Scot on the Rocks

As recently as a century ago, Sir Walter Scott was known all over Europe and America. In life he had been the original literary celebrity, called “the Great Unknown” because his novels were published anonymously, although everybody knew their author’s identity. By the time of his death in 1832 his works were available in French, German, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Danish, Russian, and Hungarian. Scott was as influential as any writer of his age could be. Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, and Victor Hugo, among many others, all attested to his greatness. Mark Twain’s claim that Scott caused the American Civil War was intended as provocative hyperbole, but the fact that he had a point at all is itself a remarkable testimony to one man’s influence.

Painting of Sir Walter Scott reading a paper

Sir Walter Scott by Sir William Allan (1831)

And now Scott is forgotten. Not utterly forgotten: His best novels (though not his long poems) are still in print, and there is still a small but highly competent circle of British and American scholars devoted to Scott’s work. But whereas Jane Austen is read by undergraduates and filmed endlessly, Scott is known rather than read, studied rather than loved. The fate of Sir Walter Scott over the last 50 years, as the English critic Jonathan Keates has observed, is the worst kind of literary demise: “Some writers are fortunate enough to attain instant classic status, others are recovered from oblivion with an almost over-compensatory degree of enthusiasm, while death deservedly topples some from the pinnacles of international significance and adulation.”

Scott, by contrast, “has been banished forever, as it must seem, to the purgatory of a cold, incurious respect, to the shadowland of literary history, in which his importance (the word itself is a sort of dead hand) is suffered rather than examined.”