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Walter Scott
(1771-1832)

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Works | Bio-Bibliographical Note | Acknowledgements | Usage

Walter Scott's Works

  • Antiquary
  • The Bride of Lammermoor
  • Ivanhoe
  • Selected Poetry of Sir Walter Scott (link to Representative Poetry)

    • A Bio-bibliographical note about Walter Scott

    "Walter Scott (1771-1832) was born in Edinburgh, the ninth child of a Writer to the Signet (ie Edinburgh solicitor). Walter was also destined for a modest career in law. He was temperamentally inclined to the army - but a disabling attack of infantile paralysis in early childhood blasted his hopes. Scott gave early evidence of his literary-antiquarian talent. His ballad collecting resulted in The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3). There followed a brilliant career in bestselling narrative verse. With Byron's eruption on the scene in 1812 Scott apprehended that he was, as he said, 'beat'. He turned to fiction anonymously with Waverley (1814), the most influential novel of the century. Among the 'Scottish' novels that followed were Old Mortality (1816), a story of the Coventanting Revolution, and Scott's study of Scottish, female, working-class heroism, The Heart of Midlothian (1818). With Ivanhoe (1819) he turned his attention to English history. Scott ran into catastrophic bankruptcy in 1826, and the years before his premature death in 1832 were a desperate struggle with debts and creditors."
    John Sutherland

    Source: Penguin Web Site (http://www.futurenet.co.uk/Penguin/Academic/classics96/britclassicsauthor.html)
    Accessed 4 April 1997.

    Credits and Acknowledgements

    The University of Toronto English Library is a project of the Department of English and the Faculty of Arts and Science, funded by the Provost's Electronic Courseware Fund. UTEL was created by Ian Lancashire, Christopher Douglas, and Dennis G. Jerz. We wish to thank the University of Toronto Information Commons, and the members of the Centre for Academic Technology, especially John Bradley, Ian Graham, and Allen Forsyth. See individual Works pages for other credits.

    The author portrait, by an unknown artist, is from a miniature at Abbotsford. (Source: Arthur Melville Clark. Sir Walter Scott: the Formative Years. Edinburgh: William Blackswood, 1969. Following page 160. PR 5332 C5 ROBA.)

    Usage

    Permission is hereby given to copy the HTML version of poems, plays and novels in the University of Toronto English Library for non-commercial educational uses; that is, for teaching, research, and study, as long as copyright information is not removed from any University of Toronto English Library On-line file and as long as no charge is made for use of the collection.

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