Walter Scott Childhood Analysis

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1.1.1 Birth and Parentage Born on August 15, 1771 in College Wynd, Edinburgh, Walter Scott had as his birthplace, a city alive with associations of Scottish greatness and glory. His father was a writer to the Signet, his mother the daughter of a well-known physician; while his ancestry was intimately connected with Border warfare. His grandfather was ‘Beardis’, the famous unshaven Jacobite. Both on his paternal and maternal side, Scott descended from some of the oldest families of the Scottish Border country. Scott was exceptionally weak as a child, and it was supposed that he would not survive his childhood. As a child, he was unable to mix with other boys in outdoor games. He therefore read enormously Old plays, Middle-Age legends, romances and ballads. While still an infant, his fragile physique lent a more vivid life to his imaginative sensibilities. It is said about Scott that he drew his genius more from his mother Anne Rutherford, “a woman of imagination and inexhaustible memory, a great genealogist, full of stories and local legends” 1, than his father. 1.1.2 Early Childhood and Influence of His Grandparents In 1773, the infant Scott suffered from Polio which rendered him lame in his right leg for the rest of his life. He was sent to Sandyknowe, a farmhouse in …show more content…

His narrative poems, particularly the first three, enjoyed great popularity, until Byron appeared on the scene with verse tales that appealed more adroitly to the same kind of taste. Scott therefore decided to quit the field of poetry and turned to prose fiction. When in 1812, Byron’s Child Harold (1812) was published; Scott realized that his own fame would be overshadowed by the ascendency of this new poet. He therefore turned to the writing of prose

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