Walter Scott

Walter Scott invented the historical novel and, in doing so, largely invented how the nineteenth century imagined the past. He was an Edinburgh lawyer, lamed by polio as a child, who began by collecting border ballads and then wrote narrative poems that sold in numbers no poet had seen. When Byron eclipsed him he turned to prose and published Waverley anonymously in 1814, a novel about a young Englishman drawn into the Jacobite rising of 1745, in which the Highlanders are neither noble savages nor rebels but people with reasons. The formula - private lives caught inside a public conflict, researched settings, dialect on the page - was copied across Europe within a decade and is the ancestor of most historical fiction since. He wrote Ivanhoe, Rob Roy and Old Mortality among some two dozen more, anonymously throughout, and used the money to build Abbotsford and to buy land. He organised George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822 as a tartan pageant, which manufactured a good deal of what is now taken for ancient Highland tradition, and he wrote in defence of the Scottish banknote. In 1826 the publishing house he was secretly a partner in collapsed and left him some £130,000 in debt. He refused bankruptcy and wrote to pay it off, which killed him within six years, and the debt was cleared after his death. His reputation collapsed in the twentieth century almost as completely as it had risen, and the charge, made most memorably by Mark Twain, was that the chivalric nostalgia he made fashionable did real damage - Twain blamed him for the American South. The monument on Princes Street is the largest ever built to a writer.

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