The entrance hall of Walter Scott’s home Abbotsford. The novelist designed a house that belonged in one of his books
I never used to understand why anyone wants to visit a writer’s house: aren’t the books enough? What would you really learn by staring at Martin Amis’s desk or Philip Roth’s kitchen table? The millions who process piously through Shakespeare’s house receive a full theme-park experience, with over-enthusiastic guides leading to the inevitable gift shop—although Shakespeare never wrote any of his plays in Stratford, and may not even have been born in the room displayed as the Bard’s birthplace.
If you join the surprisingly long lines of Japanese tourists at the Brontës’ house at Haworth, you can see Charlotte Brontë’s underwear on display—although I can’t think of any woman, let alone the paralysingly shy Charlotte, who would want her used knickers pored over by tourists. It is baffling how Shakespeare’s plays or the Brontës’ novels are meant to feel more vivid or exciting by the wet Sunday experience of a slow walk through the rooms where the author once lived. I’d rather stay home with a good book. But a visit to Abbotsford, Walter Scott’s country house, off the beaten track in the borders between Scotland and England, changed my mind.
Scott was a dumpy lawyer with a limp and a thing for old Scottish traditions. But during the first quarter of the 19th century he came to define a new category of celebrity—the superstar writer. His Waverley novels were the first to have queues waiting to buy them hot off the press; they were passionately read by adults and children alike, discussed, loved and re-read by hundreds of thousands of people across the world. Like Harry Potter now, they defined the imagination of a generation. When you come to Edinburgh today, you arrive, symbolically enough, at Waverley Station.
Scott was the first of a series of writers who became hugely famous—Byron, Dickens, Wordsworth, Hardy—and with this new passion for writers as cultural icons came a new branch of tourism: the visit to the writer’s house. Some travelled to track down the author in his home space. Wordsworth, as he became a sort of monument to his past greatness as a poet, had a well-worn spiel prepared for the star-struck visitor, a gentle tour of his garden nestled amid the mountains his poetry had celebrated. Even the austere and serious George Eliot asked a friend who was going to the Lake District to bring her a leaf from Wordsworth’s garden. But the trip to the writer’s house could also be just to see where the great works had been composed. Scott, unlike Shakespeare or the Brontës, built his home with a self-conscious awareness that it would be visited. He wanted his house to express the essence of who he was—or how he wanted to be seen as a public figure.
Now, as students choosing a poster for their room know, we all think that the place we construct to live in says something about who we are. But from Randolph Hearst to Michael Jackson, the opportunity to build a house as an expression of the self has been a potent fantasy—for builders and visitors alike. So how did Walter Scott build a monument to himself as writer?
It starts with the name. Scott bought a plot of land called Clartyhole—roughly translated as “shitty dump”—and promptly changed it to “Abbotsford,” which seemed a more suitable moniker for his baronial intentions and chivalric ambitions. And he began to design a small castle of the sort he had written about so many times in his novels. John Ruskin, high priest of architectural taste, called it the “most incongruous pile of gentlemanly modernism”—and a bizarre building it is. It has turrets, oddly crenelated roofs, and a jumble of asymmetric halls and wings. It looks—as it is meant to—as if it were built over many centuries, as if it had a long family history of wars and troubles. It is a house that looks like it should have a Scott novel written about it.
Inside, a hall of oak panelling and stained glass leads to a splendid library and luxurious sitting rooms. There is some superb pseudo-Gothic posturing here. But what animates the whole space is Walter Scott’s sense of history. He collected curious relics and the house is stuffed full of them: a lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s hair, a scrap of the dress of Mary Queen of Scots, a piece of oatcake from the pocket of a dead soldier from the battle of Culloden (someone must have loved selling him that). There are weapons from the battle of Waterloo; statues from ruined priories; Rob Roy’s dagger. Scott would explain every object to his visitors. The house is a stage-set for him as the guardian of Scotland’s history. Scott sets himself amid the fragments of the past and prepares us to see them as beginnings of stories for him to tell. This is a narrator’s house.
Waverley itself is a novel obsessed with houses and rural estates as an indication of the state of the nation as much as the status of the families that live in them: for Scott it really matters that his chivalrous hero should end up on his restored and thriving ancestral property living out his role in history. It’s no surprise that he was a huge influence on the Confederate states before and after the American Civil War. Perhaps most tellingly, The Antiquary, Scott’s favourite of his novels, stars a bumbling and garrulous local historian painfully keen to show guests round his house and his collection: a sly and amused self-portrait of the historical novelist at home.
Abbotsford steps out of Scott’s writing, and is the perfect house for it. To visit it is to see the construction of an idea of historical fiction—the stories we tell to understand the past. And we are all heirs of the Victorian sense of the past. It is a riveting trip to see how the man who formed the imagination of the Victorians also constructed an architectural image of himself as the master of historical fiction.
I never used to understand why anyone wants to visit a writer’s house: aren’t the books enough? What would you really learn by staring at Martin Amis’s desk or Philip Roth’s kitchen table? The millions who process piously through Shakespeare’s house receive a full theme-park experience, with over-enthusiastic guides leading to the inevitable gift shop—although Shakespeare never wrote any of his plays in Stratford, and may not even have been born in the room displayed as the Bard’s birthplace.
If you join the surprisingly long lines of Japanese tourists at the Brontës’ house at Haworth, you can see Charlotte Brontë’s underwear on display—although I can’t think of any woman, let alone the paralysingly shy Charlotte, who would want her used knickers pored over by tourists. It is baffling how Shakespeare’s plays or the Brontës’ novels are meant to feel more vivid or exciting by the wet Sunday experience of a slow walk through the rooms where the author once lived. I’d rather stay home with a good book. But a visit to Abbotsford, Walter Scott’s country house, off the beaten track in the borders between Scotland and England, changed my mind.
Scott was a dumpy lawyer with a limp and a thing for old Scottish traditions. But during the first quarter of the 19th century he came to define a new category of celebrity—the superstar writer. His Waverley novels were the first to have queues waiting to buy them hot off the press; they were passionately read by adults and children alike, discussed, loved and re-read by hundreds of thousands of people across the world. Like Harry Potter now, they defined the imagination of a generation. When you come to Edinburgh today, you arrive, symbolically enough, at Waverley Station.
Scott was the first of a series of writers who became hugely famous—Byron, Dickens, Wordsworth, Hardy—and with this new passion for writers as cultural icons came a new branch of tourism: the visit to the writer’s house. Some travelled to track down the author in his home space. Wordsworth, as he became a sort of monument to his past greatness as a poet, had a well-worn spiel prepared for the star-struck visitor, a gentle tour of his garden nestled amid the mountains his poetry had celebrated. Even the austere and serious George Eliot asked a friend who was going to the Lake District to bring her a leaf from Wordsworth’s garden. But the trip to the writer’s house could also be just to see where the great works had been composed. Scott, unlike Shakespeare or the Brontës, built his home with a self-conscious awareness that it would be visited. He wanted his house to express the essence of who he was—or how he wanted to be seen as a public figure.
Now, as students choosing a poster for their room know, we all think that the place we construct to live in says something about who we are. But from Randolph Hearst to Michael Jackson, the opportunity to build a house as an expression of the self has been a potent fantasy—for builders and visitors alike. So how did Walter Scott build a monument to himself as writer?
It starts with the name. Scott bought a plot of land called Clartyhole—roughly translated as “shitty dump”—and promptly changed it to “Abbotsford,” which seemed a more suitable moniker for his baronial intentions and chivalric ambitions. And he began to design a small castle of the sort he had written about so many times in his novels. John Ruskin, high priest of architectural taste, called it the “most incongruous pile of gentlemanly modernism”—and a bizarre building it is. It has turrets, oddly crenelated roofs, and a jumble of asymmetric halls and wings. It looks—as it is meant to—as if it were built over many centuries, as if it had a long family history of wars and troubles. It is a house that looks like it should have a Scott novel written about it.
Inside, a hall of oak panelling and stained glass leads to a splendid library and luxurious sitting rooms. There is some superb pseudo-Gothic posturing here. But what animates the whole space is Walter Scott’s sense of history. He collected curious relics and the house is stuffed full of them: a lock of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s hair, a scrap of the dress of Mary Queen of Scots, a piece of oatcake from the pocket of a dead soldier from the battle of Culloden (someone must have loved selling him that). There are weapons from the battle of Waterloo; statues from ruined priories; Rob Roy’s dagger. Scott would explain every object to his visitors. The house is a stage-set for him as the guardian of Scotland’s history. Scott sets himself amid the fragments of the past and prepares us to see them as beginnings of stories for him to tell. This is a narrator’s house.
Waverley itself is a novel obsessed with houses and rural estates as an indication of the state of the nation as much as the status of the families that live in them: for Scott it really matters that his chivalrous hero should end up on his restored and thriving ancestral property living out his role in history. It’s no surprise that he was a huge influence on the Confederate states before and after the American Civil War. Perhaps most tellingly, The Antiquary, Scott’s favourite of his novels, stars a bumbling and garrulous local historian painfully keen to show guests round his house and his collection: a sly and amused self-portrait of the historical novelist at home.
Abbotsford steps out of Scott’s writing, and is the perfect house for it. To visit it is to see the construction of an idea of historical fiction—the stories we tell to understand the past. And we are all heirs of the Victorian sense of the past. It is a riveting trip to see how the man who formed the imagination of the Victorians also constructed an architectural image of himself as the master of historical fiction.
