Walter Scott's friend James Ballantyne had founded…
1815 CE
Walter Scott's friend James Ballantyne had founded a printing press in Kelso, in the Scottish Borders, in 1796.
Through Ballantyne, Scott had been able to publish his first works and his poetry then began to bring him to public attention.
In 1805, The Lay of the Last Minstrel had captured wide public imagination, and his career as a writer was established in spectacular fashion.
He has published many other poems over the past ten years, including the popular The Lady of the Lake, printed in 1810 and set in the Trossachs. (Portions of the German translation of this work will be set to music by Franz Schubert in 1825.
One of these songs, Ellens dritter Gesang, is popularly labeled as "Schubert's Ave Maria".
Marmion, published in 1808, produced lines that have become proverbial.
In 1809, Scott persuaded Ballantyne and his brother to move to Edinburgh and to establish their printing press there, becoming a partner in their business.
As a political conservative and advocate of the Union with England, Scott had helped to found the Tory Quarterly Review, a review journal to which he has made several anonymous contributions.
In 1813 Scott had been offered the position of Poet Laureate, but declined, and the position had gone to Robert Southey.
Although Scott has attained celebrity through his poetry, he had soon tried his hand at documenting his researches into the oral tradition of the Scottish Borders in prose fiction—stories and novels—at this 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 had in 1814 anonymously written and published his first novel, Waverley, a tale of the Jacobite rising of 1745.
There will follow a succession of novels over the next five years, each with a Scottish historical setting; his second is Guy Mannering, in 1815.
Mindful of his reputation as a poet, Scott maintains 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 becomes an open secret, but Scott persists maintaining the façade, perhaps because he thinks his old-fashioned father would disapprove of his engaging in such a trivial pursuit as novel writing.
During this time Scott becomes known by the nickname "The Wizard of the North".
In 1815, he is given the honor of dining with George, Prince Regent, who had wanted to meet the "Author of Waverley".
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