“A Papa sort of person…” (March 6, 1814)

Walter Scott really did write a set of letters addressed to a young couple, to Miss Clephane of Torloisk and her fiancé, Lord Compton. This quotation is from a letter to Miss Clephane written on 4 May 1815. It’s a fascinating series, giving insight into all the arrangements involved in the marriage of a wealthy young woman to a man of high rank, including the famous settlements. (The Letters of Walter Scott, edited by Sir Herbert Grierson, 1932–1937)

I first read Walter Scott's letters purely for research, and ended up liking their author enormously. He comes across as such a nice, normal man. A little vain, a little foolish, but wonderfully kind, always willing to listen and advise, and with a great sense of humour. A.N. Wilson writes: "Beneath whatever melodramatic exterior he sometimes adopted – and the plaid and the bright uniforms were much less usual wear for him than the plain black of the lawyer's office – lurked a man only extraordinary by the depth of his ordinariness. But it was an ordinariness infused with astonishing energy, which only hyperbole can describe." (A. N. Wilson, A Life of Walter Scott, the Laird of Abbotsford, Pimlico 2002 [OUP 1980], p. 8)

His one great folly was his house and estate, Abbotsford, which consumed his fortune. I had the felicity of visiting it back in the year 2000 en route to a wedding in Edinburgh, and again in 2005. On our first visit, we had a nice chat among the flowerbeds with a pleasant white-haired lady; later on we learned that this was Dame Jean Maxwell-Scott (1923–2004), Sir Walter's great-great-great-granddaughter. The photos are from the first visit. They were taken with a camera, and printed on paper, hence their nostalgic look.

I was very pleased to find Scott's Letters on the shelves of my local university library, and experienced a rare moment of illumination when starting to read, because the pages hadn't been cut. Is it in Mansfield Park, and is it Edmund Bertram who cuts open the pages of a new book for Fanny? I never understood what that meant until I took down a volume of Scott's Letters. I don't know how long it had been in the library, but clearly no one had ever read it until I came along. Lacking a pen knife, I used a letter opener!