NEAR where I live in the Scottish borders is a baronial mansion called Abbotsford. Situated on the banks of the River Tweed, it was the home of Sir Walter Scott and is stuffed full of antiques and curios. Tourists flock from afar to visit, many of whom are unaware of the association with a writer who, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was more famous even than JK Rowling is today. As influential as he was popular, Scott was admired by Jane Austen and Lord Byron, Balzac and Tolstoy. Known first as a poet, he switched horses and began to write novels, often drawing on his native heath’s bloody and purple past. He has been credited with inventing the historical novel and, in so doing, an idea of Scotland that in part still holds true. His Scotland is inhabited by kilted Highlanders roaming glens and fording furious streams as they attempt to evade pursuers. Think Braveheart and you are deep in the country of Scott’s rampant imagination.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of his birth. It was to have been celebrated widely but many events have had to be rethought due to the pandemic. This is regrettable, not least because it was an opportunity to revisit and re-evaluate Scott’s work. When I was at school, his novels were an integral part of the syllabus. Among others, I read Waverley and the Heart of Midlothian. The former was the name given to Edinburgh’s main railway station while the latter is one of the Scottish capital’s football teams. On Princes Street, Edinburgh’s main thoroughfare, is the Scott Monument, a 60 metre high rocket that dominates the townscape. Nearby is the Abbotsford bar in which I have misspent countless hours. No Scottish town is without remembrances of Scott, such was the esteem in which he was held. It is hard to think of another writer anywhere on the planet who was so revered.

Time, however, is a pitiless judge. In his pomp, Scott was known as “the Wizard of the North”. These days he is often referred to as “the Great Unread”. The age of the internet has not been kind to him. Even I, an admirer, would concede that his novels are not easy to swallow. They take many pages to warm up and this does not recommend them to modern readers impatient for action. Often, too, his characters speak in the Scottish dialect which few Scots use now. Further afield, he was blamed – by Mark Twain – for fomenting the American Civil War. Ignoring the fact that Scott had been dead for nearly thirty years before the carnage began, and that he never crossed the Atlantic, Twain accused him of causing “more real and measureless harm, perhaps, than any other that ever wrote”. Citing Scott’s novel Ivanhoe – a favourite, by the way, of Tony Blair – Twain added: “It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations.”

Silly as such sallies may seem, they do serve to emphasise Scott’s global impact. His was a remarkable achievement in an age when communication was in its infancy. He was a child of the Enlightenment and destined for a law career. Indeed, he did become a Writer to the Signet, a private society of solicitors, but his true vocation was literature. His writing made him rich and he hobnobbed with royalty. In 1822, he stage-managed George IV’s “jaunt” to Edinburgh, the first visit of a reigning monarch to Scotland in almost two hundred years, which helped cement the Union with England. The debate over whether Scott himself supported the Union or was in favour of an independent Scotland still flares from time to time. Suffice it to say, there is evidence to support both sides of the argument.

The year 1826 was Scott’s annus horribilis. He was 55 years old, at the height of his powers, and writing as one possessed. Two decades earlier, he had become a partner in the business that printed his books. When it and his publisher went bankrupt he was dragged down with them. He had been living beyond his means and his debts were heavy. Scott’s reputation was severely damaged and a lesser person might have despaired. But he decided that the only way out of the mire into which he had sunk was to produce yet more books and repay his creditors. Between 1826 and 1831, he wrote five novels, a collection of short stories, a play, a nine-volume life of Napoleon and a two-volume history of Scotland, as well as essays, introductions and his journal.

It is the last-mentioned that I turn most often to now. As a record of a writer desperately trying to save himself and his family from ruin, it is without equal. Not only did he cope with the financial crash, but he was also grieving the death of his wife, and aware that his own health was failing. Like the hero of one of his novels, he was indefatigable in the face of adversity. His hard work paid off. His debts were cleared and his honour restored. And Abbotsford, which he feared he could be lost and into which he had poured everything, was saved. When he died in 1832, Scott’s legions of admirers mourned the death not only of a great writer but – that even rarer thing – a good man.

(Alan Taylor was deputy editor and managing editor of the Scotsman newspaper. He was a Booker Prize judge in 1994. His latest book is Appointment in Arezzo, an account of his friendship with the novelist Muriel Spark.)

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