Sir Walter Scott died in September
1832 as the leading man of letters in Europe. Yet for all his fame few particulars
of his life could be gleaned from memoirs published during his lifetime. This was
partly because Scott was largely successful in avoiding scandal and the attention
it brought, and partly because denying his authorship of the Waverley Novels had
kept biographers at bay. Driven from cover by his financial woes, Scott began
relating his literary life in annotations to the collected editions published to
relieve his debts. Following his death memoirs began to appear, some hostile,
anticipating the official biography to be written by Scott’s son-in-law John
Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854)—the proceeds of which were to go towards paying
off the remaining debts on the Scott estate. There would be a long wait as Lockhart
sorted through the voluminous papers Scott left behind and solicited materials from
Scott’s friends and correspondents. The biography was written while Lockhart
was managing Scott’s literary estate, editing the Quarterly Review,
and caring for a dying wife.
Lockhart was in many respects an
ideal biographer: he had been intimate with Scott for a dozen years, as the editor
of Scott's poetry and prose he knew the corpus thoroughly, and he was on good terms
with Scott's associates from whom information and documents were to be had. He was
also an experienced biographer, having early on acquired fame (and notoriety) with
the character sketches in Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819) and more
recently having written an acclaimed biography of Robert Burns (1828). He wrote to
Robert Cadell, “Perhaps I may promise a volume of my own reminiscences of our
intercourse and fireside talk. I never thought of being a Boswell, but I have a
fair memory, and to me he no doubt spoke more freely and fully on various affairs
than to any other who now survives.” Lockhart was one of the more candid
writers of his generation, though there were limits to what could then be said.
When Memoirs of the Life of Sir
Walter Scott belatedly appeared in 1837-38 it was not reviewed in either
the Edinburgh or Quarterly, the only criticism of consequence being
Carlyle’s famous sweet-and-sour review in the Westminster. The
newspapers found little of interest in it, the massive size of the seven-volume
work limited its sale, and Lockhart found himself involved in a pamphlet war with
the Ballantyne family that cast doubt on his veracity. Despite this inauspicious
beginning, Lockhart’s work came to be regarded as a classic biography and by
the end of the nineteenth century it was widely read and reprinted.
Lockhart’s reputation would later suffer along with Scott’s, but his
biography remained the standard life of Scott until the publication of Edgar
Johnson’s Sir Walter Scott: the Great Unknown in 1970.
If superseded as a factual
history, it remains a gem among lives-and-letters and an indispensable source for
Scott’s life. While the usual comparisons are to Boswell’s life of
Johnson (which it resembles in its attention to quiddities and vulnerabilities)
Lockhart’s immediate model could only have been Thomas Moore’s Life
of Byron (1830) which it resembles in both in monumental scope and
hagiographic ambition. Lockhart had been a close observer of Byron’s life and
writings and had written knowingly and sensitively about him in
Blackwood’s Magazine and the anonymous Letter to the Right Hon.
Lord Byron (1821), and he had reviewed Moore’s Life of Byron
in the Quarterly. While a formal comparison of the characters of Scott and
Byron would not have comported with his design for the Memoirs, Moore and
Byron could not have been far from his mind as he wrote the biography.
For all their differences with
respect to politics and religion, Scott and Byron admired one another’s works
and formed a friendship based on deep personal affinities. Both writers had a lame
foot to compensate for, both found themselves thrust into social situations for
which a middling Scottish background could hardly have prepared them; both were
inordinately proud of their roguish family origins, both were haunted by
disappointment in their first loves, both joyed in the companionship of beasts and
menials. They wrote quickly and found revision a chore. Scott and Byron were alike
touchy about authorship—proud but a little ashamed of their commercial
success as they sought recognition as political characters and gentlemen of
independent means. Moore and Lockhart devote much of their biographies to financial
matters, as well they might: the sale of Newstead and the purchase of Abbotsford
were watershed events.
If the shifting panoply of events
and relationships fixes readers’ attention, it is the slowly-emerging
narrative arc that renders these biographies great works of literature. Moore tells
a story of loss and redemption, Byron’s separation and exile marking the
central crisis of his book. Lockhart inverts the pattern: a central triumph is
framed by Scott’s gradual rise to fame in the first three volumes, and abrupt
decline in the last three. The story of Scott’s fall is related with all the
cumulative force that Moore puts behind his account of Byron’s recovery; in
both instances the poet’s death is presented in ways that make the preceding
life meaningful. From Moore, Lockhart learned to wind the thread of a simple and
moving story through a teeming mass of letters, diaries, documents, and witnesses.
Both biographers strive to let
their authors tell their own stories, as Lockhart put the matter in a letter to
Will Laidlaw: “My sole object is to do him justice, or rather to let him do
himself justice, by so contriving it that he shall be, as far as possible from
first to last, his own historiographer, and I have therefore willingly expended the
time that would have sufficed for writing a dozen books on what will be no more
than the compilation of one.” While the biographer’s shaping hand is
always present it is not always visible (Lockhart all but disappears for a hundred
pages at a stretch). When Moore and Lockhart do expatiate on their writer’s
life and character in their concluding chapters the extent of their involvement in
the narrative becomes belatedly clear—though not the less persuasive
following fast upon the powerful closing scenes the reader has just finished.
The fact that Scott’s life
was largely bereft of incident compared with Byron’s does not prevent
Lockhart from writing at even greater length than Moore; in the absence of incident
he concentrates on the texture of his subject’s domestic affairs even to the
exclusion of interesting matter that might otherwise have been included. In
contrast to the life-and-times mode, or the author-and-his-contemporaries mode,
Lockhart focuses narrowly on what mattered most to Scott: family, writing, and
Abbotsford with its environs. If there are digressions into politics, art, and
travel, Scott’s domestic milieu ever remains the center of attention,
described in an unprecedented level of detail—in a letter to Lockhart Robert
Southey described the Life as “the most complete biography that has
yet appeared of a great man.” The biographer enumerates hundreds of persons
Scott interacted with in his literary, professional, and social capacities, a
sprawling patronage network that included many distant cousins and
relations-by-marriage Scott regarded as part of his extended family.
Scott’s was not a
particularly complex character, its leading points being (in marked contrast to
Byron) personal loyalty and consistency of principle. Yet Lockhart finds a
mainspring for his narrative in the contrast between the writer’s public
persona as clerk of the Court of Session and sheriff of Selkirkshire, and his
private character as the Author of Waverley—the Magician, the genius, the
Great Unknown. In the first capacity, Scott was the embodiment of prudent
conservatism; in the second he pursued financial risk and cultivated romantic
fantasies. The two sides of his character coincided in the building of Abbotsford,
at once a brick-and-mortar embodiment of public status and a fabulous expression of
personal whimsy. It was barely completed when Scott’s secret speculations
went awry in the financial collapse of 1825-26, exposing the concealed writer to
the world and compelling Scott to write for a living instead of living to write.
Like Byron at Missolonghi, Scott confronted his final tribulations with a redeeming
mixture of public resolution and private sorrow.
If Memoirs of the Life of Sir
Walter Scott reads like a novel, it is surely none the worse for that.
Lockhart’s readers should be aware, however, that in common with other
lives-and-letters, the documentary evidence presented is not altogether what it
seems. Elisions in the letters and diaries are frequent and seldom indicated in the
text, the biographer occasionally amplifies a passage to give it clarity, and
sometimes spices two documents together. All this, he might claim, was in the
subservience to a greater truth, but it is not the kind of truth expected from a
modern biographer. Readers should also recall that Lockhart was writing while many
of the persons he discusses were still alive. In contrast to Thomas Moore, he
avoids the use of naughty asterisks, necessitating further tampering with the
documents to avoid controversy.
Not that the sharp-tongued
Lockhart, the “Scorpion” of Blackwood’s Magazine, was
always one to avoid controversy. His lack of tact in pointing a finger of blame at
the Ballantyne brothers (James and John) for Scott’s financial ruin resulted
in an unseemly spat that must have damaged the reception of the biography. Lockhart
seems to have been largely justified in his conclusions though the satirical zest
with which he depicts the brothers living high on Scott’s beneficence was
bound to give offense. In his reply Lockhart attributes this to political spleen,
and the reviews in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine do manifest fierce
hostility, towards Scott as well as Lockhart. To the biographer's lack of tact we
might also credit the moving description of Scott’s growing physical and
mental infirmities: few nineteenth-century biographers would present such things in
print but Lockhart, shadowing Lear, renders it the stuff of tragic poetry.
While he makes sparing use of his own voice, his considerable skills as a literary
genre-painter appear at key moments in the narrative.
In exposing Scott’s private
life Lockhart disappointed some of Scott’s admirers. In the 1830s the beau
ideal of a poet was represented by the likes of Coleridge or
Keats—Scott, with his worldly concerns with selling novels, counting votes,
and purchasing land, was hardly that. He also disappointed Scott’s
detractors, the party-men who had for years sought to diminish his reputation.
Lockhart was inevitably, though unjustifiably, accused of flattering his subject.
Scott strove mightily to maintain the character of a Christian gentleman; in that
he was largely successful and that is how Lockhart represents him. Scott also
strove to live according to the patriarchal principles he romanticizes in his
fictions, and if he was less successful there, Lockhart knew what he was about in
novelizing Scott’s domestic history. Moore performed a similar service for
Byron, emphasizing the familial dimension of his poet’s troubled life. Byron
and Scott struggled to carry their eighteenth-century Whig and Tory domestic
attitudes into the nineteenth century—failing in that, they succeeded in
leaving their biographers material for a fascinating parallel history of two
timely, anachronistic, self-fashioning lives.
Lockhart’s seven-volume
edition of 1837-38 was immediately pirated by American and French printers, then in
1839 reprinted in ten volumes with corrections, small changes, and some additional
notes; that version was condensed in one volume in 1842 and 1845. In 1848 Lockhart
issued a two-volume abridgment with additional notes and updated material entitled
Narrative of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart, the copyright sold to
Cadell to pay off the last of Scott”s debts. The first edition is given here
to supply the text that the original readers and critics knew and responded to.
The chief editorial labor in this
edition has been trying to identify all the persons mentioned in Lockhart’s
text (20,000 names tagged in the XML, for over a thousand individuals). In this
endeavor I was greatly assisted by W. E. K. Anderson’s edition of The
Journal of Walter Scott (1972) and especially by James C. Corson’s
Notes and Index to Sir Herbert Grierson’s Edition of the Letters of
Sir Walter Scott (1979)—a work equally remarkable for its diligence
and its accuracy. With the benefit of internet searching I have been able to add a
few mites to the mass of information he assembled from paper sources.
David Hill Radcliffe
