78 Volumes Original First Editions by Sir Walter Scott 1808-1832, including extremely rare Volumes 1-4 Queen Hoo Hall, 1808. Excellent condition. Includes: Queenhoo Hall, Vol. 1-4, 1808, ht. 6 6/16, wd. 4 5/16 Waverly, Vol. 1-3, 1814, ht. 6 14/16, wd. 4 1/4 Guy Mannering, Vol. 1-3, 1815, ht. 6 14/16, wd. 4 ¼ The Antiquary, Vol. 1-3, 1816, ht. 7 1/16, wd. 4 5/16 Tales of My Landlord (Jededian Cleishbotham), Vol. 1-4, 1816, ht. 6 14/16, wd. 4 ¼ Tales of My Landlord (2nd series), Vol. 1-4, 1818, ht. 6 13/16, wd. 4 ¼ Rob Roy, Vol. 1-3, 1818, ht. 7 1/16, wd. 4 ¼ Tales of My Landlord (3rd series), Vol. 1-4, 1819, ht. 6 14/16, wd. 4 ¼ The Monastery, Vol. 1-3, 1820, ht. 7 1/16, wd. 4 ¼ The Abbot, Vol. 1-3, 1820, ht. 7 1/16, wd. 4 ¼ Ivanhoe, Vol. 1-3, 1820, ht. 7 ¼, wd. 4 5/8 Kenilworth, Vol. 1-3, 1821, ht. 7 ¼, wd. 4 5/8 The Fortunes of Nigel, Vol. 1-3, 1822, ht. 7 ¼, wd. 4 5/8 The Pirate, Vol. 1-3, 1822, ht. 7 ¼, wd. 4 5/8 Peveril of the Peak, Vol. 1-4, 1822, ht. 7 ¼, wd. 4 5/8 Quentin Durward, Vol. 1-3, 1823, ht. 7 ¼, wd. 4 5/8 Redgauntlet, Vol. 1-3, 1824, ht. 7 ¼, wd. 4 5/8 St. Ronan’s Well, Vol. 1-3, 1824, ht. 7 14, wd. 4 1/2 Tales of the Crusaders, Vol. 1-4, 1825, ht. 7, wd. 4 ½ Woodstock or The Cavalier, Vol. 1-3, 1826, ht. 7 ¼, wd. 4 5/8 Chronicles of the Canongate, Vol. 1-2, 1827, ht. 7 ¼, wd. 4 5/8 Chronicles of the Canaogate (2nd series), Vol. 1-3, 1828, ht. 7 ¼, wd. 4 5/8 Anne of Geierstein (or Maiden of the Mist), Vol. 1-3, 1829, ht. 7 ¼, wd. 4 5/8 Tales of My Landlord (4th and last series), Vol. 1-4, 1832, ht. 7 ¼, wd. 4 5/8 Biography of Sir Walter Scott: Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time. Scott was the first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime,[1] with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America. His novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and of Scottish literature. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. Although Scott had attained celebrity through his poetry, he soon tried his hand at documenting his researches into the oral tradition of the Scottish Borders in prose fiction – stories and novels – at the time still considered aesthetically inferior to poetry (above all to such classical genres as the epic or poetic tragedy) as a mimetic vehicle for portraying historical events. In an innovative and astute action, he wrote and published his first novel, Waverley, anonymously. It was a tale of the Jacobite rising of 1745. Its English protagonist Edward Waverley, like Don Quixote, a great reader of romances, has been brought up by his Tory uncle, who is sympathetic to Jacobitism, although Edward's own father is a Whig. The youthful Waverley obtains a commission in the Whig army and is posted in Dundee. On leave, he meets his uncle's friend, the Jacobite Baron Bradwardine and is attracted to the Baron's daughter Rose. On a visit to the Highlands, Edward overstays his leave and is arrested and charged with desertion but is rescued by the Highland chieftain Fergus MacIvor and his mesmerizing sister Flora, whose devotion to the Stuart cause, "as it exceeded her brother's in fanaticism, excelled it also in purity". Through Flora, Waverley meets Bonnie Prince Charlie, and under her influence goes over to the Jacobite side and takes part in the Battle of Prestonpans. He escapes retribution, however, after saving the life of a Whig colonel during the battle. Waverley (whose surname name reflects his divided loyalties) eventually decides to lead a peaceful life of establishment respectability under the House of Hanover rather than live as a proscribed rebel. He chooses to marry the beautiful Rose Bradwardine, rather than cast his lot with the sublime Flora MacIvor, who, after the failure of the '45 rising, retires to a French convent. There followed a succession of novels over the next five years, each with a Scottish historical setting. Mindful of his reputation as a poet, Scott maintained the anonymity he had begun with Waverley, publishing the novels under the name "Author of Waverley" or as "Tales of..." with no author. Among those familiar with his poetry, his identity became an open secret, but Scott persisted maintaining the façade, perhaps because he thought his old-fashioned father would disapprove of his engaging in such a trivial pursuit as novel writing. During this time Scott became known by the nickname "The Wizard of the North". In 1815 he was given the honour of dining with George, Prince Regent, who wanted to meet the "Author of Waverley". "Edgar and Lucie at Mermaiden's well" by Charles Robert Leslie (1886), after Sir Walter Scott's Bride of Lammermoor. Lucie is wearing a full plaid. Scott's 1819 series Tales of my Landlord is sometimes considered a subset of the Waverley novels and was intended to illustrate aspects of Scottish regional life. Among the best known is The Bride of Lammermoor, a fictionalized version of an actual incident in the history of the Dalrymple family that took place in the Lammermuir Hills in 1669. In the novel, Lucie Ashton and the nobly born but now dispossessed and impoverished Edgar Ravenswood exchange vows. But the Ravenswoods and the wealthy Ashtons, who now own the former Ravenswood lands, are enemies, and Lucie's mother forces her daughter to break her engagement to Edgar and marry the wealthy Sir Arthur Bucklaw. Lucie falls into a depression and on their wedding night stabs the bridegroom, succumbs to insanity, and dies. In 1821, French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix painted a self-portrait of himself as the melancholy, disinherited Edgar Ravenswood. The prolonged, climatic coloratura mad scene for Lucia in Donizetti's 1835 bel canto opera Lucia di Lammermoor is based on what in the novel were just a few bland sentences. Tales of my Landlord includes the now highly regarded novel Old Mortality set in 1679–89 against the backdrop of the ferocious anti-Covenanting campaign of the Tory aristocrat Graham of Claverhouse, Viscount of Dundee (called "Bluidy Clavers" by his opponents and Bonnie Dundee by his Tory friends). The Covenanters were religious dissenters who had risen against Charles II in protest against the reintroduction of Episcopalian church government. This had led to the destitution of around 270 ministers who had refused to take an oath of allegiance and submit themselves to bishops, and who continued to conduct worship among a remnant of their flock in caves and other remote country spots. The relentless persecution of these conventicles and attempts to break them up by military force had led to open revolt. The story is told from the point of view of Henry Morton, a moderate Presbyterian, who is unwittingly drawn into the conflict and barely escapes summary execution. In writing Old Mortality Scott drew upon the knowledge he had acquired from his researches into ballads on the subject for The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border.[14] Scott's background as a lawyer also informed his perspective, for at the time of the novel, which takes place before the Act of Union of 1707, English law did not apply in Scotland, and even afterward Scotland continued to have it own hybrid legal system. A recent critic, who is a legal as well as a literary scholar, argues that Old Mortality not only reflects the evolution of Scottish nationalism but also invokes a foundational moment in British sovereignty, namely, the Act of Habeas corpus (also known as the Great Writ), passed by the English Parliament in 1679.[15] Oblique reference to the origin of Habeas corpus underlies Scott's next novel, Ivanhoe, set during the era of the creation of the Magna Carta, which conservatives like Walter Scott and Edmund Burke regarded as rooted in immemorial British custom and precedent. Ivanhoe (1819) set in twelfth-century England, marked a move away from Scott's focus on the local history of Scotland. Based partly on Hume's History of England and the ballad cycle of Robin Hood, Ivanhoe was quickly translated into many languages and inspired countless imitations and theatrical adaptations. Ivanhoe depicts the cruel tyranny of the Norman overlords (Norman Yoke) over the impoverished Saxon populace of England, with two of the main characters, Rowena and Locksley (Robin Hood), representing the dispossessed Saxon aristocracy. When the protagonists are captured and imprisoned by a Norman baron, Scott interrupts the story to exclaim: It is grievous to think that those valiant barons, to whose stand against the crown the liberties of England were indebted for their existence, should themselves have been such dreadful oppressors, and capable of excesses contrary not only to the laws of England, but to those of nature and humanity. But, alas. . . . fiction itself can hardly reach the dark reality of the horrors of the period. (Chapter 24.33) The institution of the Magna Carta which happens outside the timeframe of the story, is portrayed as a progressive (incremental) reform, but also a as a step toward recovery of a lost golden age of liberty endemic to England and the English system. Scott puts a derisive prophesy in the mouth of the jester Wamba: Norman saw on English oak. Norman spoon to English dish, And England ruled as Normans wish; Blithe world in England never will be more, Till England's rid of all the four. (Ivanhoe, Ch. xxvii) Although on the surface an entertaining escapist romance, alert contemporary readers would have quickly recognized the political subtext of Ivanhoe, which appeared immediately after the English Parliament, fearful of French-style revolution in the aftermath of Waterloo, had passed the Habeas Corpus Suspension acts of 1817 and 1818 and other extremely repressive measures and when traditional English Charter rights versus revolutionary human rights was a topic of discussion.[16] Ivanhoe was also remarkable in its sympathetic portrayal of Jewish characters: Rebecca, considered by many critics the book's real heroine, does not in the end get to marry Ivanhoe, whom she loves, but Scott allows her to remain faithful to her own religion, rather than having her convert to Christianity. Likewise, her father, Isaac of York, a Jewish moneylender, is shown as a victim rather than a villain. In Ivanhoe, as in the Waverley novels, religious and sectarian fanatics are the villains, while the eponymous hero is a bystander who must weigh the evidence and decide where to take a stand. Scott's positive portrayal of Judaism, which reflects his humanity and concern for religious toleration, also coincided with a contemporary movement for the Emancipation of the Jews in England. Scott's fame grew as his explorations and interpretations of Scottish history and society captured popular imagination. Impressed by this, the Prince Regent (the future George IV) gave Scott permission to search for the fabled but long-lost Crown Jewels ("Honours of Scotland"), which during the years of the Protectorate under Cromwell had been squirrelled away and had last been used to crown Charles II. In 1818, Scott and a small team of military men unearthed the honours from the depths of Edinburgh Castle. A grateful Prince Regent granted Scott the title of baronet. Later, after George's accession to the throne, the city government of Edinburgh invited Scott, at the King's behest, to stage-manage the King's entry into Edinburgh. With only three weeks for planning and execution, Scott created a spectacular and comprehensive pageant, designed not only to impress the King, but also in some way to heal the rifts that had previously destabilised Scots society. He used the event to contribute to the drawing of a line under an old world that pitched his homeland into regular bouts of bloody strife. He, along with his 'production team', mounted what in modern days could be termed a PR event, in which the (rather tubby) King was dressed in tartan (worn over pink tights), and was greeted by his people, many of whom were also dressed in similar tartan ceremonial dress. This form of dress, previously proscribed after the 1745 rebellion against the English, subsequently became one of the seminal, potent and ubiquitous symbols of Scottish identity.[17] Much of Scott's autograph work shows an almost stream-of-consciousness approach to writing. He included little in the way of punctuation in his drafts, leaving such details to the printers to supply.[18] He eventually acknowledged in 1827 that he was the author of the Waverley novels.[17] In 1825 and 1826, a banking crisis swept through the cities of London and Edinburgh. The Ballantyne printing business, in which he was heavily invested, crashed, resulting in his being very publicly ruined. Rather than declare himself bankrupt, or to accept any kind of financial support from his many supporters and admirers (including the King himself), he placed his house and income in a trust belonging to his creditors, and determined to write his way out of debt. He kept up his prodigious output of fiction, as well as producing a biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, until 1831. By then his health was failing. Notwithstanding this, he undertook a grand tour of Europe, being welcomed and celebrated wherever he went. He returned to Scotland and, in September 1832 died (under unexplained circumstances) at Abbotsford, the home he had designed and had built, near Melrose in the Scottish Borders. Though he died owing money, his novels continued to sell and the debts encumbering his estate were eventually discharged. Source: Wikipedia

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