Sir Walter Scott: A Supreme Purveyor of Scottish History and Society

Abstract

Sir Walter Scott's novels portray a World of romance, fascination that holds within it
modern themes and interests: racial prejudice, social justice, religious differences, rebellion,
commerce and imperial economy, the rights of women. All these are woven by a born storyteller
whose influence during his life time and two generations after on English and European
novelists is apparent. Balzac, Merimee, Tolstoy, George Eliot estimated his contribution to the
novel; the popular art of the nineteenth century, especially in Victorian England. It is his true
self and Scottish identity that gives his novels their unique flavor. They are woven journeys by
the vocation of Scott in the Scottish literary settings in Scottish history and society. That past and
society needed to be traversed by an artistic eye and depicted by a talented storyteller who shows
the Highlands, Glasgow and other cities as a fascinating World that is not given its freedom to
show its treasures. He opened a closed door for the English, European, American readership.
His true contribution to the novel is making historical romances a means to combine the past
and the present through his own bridge that can be seen by visionary eyes that try to pave a good
trodden road for the posterity.