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    The Journal of Sir Walter Scott
    The Journal of Sir Walter Scott
    The Journal of Sir Walter Scott
    Ebook1,673 pages20 hours

    The Journal of Sir Walter Scott

    By Walter Scott

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    This edition of the great Scottish author’s personal journal is “truly a classic . . . compelling right to the very last unfinished sentence” (Scotland on Sunday, UK).
     
    The celebrated 18th and 19th century Scottish author of such classics as Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, and The Lady of the Lake delivers what many regard as his greatest work: a day-to-day account of the last six years of his life as he navigates financial ruin, bereavement, and increasing ill health. Laboring to pay off debts of more than £120,000, Scott emerges, not simply as a great writer, but as an almost heroic figure whose generosity and even temper shine through at all times.

    This edition of Scott’s journals presents a complete edited text and notes drawing on a wealth of other material including correspondence, reminiscences and the memoirs of Scott’s contemporaries. It remains one of the standards by which Scott scholarship is judged.

    “Scott’s Journal is a hugely important piece of Scottish, and indeed European literature, published here with an incisive introduction, brilliantly judicious annotation and appendices and an excellent index . . . Walter Scott has never been so readable.” —The Herald, UK
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJul 1, 2010
    ISBN9781847674951
    The Journal of Sir Walter Scott
    Author

    Walter Scott

    Sir Walter Scott was born in Scotland in 1771 and achieved international fame with his work. In 1813 he was offered the position of Poet Laureate, but turned it down. Scott mainly wrote poetry before trying his hand at novels. His first novel, Waverley, was published anonymously, as were many novels that he wrote later, despite the fact that his identity became widely known.

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      The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - Walter Scott

      Preface

      Scott’s daughter Sophia and her husband, John Gibson Lockhart, may be considered the first editors of Scott’s Journal. Sophia wrote out a longhand version of the text which was then set up in type for her husband to read. Lockhart selected lengthy extracts for his Life of Scott, published in 1837, and added only a few notes, since his narrative provided what the reader was likely to want to know.

      The next edition of the Journal, (the first in which is appeared as a work in its own right) was brought out by David Douglas in 1890. Again the task of establishing the text was not undertaken by the editor, but in this case by his friend Professor Hume Brown. No one who is familiar with the difficulty of reading Scott’s handwriting in his later years will underestimate the problems he faced, and, as Victorian editions go, it is quite acceptable, even if it does not entirely merit Professor Masson’s description of it in an early review as ‘Sir Walter Scott’s Journal in perfect form and with all requisite annotations’.¹ The text has a number of inaccuracies, corrections were made without any indication of the original readings, and passages were omitted without comment; but Douglas knew his Scott well, and his notes (especially to the new edition of 1927) are helpful.

      The Journal’s next editor was John Guthrie Tait, who set out to revise the Hume Brown text from a photostat in the National Library of Scotland. Unfortunately the work was still incomplete at his death, but the last third was undertaken by W. M. Parker, who proved a better reader of Scott’s hand than any of his predecessors. The result was a text superior to Douglas’s, although the untimely death of Tait left it unsupported by adequate notes. It appeared in three volumes in 1939, 1941, and 1946, and was reprinted in one volume in 1950.

      None of these editions seriously misrepresents Scott in major matters. Each of them, however, has its textual inaccuracies and omissions, and an index which leaves something to be desired. In the footnotes there is no systematic attempt to supply the reader with the information that he needs about the people and events of the Journal. It seemed that there was room for a new and more fully annotated text. That was what I was attempting to provide for the Clarendon Press in 1972. This present Canongate Press edition is in fact the paperback edition of that work, with some minor corrections and additions.

      My aim has been to provide a complete and accurate version of what Scott actually wrote, with notes which in effect expand the work into a day-by-day biography of Scott’s final years. As it happens, Scott’s life at this time is exceptionally fully documented. A vast number of the letters he wrote survive, either published or still in manuscript; almost all the letters written to him during these years are preserved, along with dozens written about him by members of his family. We have the business letters and the diary of his publisher, and the minute-book of his trustees. Everyone who met him was likely to record the hours they spent in the company of so famous a man. On this wealth of published and unpublished biographical material, most of it in the great Scott collection of the National Library of Scotland, I have been able to draw freely for the notes.

      In editing the Journal I have constantly had in mind the aim of producing a readable as well as an accurate edition. Some explanation of the editorial practices adopted may be helpful.

      In order to keep the foot of the page as clear as possible of unimportant textual emendations, obvious slips of the pen have been corrected silently. All except repetitions like ‘the the’ have been listed in Appendix F. Mistakes which are of any interest for the light they throw on Scott’s mind or, in some cases, on his pronunciation, have, however, been left in the text and corrected in a footnote.

      The spelling and capitalization of the original have been retained, and the editorial punctuation kept as light as possible, in an attempt to retain something of the liveliness and spontaneity of the original that had been lost in previous editions. For reasons of readability or typographical consistency, however, the following alterations have been made:

      A full stop has been supplied where, as is often the case, Scott omitted it before a following capital letter.

      Brackets, inverted commas, and parentheses between dashes have been closed without comment where Scott forgot to close them. On a few occasions a capital letter has been supplied at the start of direct speech.

      The dot after Dr., Mr., and Mrs., which Scott sometimes added, is supplied in every case, and the elevated letter occasionally used by Scott in these and other abbreviations has been brought down.

      Ampersands, which Scott frequently but not invariably used, have been expanded.

      ‘To-day’ and ‘tomorrow’, which often appear as two words in the original, have been spelt throughout as they are here. Titles of books and names of ships, as well as quotations from foreign languages, have been set in italics. Scott occasionally underlined words in Latin or French but his practice was not consistent.

      Titles of poems, songs, and pictures have been placed in editorial inverted commas and given the usual capital letters.

      Date headings have been printed in the form most commonly used by Scott, as plain figures. Where the entry has been assigned to the wrong day in the original, the correct date is used and an explanation added in a footnote or in Appendix E.

      Editorial punctuation, where the meaning would otherwise be in doubt or the sentence difficult to read, has been sparingly added. All but a few commas, semicolons, and question-marks are editorial. Colons and exclamation-marks are Scott’s, as are dashes and all full stops except those mentioned above.

      Emendation has been as sparing as possible. When we have Scott’s warrant for it – ‘a solecism in point of composition like a Scotch word in speaking is indifferent to me’² – I have not emended ‘who’ to ‘who [m]’ (p. 530), nor supplied a verb in such entries as ‘This a morning of fidgetty nervous confusion’ (p. 384), nor obscured Scotti- cisms like ‘out the Bay’ (p. 761) by inserting‘[of]’. ‘Max’ has not been expanded to ‘Max [popple]’, nor ‘the D. of B.’ to ‘the D [uke] of B [uccleuch]’, since the flavour of the work depends so much on the hurried inconsequential jotting down of names and impressions. Obvious omissions have, however, been supplied. They appear in square brackets, thus [ ]. These additions have always been made reluctantly, but with least timidity when the omission occurs at the end of a line or page. Scott’s mind moved faster than his hand, and it is at these places that syllables or whole words are most apt to be lost. ‘Irritabi [lity]’ (p. 68) and ‘imagina [tion]’ (p. 81), for instance, are the final words in their lines. Words which Scott should have omitted for the sake of the sense are enclosed in angular brackets, thus < >.

      It was tempting to emend the last hundred pages of the text very considerably. I was reluctant, however, to obscure the ‘hideous paralytick custom of stuttering’³ which Scott’s pen acquired in his later years, and decided to leave untouched, as far as possible, the mis-spellings and repetitions which so vividly illustrate the decline of his powers. The strangely garbled words of the final months are to be ascribed, therefore, to the confusion of Scott’s mind, not to an inattentive reading of the proofs.

      Deletions have not been retained. They are relatively few and for the most part without interest. Those of any importance are recorded in footnotes.

      Mis-spellings, both Scott’s habitual ones and those caused in his later years by confusion of mind, have been retained. The words for which Scott had his own personal spelling are ‘accomodation’, ‘aflicted’, ‘astmha’, ‘embarassing’, ‘knowlege’, ‘plege’ (for ‘pledge’), ‘segar’, ‘shufle’, ‘stopd’ (for ‘stopped’), ‘untill’, and ‘wellcome’. In addition he usually, but not invariably, shortened the verb-ending ‘ed’ to plain ‘d’.

      Some of Scott’s idiosyncrasies are worthy of notice. Certain omissions, for instance, occur so often that they probably reflect the way he spoke. He sometimes omitted the final letter of the present participle (‘bein’, p. 487; ‘good-lookin’, p. 521) and of the past participle (‘look’ for ‘lookd’, p. 117). In his last years the tendency to forget the final ‘t’ in the perfect tense became more marked, and we havècrep’ (p. 652), ‘wen’ (p. 664), and ‘lef’ (p. 667). The ‘d’ sometimes disappears from ‘and’, as does in the last quarter of the Journal the final ‘e’ on a number of words. From the beginning, the adjective occasionally appears for the adverb and vice versa, and this confusion, connected perhaps with his by then slurred speech, is increasingly marked in the final hundred pages, where, for instance, ‘exclusive’ (p. 722), ‘graduall’ (p. 759), and ‘splendid’ (p. 770) appear instead of the corresponding adverbs.

      Other mistakes and mis-spellings give an interesting indication of Scott’s accent. He lived in the last age in which educated Edinburgh men spoke Scots rather than English, before increasing commerce of all kinds with England reduced the differences to insignificance. ‘Scotch’, he wrote to Constable in 1822, ‘was a language which we have heard spoken by the learnd and the wise & witty & the accomplishd and which had not a trace of vulgarity in it but on the contrary sounded rather graceful and genteel. You remember how well Mrs. Murray Keith – the late Lady Dumfries – my poor mother & other ladies of that day spoke their native language – it was different from English as the Venetian is from the Tuscan dialect of Italy but it never occurd to any one that the Scotish any more than the Venetian was more vulgar than those who spoke the purer and more classical – But that is all gone & the remembrance will be drownd with us the elders of this existing generation.’⁴ Scott was of the old school, and prided himself on his native accent and ‘Berwickshire burr’.⁵ The distinctive vowel sounds of his speaking voice survive for us in words likèJohnie’ for ‘Johnnie’ (passim), and ‘over’ for ‘offer’ (p. 447); in ‘debt’ for ‘date’ and ‘date’ for ‘debt’ (pp. 444 and 574); and in ‘a fear task’ for ‘a fair task’ (p. 477). His burr accounts for a mistake likèperils’ for ‘pearls’ on p. 774.

      A word should be added about Scott’s quotations. The range of his reading was extraordinary and his memory unusually tenacious. He was able, therefore, to quote effortlessly not only from Shakespeare, the Bible and the Latin texts he had read at school but from ballads, popular collections of poetry, songs, plays and farces. In the novels, as Tom B. Haber showed in 1930,⁶ Scott’s practice was to invent some of the tags he needed, and to adapt – consciously or uncon- sciously – the lines he borrowed from other people. In the Journal almost every identifiable quotation is misquoted or freely altered, and no doubt many of those which have defied all attempts to ascertain their authorship are half-remembered adaptations of ballads and songs. The references at the foot of the page do not take notice of the correctness or otherwise of the quotation as it appears in the text, unless the link with the original version is so tenuous as to require explanation.

      1 . See David Masson, Edinburgh Sketches and Memories , 1892, p. 204.

      2 . Entry for 22 April 1826.

      3 . Entry for 5 April 1831.

      4 . Letters , vii. 83.

      5 . Letters , vii. 63.

      6 . P.M.L.A ., vol. 45, 1930, pp. 1140–9.

      In Memoriam J.C.C.

      Contents

      ABBREVIATIONS USED BY SCOTT

      ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES

      INTRODUCTION

      Scott’s Edinburgh: The Changing City

      The Law

      Abbotsford

      The Financial Crash

      The Arbitration

      Political Affairs

      The People of the Journal

      THE EVENTS OF THE JOURNAL

      THE JOURNAL

      ADDITIONAL NOTES

      APPENDICES

      A. Chronology of the Life of Sir Walter Scott

      B. Country Houses of the Journal and their Owners

      C. Edinburgh Addresses

      D. Politics in the Journal

      E. Dating

      F. Silent Corrections

      G. Memoranda

      INDEX

      Abbreviations Used by Scott

      Abbreviations Used in the Notes

      Introduction

      It is fortunate that Sir Walter Scott began his Journal when he did. He was already fifty-four, famous, and to all appearances wealthy. He was Laird of Abbotsford and a notable member of Edinburgh society; he numbered among his friends almost all the great men of his day; his public was the entire civilized world. As he wrote the first entry in November 1825 his fortunes were at their height. Yet within a few months the wheel had spun wildly and he had lost everything – his land, his money, and the wife he loved. The Journal, which would have been the informal record of a major writer’s declining years, became instead the revelation of a great man’s courage in adversity.

      No one can fail to be impressed, like the early reviewer of Douglas’s edition, by its account ‘of indomitable manliness, and prodigious industry’.¹ He writes through days of pain and sickness; he writes down the depression of spirits which afflicted him more often than his friends or family were allowed to know; he writes day in and day out, weekday and Sunday, in Edinburgh and at Abbotsford, to pay the debts which he considered debts of honour. The Journal confirms, too, the opinion of those who knew Scott, that he was one of the pleasantest of great writers. His generosity is everywhere apparent – not merely the generosity which sends £10 to Haydon or £50 to Gillies, but a generosity of judgement, a willingness to be pleased by new acquaintances or new books. His evenness of temper, which only illness seems to have ruffled, is remarkable. He is pestered by coxcombs and eccentrics; his precious time is picked away by bores and foreigners and friends of friends. Scott does not claim the privilege of withdrawing himself, but does the honours of the house till they are gone, and settles again to his work.

      The Journal is also to some extent a private diary of day-to-day events, although we have Lockhart’s word for it that it was intended for publication. ‘Scott clearly, and indeed avowedly, considered himself as writing what would one day be published’, he told Croker in 1853. ‘In his will he distinctly directs what shall be done with the money that his executors shall obtain in respect of this and other  manuscripts.’² No doubt Lockhart is right, although how far Scott’s bankruptcy and the need to turn every word he wrote to account may have altered his original purpose is matter for speculation. Certainly the internal evidence supports Lockhart’s contention. A reference to ‘those [who] may read my confessions’³ is scarcely conclusive, as it might refer only to his own family; but Scott’s reticence throughout the whole work seems to clinch the argument. He is much franker – and ruder – in his correspondence than in his Journal. For the character of Mrs. Jobson, or Mrs. Thomas Scott, or his cousin Maxpopple, you have to go to the Letters; you can make no guess at them from the Journal. Obviously he had one eye on future publication, and had no wish to cause embarrassment to the people he wrote about or to his own family. Nonetheless there are trivialities that he would have expected to be excised, and much that was obvious to himself and his contemporaries which the lapse of time has made obscure. Some account of the world in which he lived is therefore a necessary prelude to the Journal itself.

      SCOTT’S EDINBURGH: THE CHANGING CITY

      The Edinburgh of Sir Walter Scott was a city of astonishing contrasts. Its centre was still the High Street running down the hill from the Castle to Holyrood House, but its tenement buildings and dirty wynds and closes were no longer the homes of the wealthy and the well-connected. They had moved to what they called the New Town, the severe and classical streets and squares which had been built to the north of Princes Street Gardens, linked to the Old Town by the steep slope of the Mound and the arches of the North Bridge. Like generations of Edinburgh men before him, Scott was born into the noisy, crowded squalor of the Old Town, although the family moved three years later from the College Wynd to one of a row of unpretentiously elegant houses in George Square, on the south side of the city. At the time of his marriage Scott took one of the new houses in Castle Street in the New Town, and there, but for the financial disaster of 1826, he would have stayed until his death.

      The New Town was largely created within Scott’s lifetime. Craig’s plan was finally accepted, and the first feus (in St. Andrew Square) were let only four years before he was born; when he married in 1797, development had moved west only as far as Castle Street; by the time of the Journal the town had grown considerably bigger, and there were complaints that the atmosphere was affected by the extent of the expansion to the north. The great public buildings all belong to this period. The Assembly Rooms in George Street were opened in 1787; the old Parliament House, the seat of the Law Courts, was given a classical façade between 1807 and 1810 and became a New Town building at the heart of the Old Town. The Edinburgh Academy was opened in 1824, the Royal Institution at the foot of the Mound in 1826, and the Royal High School in Regent Road in 1829.⁴

      Every morning during the Session Scott passed from one world to another as the Clerks’ Coach trundled up the Mound to the Parliament House on the High Street. The change of oldways into new, which is the theme of Waverley, Rob Roy, and Redgauntlet, was visible around him in substantial stone and lime. At the endof the day’s work he returned from the Scotland about which he wrote to the new Scotland in which he lived. The New Town gave Scott and his generation an environment which combined gracious living and intimacy to a degree that can scarcely have been equalled anywhere else at any other time. Within half a mile of Scott’s house – in Princes Street, George Street, Heriot Row, Charlotte Square, Shandwick Place – lived most of his Edinburgh friends, a civilized, well-to-do, close-knit community, largely of advocates, many of them known to each other from their school and college days. Scott walked the mile home from Court in the afternoon, and he could go on foot to the dinner parties and supper parties for which Edinburgh was renowned. It was a far remove from the Edinburgh of the novels, from Prince Charles leaving Holyrood for Prestonpans, from Covenanters tried and tortured in the Laigh Hall, or Captain Porteous seized from the Heart of Midlothian and lynched in the Grassmarket. That Edinburgh survives in the novels. The Journal belongs to the New Town.

      THE LAW

      The most influential and frequently the most able men of Scott’s time in Edinburgh were lawyers. Whether or not he practised at the Bar, a young man of good connections normally attended classes in law and became a member of the Faculty of Advocates. Most of Scott’s friends in Edinburgh were therefore members of this ‘noblesse of the robe’,⁵ and references to the Parliament House and its Courts are so frequent that some knowledge of the structure of the legal system in Scott’s time is necessary to a full understanding of the Journal.

      The supreme civil court in Scotland (subject to a right of appeal to the House of Lords) is the Court of Session. The Judges are known as the Lords of Session, and in 1825 there were fifteen of them. The seven junior Lords of Session sat in the Outer House to hear cases at first instance; the other eight sat in the Inner House in two Divisions to hear appeals. The First Division was presided over by the Lord President, the Second by the Lord Justice-Clerk. Scott sat as Clerk of Session in the First Division.

      The supreme criminal court, from which there is no appeal to the House of Lords, is the High Court of Justiciary. In Scott’s day the Judges of this Court were the Lord Justice-Clerk and five Lords of Session, known in this capacity as the Lords Commissioners of Justiciary. Since this Court had its own Clerks of Justiciary, Scott was professionally involved only in its sittings on Circuit at Jedburgh, which he had to attend as Sheriff of Selkirkshire.

      The Teind Court, which sat every second Wednesday during session, performed administrative and judicial functions connected with parish churches, manses, stipends, and ‘teinds’, or tithes. Its Judges were the Lords of Session, but the Court had its own Clerks, so Scott was free on a ‘Teind Wednesday’.

      The Jury Court, established in the teeth of heated opposition as recently as 1815, introduced jury trials in civil causes to Scotland. The Lord Chief Commissioner, who presided, was Scott’s friend William Adam of Blair-Adam. This Court had no original jurisdiction but tried issues of fact remitted to it by, for instance, the Court of Session, the Admiralty Court, or the House of Lords. Its existence as a separate Court, which was appropriate while civil jury trial was an innovation in Scotland, came to an end in 1830 when it was merged with the Court of Session.

      The Court of Exchequer concerned itself with such matters as Customs and Excise, the approval of Sheriffs’ accounts, and the collection of Crown debts. The Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer Court (throughout most of the period of the Journal Scott’s close friend Sir Samuel Shepherd) was assisted by two Barons of Exchequer. The Court did very little, and Scott would not have refused a Baron’s gown had it been offered to him in 1826.⁶

      The previous twenty years had been a period of upheaval and reform. Between 1808 and 1830 the Court of Session, which Cockburn described as ‘a mob of fifteen judges, meeting without previous consultation, and each impatient for independent eminence, and many of them liable to be called away and to return irregularly in the course of the same day’,⁷ was reshaped in the  manner described above. In 1825 the prize jurisdiction of the Admiralty Court was transferred to the High Court of Admiralty in England, and there was a far-reaching reorganization of the Sheriff Courts. To many of these changes Scott was opposed. The tendency in every case was towards a closer conformity with England, dictated not by reason but by ‘Anglomania – a rage of imitating English forms and practices’,⁸ and Scott, whose poems and novels celebrated, as he said of Waverley, ‘some traits of those characters and manners peculiar to Scotland the last remnants of which vanishd during my own youth’,⁹ saw Scots Law and the Scottish Church as the last bastions of national independence. He was not, however, opposed to all legal reforms. Indeed he acted as Secretary to the Parliamentary Commission which prepared the way for the reforms of 1808, and he voted with Jeffrey and other Whigs to reduce the number of judges in the Court of Session – a reform finally effected in 1830.

      Scott did not practise long at the Bar. When the Journal opens he had held for more than twenty years two legal offices which brought him a decent salary and little danger of too much work. A Sheriff’s duties were wide-ranging, but not particularly onerous – especially in Selkirkshire, which had a small, scattered, and, if poaching were left out of the question, a generally law-abiding population. Minor breaches of the law of all kinds came before his Court, and, as was inevitable in days of slow communications, frequent civil disorder, and no police force, he had considerable administrative and magisterial functions. It is clear from the Journal that Scott performed his duties conscientiously. He works on Sheriff Court processes, regularly transmits the county money to the Sheriff-Clerk, super-intends elections to Parliament, creates a force of Special Constables during the unrest of 1830 and 1831, and conducts investigations into cases of assault and riotous behaviour; he attends the Circuit Court at Jedburgh, and occasionally presides himself in the Sheriff Court at Selkirk.

      The Sheriff, who was paid £300 a year, was allowed to appoint a Sheriff-Substitute, resident in the county, to hear cases and conduct the day-to-day business on his behalf. During the years covered by the Journal Scott’s deputy was his cousin William Scott of Maxpoffle, usually referred to as ‘Max’ or ‘Maxpopple’, who was neither very intelligent nor very efficient, but who badly needed the salary. From the letters which survive it would appear that the real power lay in the hands of an admirable Sheriff-Clerk, Andrew Lang, grandfather of the man of letters.

      During legal terms Scott was necessarily absent from his sheriffdom, by virtue of his other duties as one of the Principal Clerks to the Court of Session. The Clerks were not the mere scribes that their title suggests, but held a position roughly analogous to that of a Town Clerk or a Clerk of Parliament. They had charge of the papers connected with a case, and were responsible for ensuring that the correct legal procedures were followed. At the end of the debate they had to reduce the Judge’s decision as delivered from the Bench to a concise written decree or ‘interlocutor’. A Clerkship of Session was not a sinecure, but the salary of £1300 with which it was rewarded was handsome remuneration for the work involved. The Court sat from the 12th of November to the 24th of December, from the 15th of January to the 11th of March, and from the 12th of May to the 11th of July. Scott was not at the table before 10 a.m. and was often finished for the day by 1 p.m. If the sitting was prolonged beyond 2 p.m. he felt aggrieved enough to mention it in his Journal. Since cases were shared between three Clerks, there was often time during the day to write letters – although not novels, as he was at pains to make clear.¹⁰ Saturday was a working day, but Monday was not, and Scott also had a clear day every second Wednesday, when there was a sitting of the Teind Court.

      ABBOTSFORD

      Because of his two official positions Scott divided his time between Edinburgh and Abbotsford. By 1825 the house, whose enlargement and embellishment had been one of his principal concerns for more than ten years, was at last complete. A great ball to celebrate his son’s engagement to Jane Jobson was held in January of that year. He could look forward to spending his last years in the ‘Conundrum Castle’¹¹ which he had created beside the Tweed, devoting himself to the care of his rising woods and plantations. Financially Abbotsford may have been the Dalilah who brought Scott to ruin,¹² but to see it, as so many commentators have done, as the embodiment of Scott’s yearning for a feudal past, which he could relive as Laird of Abbotsford, is perverse. The plain facts are that an estate was the sensible investment for a man who was getting on in the  world, that the Sheriff of Selkirkshire was bound to live for some part of the year on Tweedside, and that Scott's was only one of 'the numerous families having independent fortunes that have chosen the neighbourhood for a place of residence, attracted', the Statistical Account of Roxburghshire suggested in 1841, 'by the amenity of the situation'.¹³ Most of Scott's friends owned houses and estates in the country round Edinburgh or in the Borders; and by comparison with Arniston or Melville Castle, Mellerstain and Minto, Abbotsford is homely rather than grandiose. The public rooms are intimate, the upstairs more on the scale of a cottage than of a Gothic castle. For all the extravagance of its details, Abbotsford is a house for living in. It pleased Scott to return to the country from which his ancestors came, but he had other good reasons for building there.

      Nonetheless he overreached himself. The house and its embellishments cost thousands of pounds that were always to be earned by the next novel or the next novel but one, and land was a constant temptation. As early as 1816, long before the house was built or money laid aside to pay for it, he had added Kaeside to Abbotsford; he bought Toftfield in 1817, and he carried as far as Italy the dream of buying the neighbouring estate of Faldonside from Nicol Milne.

      In 1825 Abbotsford was finished, and, unless Scott lost the favour of the public, it would be paid for in a few years’ time. But the financial storm-clouds were already gathering.

      THE FINANCIAL CRASH

      The country-wide financial crisis of 1825 had already brought down numerous banks and business houses when on 14 January 1826 Constable’s London agents, Hurst, Robinson & Coy., stopped payment. Their fall brought down in turn Archibald Constable & Coy., Scott’s publishers, and with them James Ballantyne & Coy., the firm which printed the Waverley Novels and in which Scott himself was a partner. As there was no limited liability in those days, Scott himself was held responsible not only for his private debts of £20,000, but also for the entire debts of the concern, which amounted to nearly £100,000.

      This huge sum is largely accounted for by the incautious use of Accommodation Bills by Scott, Ballantyne, and Constable. An Accommodation Bill was a type of Bill of Exchange where one party lent his name in order to ‘accommodate’ another and enable him to raise capital at a discount. In the case of an ordinary Bill of Exchange the party who signed as Acceptor intended to pay the sum due on the due date, but in the case of an Accommodation Bill the true intention was that the Drawer of the Bill would redeem or ‘retire’ it on or before the due date, thus relieving the Acceptor of his liability. If, however, the Drawer could not pay when the date came, the Acceptor was liable. The position of the Acceptor was therefore very much like that of a person guaranteeing an overdraft.

      Archibald Constable & Coy. and James Ballantyne & Coy. were financed to a great extent by accommodating each other. Their system was to keep the amount guaranteed by each firm roughly equal and to adjust the balance from time to time. At the crash Archibald Constable & Coy. had accommodated James Ballantyne & Coy. to the extent of £29,088. 2s. 6d., and James Ballantyne & Coy. had accommodated Archibald & Coy. to the extent of £29,624. 2s. 9d., but neither firm had funds sufficient to repay the debts guaranteed by the other.

      Scott, as a partner in James Ballantyne & Coy., was liable on both sets of Bills, since the partnership was the Drawer of one set and the Acceptor of the other. In addition he was liable on a further set of Bills which he had accepted in order to accommodate James Ballantyne & Coy. In the event, the liability of both firms was discharged by Scott, since the dividend of 2s. 9d. in the £ paid by Constable & Coy. was set off against interest.

      The full extent of Scott’s liability was not immediately recognized. The Trustees’ first calculation of the claims against Scott and James Ballantyne & Coy., and of the funds available to meet them, was as follows:

      This was an underestimate. By the end of 1827, when the first dividend came to be paid, the claims were more accurately assessed at £120,899. 5s. 6d.¹⁵ – and these figures did not include £10,000 raised on the estate a few days before the crash. The principal debts were:

      The assets of Scott and Ballantyne, individually and as a company, totalled £48,494, of which Scott’s share was almost exactly half. It was made up as follows:

      Scott’s assets were just sufficient to have met the private claims against him; they could not begin to pay off the debts of James Ballantyne & Coy. In any case it would not have been sensible to dispose of most of these assets for ready money, and the Trustees did not. On the understanding that Scott would write for their benefit, they left him Abbotsford to live in, along with his library and furniture, and since the copyrights were of infinitely greater value in their own hands they too were not sold. Their best hope was to trust in Scott’s own resolve to write his way out of his difficulties. ‘This right hand shall work it all off’, he had said,¹⁸ and work it off, with Cadell’s help, he did.

      When the crash came three possibilities were open to Scott: Cessio, Sequestration, or a Trust Deed. By the procedure known as Cessio Bonorum an insolvent debtor could, if his creditors agreed, put all his goods at the disposition of his creditors. He remained liable for the full amount of his debts, but could no longer be imprisoned for his failure to pay. At one point in the Journal¹⁹ McCulloch of Ardwall avails himself of this procedure to procure his release from jail. For Scott, however, it was not the best solution, since it would have entailed the loss of his library, his furniture, and his life-rent of Abbotsford.

      Sequestration was similar to modern procedures. It gave the debtor an absolute discharge, provided that four-fifths of the creditors, in number and value, concurred. It was available only to debtors engaged in trade. When harried by Abud in 1827 Scott was nearly forced to apply for Sequestration. Had he done so, it would have eased his burden and perhaps lengthened his life, but it would not have suited his creditors, who would have received some shillings in the pound instead of the full amount. None the less Sequestration was the course Scott himself would have recommended to a client in his position.²⁰ Why then did he not avail himself of it at the start? Firstly, because he was a gentleman. Sequestration was for debtors engaged in trade, and although Scott was legally entitled to it by virtue of his business interests, he could not take advantage of it without sinking himself for ever, in his own eyes and in the eyes of his friends, to the level of a shopkeeper. He might by this means have saved his library and bid his creditors defiance; but in doing so, he would, as he put it, in a court of honour deserve to lose his spurs.2 Secondly, almost all the money he owned and much of the money he owed was sunk in the estate of Abbotsford, which he had effectively removed from the reach of his creditors by settling it on his son Walter at his marriage only a year before. If he had petitioned for Sequestration, he could have paid perhaps 7s. in the £; had he still owned Abbotsford, instead of merely the life-rent, he might have paid double. Evil tongues would not be lacking to whisper that he had foreseen the crash, and to protect Abbotsford had taken steps which although legal were scarcely honourable.

      Instead, Scott took the third way that was open to him and signed a Trust Deed for his creditors. This had the advantage of allowing all parties to agree on the conditions that were to be observed. In this case the Trustees decided to sell 39 Castle Street, but to leave Scott his official salary to live on, and the use of his library and furniture at Abbotsford. Scott in turn bound himself in these terms:

      I the said Sir Walter Scott have resolved to employ my time and talents on the production of such literary works as shall seem to me most likely to promote the ends I have in view, the sums arising from which works I am also desirous to devote to the payment of the debts owing by me as a Partner of the said Company [James Ballantyne & Coy.] and as an individual.²¹

      Throughout the period of the Journal that is in effect what Scott did. Almost every moment when he is free from the Court is employed in the attempt to write off his debts. On Sundays, or on wet days at Abbotsford, he works harder than on ordinary days. As 1827 succeeds 1826 the number of Entries which record six leaves completed in the day, instead of the original task of three, show that he is working twice as hard as before, and much harder than he ought. He has always written in the morning – that is, before breakfast – and in the forenoon at Abbotsford; now writing before dinner ‘has become a habit’,²² and usually he works also in the evening. In 1829 he begins to fall asleep as he writes Anne of Geierstein. By 1831 the compulsion to write and keep writing, despite illness and disability, is so strong that Moore is told that ‘The great object in sending him abroad is to disengage his mind from the strong wish to write by which he is haunted.’²³

      The result of Scott’s unremitting labour was a staggering collection of titles. Woodstock was already begun at the time of the crash, and the first volume of the Life of Napoleon was finished. Between 1826 and 1831 Scott wrote five novels – Woodstock, The Fair Maid of Perth, Anne of Geierstein, Count Robert of Paris, and Castle Dangerous; one collection of short stories – Chronicles of the Canongate; one play – Auchindrane; the nine-volume Life of Napoleon; a two-volume History of Scotland for Dr. Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia; four series of Tales of a Grandfather; Notes and Introduction to the Magnum edition of the novels; and two volumes of essays for the Miscellaneous Prose Works.

      The numbers of each edition and the profits to the Trust were of this order:

      In addition the small Collected Editions brought in £1950, and the Magnum Opus or Collected Edition, which was the means in the end of liquidating the debt, had contributed £18,000 by the time Scott went abroad. In less than six years he made nearly £50,000 for his creditors.

      He also made some thousands for himself. It was not in his nature to pinch and scrape. ‘Papa is a bad hand at economizing’, Anne told Moore. ‘All his great plans of retrenchment have ended in selling my horse.’²⁵ In truth no amount of retrenchment could have enabled him to live within his official income of less than £2000 a year, as long as he had Abbotsford, or as long as his fame drew every traveller of rank and eminence who visited Scotland to pass along Tweedside. His own generosity too made a mockery of his economies: £10 to save Haydon from his creditors; £5 to Laidlaw; £20 to Charles; £100 to Walter; £50 to Gillies and £50 again. ‘I will grow hard-hearted and do no more’,²⁶ Scott resolves in despair; but the next appeal always finds the same open hand.

      Money had to be found from somewhere, and it came from the same unfailing source. In addition to the £50,000 for his creditors, Scott earned close on £6000 for himself. The four series of Tales of a Grandfather brought him more than £3000; there was £1500 from Dr. Lardner for his History of Scotland; £500 from Cadell for Chronicles of the Canongate; £100 or £50 for every lengthy review for the Quarterly or Foreign Quarterly. The Trustees were embar-rassed to find that Scott was writing for his own profit as well as for theirs. The first case was Chronicles of the Canongate, which Scott intended to publish anonymously in a limited edition for a payment of £500. When he changed his mind and allowed Cadell to extend the impression to 8000, he told the Trustees about the work and stipulated that a further £2000 should be paid to them.1 Tales of a  Grandfather posed them more of a problem. Scott kept the proceeds for himself, without a word to the Trustees, other than a remark ‘in a jocular manner’ to Gibson: ‘Remember I do not mean to give you this little Book, I must keep it for myself to pay my current expenses and for my family.’²⁷ After anxious discussion they acted magnani-mously:

      taking into view how largely the creditors have drawn and were continuing to draw from the treasures of his genius since his embarrassments came upon him, and the high moral feeling from which his great and productive exertions on their behalf spring, and how indispensably necessary it was both for his health and his spirits that he should continue to live in the same easy and comfortable style to which he had long been accustomed, the Trustees did not see it to be their duty to interfere with him in reference to the works in question.²⁸

      No claim was made either on his History of Scotland or his Quarterly money, and it was only when Castle Dangerous came to be written and they discovered that ‘without communicating… with the Trustees Sir Walter had disposed of the First Edition of this new Book to Mr. Cadell and had applied the author’s money to his own purposes’,²⁹ that they had to make a stand. But by then Scott was too ill to be fully aware of what he was doing.

      His contention that these works were written in his own time, ‘in the hours snatched literally from rest and exercise’,1 is not to be taken as the whole truth, for the Journal Entries quite clearly show that, for instance, throughout the months of October 1827 and June 1828 he wrote nothing other than Tales of a Grandfather. The sums involved, however, can never have amounted to more than an eighth of what he was paying into the Trust, and ultimately it was in everyone’s interest that he should be as free as possible from financial worries.

      THE ARBITRATION

      The Trustees of the two bankrupt companies – James Ballantyne & Coy., and Archibald Constable & Coy. – inevitably found themselves in dispute over a number of questions, and they agreed to submit their differences to the arbitration of Alexander Irving, who was raised to the Bench shortly afterwards as Lord Newton. Since the Journal’s frequent references to the progress of the arbitration are confusing and in places apparently contradictory, it is worth setting out the individual points at issue.

      Constable’s Trustees laid claim to the Life of Napoleon and Wood-stock, on the grounds that they had agreed with Scott to publish them. Scott’s Trustees, in reply, argued that any agreement lapsed at the failure of Archibald Constable & Coy., for a company that no longer existed could not carry out its part of the bargain by publishing the works in question. While Lord Newton pondered, the works were completed and published, and by mutual agreement the profits were banked until the arbiter gave his judgement. When he declared in favour of Scott, on the grounds that the words ‘had never been the subject of a completed bargain’,³⁰ the Trustees were able at last to pay their first dividend.

      At the time of the crash six volumes of Miscellaneous Prose Works were in preparation. Two volumes were already in Constable’s possession, two volumes were in Ballantyne’s printing office, and two volumes were as yet unfinished. Since in that state they were of no use to anyone, Scott proposed in July 1826 that he should supply the necessary copy, and that the whole work should be published as soon as possible, the profits to be laid aside until Lord Newton decided to whom they rightly belonged. The Prose Works were accordingly published jointly by Cadell in Edinburgh and Longman in London; but as Lord Newton decided in favour of Archibald Constable & Coy. (‘altho’ they had not paid the price’, as the minutes of a meeting of Scott's Trustees complains, ‘but had merely granted Bills which were dishonoured and now rank on Sir Walter Scott's Estate’),³¹ the only profit to the Trust was £200 for reissuing and putting to press.

      Scott also lost the copyrights of his earlier novels. These he had sold to Constable, but he argued that part of them remained his property as £3800 of the purchase price had never been paid. The arbiter declared otherwise; Constable’s Trustees put them up for sale, and Cadell and Scott's Trustees had to buy them back for £8400.³²

      The final question to be settled was the ownership of the manu-scripts of the novels. Scott had given these to Constable, but the condition on which the gift was made – that the secret of his authorship should be preserved – had been infringed, he said, by Constable. Lord Newton decided, however, that they remained the property of Constable’s creditors, as they were a gift of a remuneratory nature. They were sold at Evans’s rooms in London in 1831 for only a few hundred pounds. Waverley fetched £18, Ivanhoe £12, and Rob Roy the top price of £50.³³

      On three out of the five main issues before him, Lord Newton decided against Scott. Nonetheless ‘the grand questions’.³⁴ of the profits of Woodstock and the Life of Napoleon were settled in his favour, and the loss of the copyrights, on which all hopes of paying off the debt by the judicious management of further editions depended, was not irreparable.

      POLITICAL AFFAIRS

      Scott followed politics with more than a spectator’s interest. He was the friend of Canning, Peel, and Wellington, and acquainted with many other members of the Cabinet.³⁵ His link with London during the turbulent years to which the Journal belongs was Lockhart, a faithful and frequent correspondent on political affairs. By instinct and long habit Scott was a high Tory, and on most of the important issues he held the views that one would expect. On the Catholic Question, however, his visit to Ireland in 1825 had made him change his mind, and he gave a guarded welcome to the passage of the Catholic ‘Emancipation’ Act in 1829, which threw open most civil and military offices to Roman Catholics.

      To Reform, however, he remained resolutely opposed. He did not understand the forces that were at work, nor see that the new patterns of production and employment forced on the country by the industrial revolution and the needs of the war against Napoleon had altered society beyond any possibility of going back. What he saw was a prosperous and contented population of peasants and small farmers turned in one generation into ‘the stern sullen unwashd artificers whom you see lounging sulkily along the streets of the towns in Lancashire’,³⁶ and unruly mobs filled with revolutionary ideas.

      Reform of the franchise was, however, necessary as well as inevitable. Omond, in his book The Lord Advocates of Scotland, describes a state of affairs which cried out for action:

      In Scotland the state of the representation was far worse than in England. The population was, in round numbers, two millions three hundred and sixty thousand. The franchise was in the hands of about three thousand persons. The county franchise was the privilege of the freeholders. Of these fully one-half were Paper Barons, voters who possessed no property, but had voting qualifications. In Midlothian, out of one hundred and seventy-two electors, one hundred and forty-one were paper voters…. In Buteshire, out of twenty-one electors, twenty were paper voters…. The burgh franchise was in the hands of the self- elected Town Councils. Edinburgh, the population of which was upward of one hundred and sixty-two thousand, had thirty-three electors, the members of its Town Council; but the average number of voters in a Scottish burgh was nineteen, the average number of the corporations. The distribution of the burgh seats was, moreover, grossly absurd. Glasgow, with a population of one hundred and forty-seven thousand, had one-fourth of a member, whom it shared with Renfrew, Rutherglen, and Dumbarton, whose united populations came to a little more than ten thousand. Paisley with twenty-six thousand inhabitants, Green-ock with twenty-two thousand, Kilmarnock with twelve thousand, Falkirk with eleven thousand, had no representation in Parliament. But five small burghs in Fife, the united populations of which amounted to only six thousand, returned a member.³⁷

      The reforms projected by Lord John Russell in March 1831 seem scarcely radical enough to make much impression on a situation as desperate as this. Only 60,000 new voters in Scotland were added by the new measures extending the franchise (i) to householders in the burghs rated at £10, and (ii) to all those in the counties who possessed real property to the value of £10, or were tenants on a long lease paying at least £50 in rent. But to Scott these proposals, as embodied in three successive Reform Bills,³⁸ were ‘the most uncalld for attack upon a free constitution… which ever was ventured in my day’.³⁹ He campaigned against them with vigour, and urged his younger friends to adopt the same uncompromising principles. The news that the Third Reform Bill had finally received the Royal Assent in July 1832 was probably kept from him, but it would have consoled him a little, as he lay on his deathbed, to know that his young chief, the Duke of Buccleuch, as Scott had hoped he would, ‘to the last protested against the bill’.⁴⁰

      THE PEOPLE OF THE JOURNAL

      Sir Walter Scott was fifty-four in 1825 and Lady Scott a year older. There is no clear description of her in the Journal, only the hint that she was not the person she had been. Other diarists were less reticent. ‘Lady Scott was a little, made-up sort of personage in my time,’ writes an Edinburgh lawyer, ‘luxuriant, dark, and I should say not natural curls, shading a yellow face, blushing under a real or artificial bloom of crimson, a very little figure, and a bustling demeanour exhibited both a physical and moral manner in singular contrast to the manly plainness of her illustrious husband.’⁴¹ Helen Graham was struck too by the ‘complete contrast to her husband: she is a funny looking little bodie and very fond of showy dress, and completely foreign both in manner and appearance. She is said to be very variable towards her acquaintances. She was so kind, sweet and hospitable to us; nothing could exceed it.’⁴² Lady Shelley found her in her younger days ‘the greatest bore in Europe’, speaking ‘an almost unintelligible broken English’,⁴³ and Mrs. Grant of Laggan thought her a snob. Scott’s own testimony, however, should not be ignored. ‘Whatever were her failings,’ he wrote to Sophia after her death, ‘they hurt only herself and arose out of bodily illness and must be weighd against one of the most sincere loyal and generous hearts that ever blood warmd.’⁴⁴

      His elder son Walter was twenty-four when the Journal opens. He was tall and bewhiskered, rode beautifully, and was seriously devoted to his army duties as a Captain in the 15th Hussars. Scott adored him. ‘He has good sense and the most perfect good temper,’ he writes to Lady Louisa Stuart, ‘bel cavalier beau sabreur a very kind husband to his little wife.’⁴⁵ But he was also obstinate,⁴⁶ occasionally uncivil,⁴⁷ and, on the evidence of those who met him in Italy, ‘rather an adept at the gaming-table’.⁴⁸

      His wife Jane, whom he had married in January 1825, was Sir Adam Ferguson’s niece. ‘Poor Jane’s heart is so sincere and good that one must make considerable allowance for the narrowness of her education’,⁴⁹ Scott wrote to Walter, forgetting to mention the even greater allowances that should be made for the estate and fortune she brought with her. Mrs. Thomas Scott found her ‘rather retired’,⁵⁰ and such of her letters as survive reveal a humourless, insipid girl. To Scott’s great grief she had no children. Neither the Lockharts nor Anne enjoyed her company,⁵¹ but she was at least preferable to her widowed mother, ‘the fat, vulgar Mrs. Jobson’. Mrs. Grant of Laggan says that she was not entirely happy at the match: ‘her Jane might have looked higher; it was only a baronetcy, and quite a late creation’.⁵² She was troublesome before the wedding – ‘A perfect allegory on the banks of the Nile and all for nonsense of the first water’⁵³ – and no great favourite with her son-in-law after it.⁵⁴

      Scott’s younger son Charles was ‘a nice young man’,⁵⁵ cleverer, more likeable, and more attached to his family than Walter. He was a little deaf and at times terribly afflicted by rheumatism. In 1825 he was still at Oxford; afterwards he was placed in the Foreign Office, and he died in 1841 of a fever caught while on a mission to Persia.

      Sophia was Scott’s

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