This Day in Literary History (Sir Walter Scott, Father of the Historical Novel—and Object of Twain Scorn—Born)

Aug. 15, 1771— Sir Walter Scott, who fostered Scottish pride with his vast output of novels, poems, plays and histories, pioneered the historical novel as a genre, and served as an example to later authors and how to gain and lose a fortune, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.

In a prior post, I discussed how Hollywood has looked to Scott properties like Ivanhoe and Rob Roy for content, and how Mark Twain took a various revenge on him for polluting the consciousness of the antebellum South with fake notions of medieval chivalry by sending the steamboat The Walter Scott to a watery grave in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

It wasn’t until I read Ray Perman’s essay from last weekend’s edition of The Financial Times that I discovered that Twain, to his mortification, had more in common (besides the resort to pen names early in his career) than he would have liked with Scott: i.e., spendthrift ways and foolhardy investments that almost capsized the fortune he made from his work.

As I explained in this post from seven years ago, Twain, once he achieved success, built a 19-room red mansion whose whimsical design—filled with turrets, balconies, verandas and embrasures—also looks, from a certain angle, like a steamboat. It was a reminder of the start of his professional career, as a Mississippi riverboat pilot. The kind of convivial lifestyle he enjoyed in the house was a New England version of what Scott possessed at Abbotsford, his fantasy castle.

Both Scott and Twain came into their fortunes during economic booms that followed convulsive wars: The Napoleonic Wars in Scott’s Great Britain, to the Civil War in Twain’s America. Both writers numbered industrial magnates among their close friends.

Rash investments led both Scott and Twain to insolvency. Scott saw the foundation of his fortune rocked by reverses in three companies, while Twain poured $300,000 ($6 million in today’s currency) into the Paige Compositor, a typesetting machine so complex (with 18,000 parts) that only one was successfully built. Both authors worked frenetically to extricate themselves from bankruptcy: Scott through writing (nine books in his last six years), and Twain through an intensive worldwide lecture tour.

Other 19^th century authors (notably, Washington Irving) were transatlantic celebrities who made money off their works, but Scott and Twain pointed the way on new, influential means of doing so. Scott helped pay (at least for a while) the expenses on his home through publishers’ advances before he had sat down in earnest to write some titles. Twain found that his lectures (often crafted with specific audiences in mind) not only boosted his career at the start but also were useful in publicizing his new books.

Each author also heavily influenced the development of literature in their country. Scott did so by pioneering historical fiction as a genre through his so-called “Waverly Novels” (named for the book that thrust him into the limelight in the first place), inserting fictional characters into real-life events. Though Twain was hardly the first American author to use dialect, he was the first to use it naturally so that, even today, the speech of his characters remains recognizable.

Photo of the Day: Sir Walter Scott Statue, Central Park, NYC

Central Park, among other points of interest in its 843 acres, contains “Literary Walk,” s series of statues dedicated to writers. In prior posts, I discussed those dedicated to Robert Burns and William Shakespeare.

There was a time, a century and a half ago, when the fame of Sir Walter Scott here in the United States was nearly a match for either of them. Even though he remains a figure of note and pride in his native Scotland, where his romantic vision of the land sparked an interest in tourism that continues to this day, his novels and poems haven’t worn as well here. Those aware of his work here in the U.S. are likely to know it secondhand, through the TCM staple Ivanhoe (the 1951 film starring Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor) and the 1995 flick Rob Roy, starring Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange (neither, of course, a Scot).

Blame some of the decline in Scott’s reputation on Mark Twain. In Life on the Mississippi, the American saw Scott as having “so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the [Civil War], that he is in great measure responsible for the war.” In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain takes a gleeful revenge by having his two runaways from the South, Huck and the slave Jim, board the sunken steamship the Walter Scott, which had “killed herself on a rock.”

(Incidentally, for all his annoyance with Scott, Twain found his influence inescapable.He felt compelled to use historical fiction, a genre that the Scot had advanced more than any other writer, in writing about a French adolescent girl of the late Middle Ages. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc turned out to be Twain’s favorite among his own writings.)

Twain’s biting comments came before the commissioning and creating of a Central Park tribute to Scott. In 1871, the centennial of Scott’s birth, a group of Scottish-Americans managed to get a statue in his honor along what is now Literary Walk. Sir John Steell (also responsible for the park’s Burns statue) created a bronze replica of his 1845 marble of Scott in the two men’s native Edinburgh. Unveiled in November 1872, it shows Scott dressed in a flowing cloak with workingman’s shoes, book and pen in hand, and his favorite dog, Maida, at his feet. This is what I saw when I took this photograph three years ago this past May.