden was an attempt to break that union. Scott was born in 1771. He accepted that union, but he was determined to show the English that Scotland had a history and a culture; Some say he went too far in giving us Scottish culture and made the Scotch more heroic and romantic than they really were. Local color is laid on thick. Janet Adam Smith, in an essay on Scott, says: “The’ Scott who lives today is the novelist with a Tolstoyan sense of man in history, man in society: the author of half a dozen novels which, conceived in a profound patriotism, transcend their Scottishness and become of universal appeal.” It’s that Scott I think you’ll enjoy, and I suspect Rob Roy and Red Gauntlet are in that half dozen.