Biography
Sir Walter Scott was the most popular English novelist of the late 18th and early 19th century, and the most enduring of his books -- Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, and Quentin Durward -- have become the sources for notable adventure movies and television shows. Additionally, as a poet, he was one of the most popular of his age, and work in that area also inspired filmmakers since the second decade of the 20th century.
Scott was born in 1771 in Edinburgh, Scotland, the fourth of five surviving children out of 12. All but one of his four brothers ended up in the military or the navy, and two, at least, served with considerable distinction. The younger Walter Scott (his father had the same name) was lame in his right leg, probably as a result of what would later be identified as polio; none of the established treatments of the era, including wrapping the child in the skin of a freshly killed sheep, worked to cure him. He grew up steeped in the songs and stories of his ancestors, especially of the warriors on his mother's side, and also was exposed to literature and theater (including Shakespeare's plays). Scott was an indifferent student, but despite his physical impediment, he enthusiastically embraced boxing, among other physical activities. His special skill, however, was in his ability to read and retain literature in his memory, including large portions of Edmund Spenser's epic poetry, before reaching his teens. In contrast to most learned men of his era, in college Scott neglected learning Greek and gave up Latin, though he learned some Italian, Spanish, and French -- rather anticipating modern scholars' educational focus. He was, however, frustrated in his goals of becoming a painter and a musician.
Scott studied the law and entered the profession in the 1790s. He was known in this period as a gifted speaker, with a great storehouse of arcane knowledge of the past, especially out of Scottish history, but not limited to that field. He also eagerly absorbed stories from those he met, who'd met such renowned figures as Rob Roy on the field of honor, and he did cross paths once with the legendary Robert Burns. By his mid-twenties, Scott was a popular storyteller, even as he earned his living as an attorney. He spent his spare time tramping around the countryside collecting ballads and mementos of wars fought long ago, and became a popular visitor in the hinterlands. He was, in his sympathies, a monarchist, and was appalled by the French Revolution; despite his lameness, he was also an enthusiastic volunteer in various militias organized for defense. Scott was still developing a successful practice when literature beckoned; he published translations of works from other languages and some ballads that were well received. It was in 1800 that he began work on the project that would establish him in literary circles -- he assembled a collection eventually known as the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, printed by his longtime friend James Ballantyne in 1802. Two volumes from Ballantyne led to interest from a much bigger house, Longman, which bought out the rights -- for the huge sum of 500 pounds -- and those to a third volume, all of which were successful printed during the early years of the 19th century.
By 1804, Scott had decided to turn the focus of his life from law to literature. His work now had a major following and was bid on and bought as fast as he produced it, songs, ballads, poems, and stories alike. The most notable of these was The Lady in the Lake (1810). He and Ballantyne became partners in a publishing concern that became Scott's undoing over the next decade. In much the same way that rock bands that founded their own labels in the 1960s and 1970s discovered that there was more to being in the music business than simply making popular music, Scott found that, popular as his work was, it was far more difficult to find and cultivate authors of similar appeal. He also lost money on land acquisitions, and the publication of a 19-volume collection of Jonathan Swift's work had not sold nearly as well as anticipated. By sheer luck, in the early months of 1814, Scott had found a manuscript that he'd abandoned nearly a decade earlier and was impressed with the work he'd previously shunned. This was Waverley, published under a pseudonym, as were all of his books for the next decade. Scott's aliases included Jebediah Cleisbotham, Crystal Croftangry, Malachi Malgrowther, and Lawrence Templeton.
Set against the background of the Scottish rebellion of 1745, and telling a heroic tale of patriotism, the first of the Waverley novels sold out its complete first printing in five weeks, and its popularity only grew from there. In the midst of writing articles for the Encyclopedia Britannica on theater and other essays and nonfiction works to keep himself afloat financially, Scott's fiction was suddenly and rapidly making his financial losses good. He wrote nine Waverley novels during the next five years, and they sold well not only initially but over time as well -- Rob Roy sold out its complete first printing of 10,000 copies in just 14 days, and was still being read 200 years later. Across the ensuing decades, the Waverley novels became a cash cow for Scott and his publishers and associates. He became something of an industry unto himself, akin to what J.R.R. Tolkien,
Stephen King, and Anne Rice, among others, have become in more recent times. There was also a good deal of ego involved. More than one reader who had more than passing knowledge of the author saw in the hero Guy Mannering many attributes that could be found in Scott himself. All of Scott's writing during this period was tremendously popular, and remained so for centuries -- Rob Roy (1817) for one, and The Bride of Lammermoor (1818), based on the real-life Miss Janet Dalrymple, found new life on the operatic stage when it served as the basis for Gaetano Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.
Scott's greatest success, however, was Ivanhoe (1819). Set in medieval England and telling of the struggle between Saxon and Norman Britons, it became Scott's biggest success in England (achieving far greater popularity there than any of his Scottish-subject works and, by extension, vast popularity in America). It marked the peak of his critical reputation as well as his popularity and, ironically enough, came at the end of a period of terribly ill health for the author, who wrote his most enduring works during three years of terrible pain and seeming inexorable decline presaging death. Instead, he recovered -- sufficiently to be created a baronet by the and, over the next few years, authored books that were sometimes (as in the case of Quentin Durward) received well in one country (France, in the latter case) or another, but never as universally as his earlier books. Scott's later life was marred by financial setbacks that greatly complicated his very lavish lifestyle, which included a lot of expensive entertaining, and he also experienced a rapid decline in popularity, especially in Scotland and England. He alleviated some of these problems with a new edition of his complete works up to that time, with new autobiographical introductions, in 1827, but his final years were spent in greater uncertainty than one would have anticipated of a man of his renown and lifetime earnings.
For all of his popularity, Scott had his detractors, and not just among the academics who looked down their noses at any popular literature. In the decades after his death, he fell out of favor with readers because of his romanticism, and some prominent readers were even more harsh. Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), for one, despised the brand of romanticism of England's past embodied by Scott's historical novels; he believed that it was the romanticism represented by Scott and his work, embraced by the leaders and property owners of the Southern states, that had helped them justify to themselves their clinging to a slave-owning social order, as well as emboldened them to attempt secession from the United States. In his magnum opus, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Clemens included a scene in which Huck and Jim are going down the river and find a steamboat sinking by the bow, and the steamboat's name was...the Walter Scott. Beyond their sheer familiarity and attractiveness as titles, Scott's works, with their romanticized, often pageant-filled view of the past, accounts of heroism, and struggles against injustice, lent themselves to dramatizations, and the movie industry lost no time in adapting his works once it had achieved the technical capability to do so. The fact that this achievement also postdated the expiration of Scott's copyrights made his works especially attractive to producers.
The first-known adaptation of one of Scott's novels came in 1909 with The Bride of Lammermoor: A Tragedy of Bonnie Scotland, by J. Stuart Blackton, with
Annette Kellerman and
Maurice Costello.
Lochinvar and Kenilworth followed that same year, and the first film versions of Rob Roy and Ivanhoe (retitled
Rebecca the Jewess for the United States), the latter starring Lauderdale Maitland and Ethel Bracewell, appeared in 1913. There were also several films inspired by the poem The Lady in the Lake, starting in the teens. The notable adaptations of the sound era came much later, in the postwar period. Piero Ballerini directed a film version of the Donizetti opera Lucia di Lammermoor in 1946, with a young, uncredited
Gina Lollobrigida in the cast, but the best screen adaptation of Scott came six years later when MGM and director
Richard Thorpe adapted Ivanhoe to the screen, starring
Robert Taylor,
Elizabeth Taylor, and
George Sanders. That movie was not only a huge critical and financial success, but was arguably the best costume drama ever released by MGM, and one of the finest ever produced by Hollywood (though it should be said that it was filmed in England). MGM's success proved more the exception than the rule, however, and a pair of less critically and commercially successful Scott adaptations, Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue and
King Richard and the Crusaders (based on Scott's 1825 The Talisman) (both 1954) dampened Hollywood's enthusiasm for the author. A short-lived television series based on Ivanhoe, produced by Sir Lew Grade and starring
Roger Moore, also failed to capture the imagination of viewers.
The social changes of the 1960s and the heightened degree of cynicism that permeated Western society, especially in the United States, left Scott's work, with its tales of heroism and injustices righted and redeemed, quaintly out-of-fashion. Subsequent adaptations have been confined to television, mostly from England. One suspects, however, that somewhere a producer may someday come out with a
Xena- or
Hercules-type version of Ivanhoe, though if they do, it's likely they'll give it a more impassioned title such as "The Saxon Avenger." Ironically, it fell to two filmmakers usually thought of as too sophisticated to bother about Scott,
Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger, to provide the most sophisticated use of his poetry onscreen. In their magnum wartime opus
A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven, 1946), at the denouement, a heavenly judge played by
Abraham Sofaer quotes Scott by name, and the lines, "Love rules the court, the camp, the grove/And men below, and saints above/For love is heaven, and heaven is love," from The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), giving the movie an unexpectedly reassuring and witty conclusion. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide