Great Scott! That man gets everywhere!
Paul Tempan
‘An English traveller on his way to Transylvania in 1832 went into a bookshop in the remote [Hungarian] town of Nagyszeben only to find a portrait of Walter Scott hanging on the wall and to see that the books for sale consisted in large part of piles of French and German translations of the latter’s work.’ This anecdote, recounted by Emilia Szaffner, illustrates the extraordinary penetration of Scott’s writing throughout Europe: as the same Hungarian bookseller put it in French, “Le sieur Valtere Skote’ was in 1832 ‘l’homme le plus célèbre en toute l’Europe”’ (Szaffner 2006: 144).
In an earlier blog dealing with the theme of literature and the arts, we saw that Sir Walter Scott is the author commemorated with the most Belfast street names, far ahead of any rival, such as Swift, Disraeli, Dickens and the Bard of Avon. His compatriot Burns doesn’t even get a look in. So, it seems worthwhile to take a look at the man, the rise and fall of his literary reputation (and rise again?), his impact on culture in Ireland, and his legacy, including, needless to say, a wheen o’ Belfast street and house names. We’ll also hail a chief, take in a boat, a football club, a dog-breed and do a spot of trainspotting (no, not that Trainspotting!).
Walter Scott (1771-1832) was born in Edinburgh, the son of Walter Scott, a solicitor, and Anne Rutherford. At the age of two he contracted polio, which left him lame for life. For the good of his health, the boy was sent to live with his grandparents on their farm, Sandyknowe, near Melrose in the Scottish borders. He returned to Edinburgh for schooling. At the age of 12 he entered the University of Edinburgh and by 14 he began an apprenticeship in his father’s office to become a solicitor. The profession was his passport into Edinburgh society. He attended literary salons, where he was introduced to the poetry of ‘Ossian’, supposedly a Gaelic bard of the 3rd century, which made a strong impression on him, as it also did on the wider Romantic movement across Europe, even though the work's authenticity was widely doubted (they were actually the work of James Macpherson, who claimed to have ‘collected’ them in the Highlands). It was also at one of these gatherings, at the age of fifteen, that he had his one and only meeting with Robert Burns. Scott maintained his legal work as an advocate and legal administrator throughout his life, combining it with his creative writing and editing.
Scott was held in such high esteem in the nineteenth century that he was sometimes compared to Homer, praise which may seem somewhat overblown nowadays. ‘The highly influential Victorian critic John Ruskin chose to cite Homer and Scott as “my own two masters” in his Fors clavigera’ (Coates 2023: 441). Interestingly, the poetry of ‘Ossian’ was also compared to The Iliad, by such illustrious critics as Henry David Thoreau. From the perspective of the majority of readers unfamiliar with Celtic languages, Scott was to become the nearest thing in the nineteenth century literary scene to a real-life Ossian. He established his literary reputation with historical narrative poems, notably The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810). Incidentally, Scott pops up in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, when the heroine is given a copy of Marmion by St John Rivers, a sign of the influence he had on all three Brontë sisters. He gained even greater fame as a novelist, acquiring the nickname ‘the Wizard of the North’. He is frequently credited as ‘the father of the historical novel’. Whilst the Anglo-Irish author Maria Edgeworth has a better claim to having invented the genre with her novel Castle Rackrent (1800), it is certainly true that Scott did more than most to popularise it and took it to grander places with a love for pageantry and ‘derring-do’. His passion for the past had a huge influence on many other authors, not just on writers of historical fiction – one can think of Philippa Gregory, best known for her Tudor period fictionalisations, such as The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) – but also many exponents of fantasy fiction, which tends to draw heavily on all things medieval. It is hard to imagine Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice (adapted for television as Game of Thrones) without Scott’s Rob Roy or Ivanhoe. His works have also inspired musical compositions, such as Donizetti’s tragic opera Lucia di Lammermoor (1838), based on The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and Hamish MacCunn’s overture The Land of the Mountain and the Flood (1887), whose title is taken from a passage in Canto II of the epic poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805):
O Caledonia! stern and wild,
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e'er untie the filial band,
That knits me to thy rugged strand!
The popularity of MacCunn’s orchestral work was boosted by its use as the theme for the 1970s television series Sutherland’s Law.
Whereas MacCunn’s overture powerfully evokes the dramatic landscape of the Scottish Highlands, another Scott-inspired work is nowadays closely linked with American nationalism, regardless of its Scottish origins. This is the song ‘Hail to the Chief’, used as the anthem of the US President. It began its life as a ‘Boat Song’ in Canto II of Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake. It is sung by oarsmen in a birlinn rowing their Gaelic chieftain, Roderick Dhu, to an island on Loch Katrine:
Hail to the chief, who in triumph advances,
Honour'd and blessed be the evergreen pine!
Long may the tree in his banner that glances,
Flourish the shelter and grace of our line.
Heaven send it happy dew,
Earth lend it sap anew,
Gaily to bourgeon and broadly to grow;
While every Highland glen,
Sends our shout back again
Roderigh Vich Alpine Dhu, ho! i-e-roe!
It was then set to music by English songwriter James Sanderson. It was first connected with the US President in 1815 when it was played to honour George Washington and mark the end of the War of 1812 against the United Kingdom and its allies. Later the words were adapted to an American context by Albert Gamse, although the tune is usually played as an instrumental piece:
Hail to the Chief we have chosen for the nation,
Hail to the Chief! We salute you, one and all.
Hail to the Chief, as we pledge cooperation,
In proud fulfilment of a great, noble call.
Yours is the aim to make this grand country grander,
This you will do, that is our strong, firm belief.
Hail to the one we selected as commander,
Hail to the President! Hail to the Chief!
Yet, despite this vast influence, Scott’s own stock as a writer is nowadays pretty low, and has been so for a century or more. In The Great Tradition, F. R. Leavis described him as ‘… a great and very intelligent man; but, not having the creative writer’s interest in literature, he made no serious attempt to work out his own form and break away from the bad tradition of the eighteenth-century romance’ (Leavis 1948: 14). Such negative views persist today. Like Jane Eyre, the narrator of Anna Burns’ 2018 novel Milkman also reads Scott. When the milkman first pulls up beside her, she is reading Ivanhoe, but the allusion is pointedly chosen for its unfashionable quality: the narrator acknowledges that she is “losing touch in a crucial sense with communal up-to-dateness and that that, indeed, was risky.” Scott is particularly associated in the public mind with a Scottish identity afflicted with sentimental nostalgia and over-commercialism, or ‘Sir-Walter-Scottery’ as Jonathan Meades puts it (Off Kilter, BBC4, 2009). Along with Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, he gets the blame for everything from bagpipes and tartan to butterscotch and deep-fried Mars bars. He has been a victim of the clearances – not the highland clearances, but the equally swingeing removal of shelffuls of three-volume historical novels by ‘the clearance man’, dragged off to the second-hand bookseller or simply taken to be pulped. Scott focusses on external detail, while some of his contemporaries, such as Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth, are more modern in their interest in the internal life of characters. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the trend was overwhelmingly for novelists to get inside the heads of their characters, leaving Scott looking outdated. However, there has been a minor revival of academic interest in his work beginning in the late twentieth century. There is a regular conference on Scott. The 13th International Walter Scott Conference took place in 2024 at the University of South Carolina. The publication of selected papers from the 4th International Conference (Edinburgh, 1991) in the volume Scott in Carnival made a particularly strong impact. Since 2009 there is a literary prize named in honour of Scott, and it has had a Northern Irish winner. Lucy Caldwell was awarded the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction for her novel These Days, set during the Belfast Blitz.
Scott made a substantial impact on the contemporary literary and wider cultural scene in Ireland. He only made one visit to Ireland, staying just over a month in the summer of 1825. It was a big deal. On July 14th he arrived in Dublin with his daughter Sophia and her husband, John Gibson Lockhart (who would later write Scott’s biography after his decease). His son, also Walter, was serving in the army and stationed in Dublin at the time. Scott’s carriage was followed by crowds in the street. When he attended a theatre performance, he was spotted by members of the audience and was obliged to come forward to receive a rapturous welcome. Amongst the places he visited in Dublin were several connected with Jonathan Swift, most notably St Patrick’s Cathedral, where Swift was dean for 32 years. This had particular significance because Scott had spent six years editing the complete works of Swift and writing his biography, published in 19 volumes in 1814. He also made an excursion to Glendalough and other sights in Co. Wicklow.
From Dublin he travelled to Edgeworthstown in Co. Longford to visit ‘Miss Edgeworth’, whose work he greatly admired. They differed in their politics, however, she being more of a reformer and a feminist. She had visited him two years earlier, spending two weeks with him at Abbotsford, his home near Melrose in Roxburghshire. Maria Edgeworth then travelled with Scott’s party to Killarney in Co. Kerry. They returned to Dublin via Cork, where Scott was granted the freedom of the city, and Kilkenny. (You can read more here about Sir Walter Scott's Visit to Ireland.)
What then of Scott’s impact on Belfast? One way of gauging his influence is to look at names honouring him. In 1900 there were at least seventeen Belfast streets whose names can be linked with his works, and arguably more. In some instances the name was first applied to a house, then later given to a street in the same area. This was the case with Ardenvohr, residence of builder John D. Dunlop, built c. 1890. The house does not seem to have lasted very long as it was cleared for the building of Ardenvohr Street in 1897. The gallant Graham, Knight of Ardenvohr is a character in A Legend of Montrose (1819). In the case of Glenvarlock Street (1900) it seems that the street was directly named without a house being involved. Nigel Olifaunt, Lord Glenvarloch, is the protagonist of The Fortunes of Nigel (1822).
Well before the appearance of any of these houses and streets, the popularity of Scott's work can be discerned from the following passage quoted by Benn: ‘The first Steamboat that ever appeared at our quays was the Rob Roy, called so, we presume, from Scott's novel of that name. She came from Scotland, and excited in the town an excessive curiosity. This was in the year 1819. She plied between Belfast and Glasgow’ (quoted in George Benn, A History of the Town of Belfast, vol. ii, 1880, p. 124). This seems to have been a very prompt response to the publication of the novel Rob Roy just two years earlier in 1817.
In the Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory for 1877 the Waverley Temperance Hotel is recorded on Queen Street, proprietor: F. McLennon. It was located here until 1900, when the business seems to have moved to Tomb Street. In the directory for 1883-4, Waverley Terrace is listed on Ashley Avenue, off Lisburn Road. In 1924 Waverley House appears on Upper Newtownards Road. All of these are probably named after the novel Waverley (1814), set at the time of the Jacobite Rising of 1745. It is the first in a long series of 26 historical novels, known collectively as ‘the Waverley novels’. The first nine are set mainly in Scotland in the Early Modern era. With Ivanhoe (1819), Scott widens his sights to medieval England, and subsequently a range of different locations and periods are explored. It is for this reason that he is sometimes credited with helping to establish a modern sense of Britishness (as opposed to separate English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish identities) through his works. The series name is due not only to Waverley being the first, but also because they were published anonymously, the subsequent books being attributed on the title page to ‘the author of Waverley’. However, the identity of their author soon became a poorly kept secret.
The first Belfast house named in this theme, as far as we are aware, is Woodstock Place, a group of 3 houses which existed at least as early as 1845, as shown by notices in newspapers. In 1863 Woodstock Road was named from this group of houses. This was probably not due to its size or importance per se, but rather its position at the start of this road, which made it a landmark. John J. Marshall connected Woodstock Road with Scott's 1826 novel Woodstock, ‘recalling Cavalier and Roundhead; Cromwell and Prince Charles’ (Marshall, Belfast Telegraph, 26/02/1941). If we were able to determine who built Woodstock Place, we might know the identity of the person, presumably a Scott afficionado, who started this trend in house names. Unfortunately, the earliest known occupants were probably renting or leasing these properties, so the actual owner eludes us at present.
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The other Scott-related street names have been dealt with in my earlier blog on the theme of names from literature and the arts. For the record, they are: Melrose Avenue and Wayland Street in East Belfast; Matilda Avenue / Drive / Gardens and Oswald Park in the Sandy Row estate; Clanchattan Street in North Belfast. Montrose Street in East Belfast is attributed by Marshall to James Graham, first Marquis of Montrose, whose biography was written by John Buchan. However, it could equally be linked with Scott's novel A Legend of Montrose (1819). Five streets which no longer exist fit into this theme: Kenilworth Street and Rokeby Street in East Belfast; Abbot Street, Ivanhoe Street and Peveril Street, all off Lower Ormeau Road.
Recent research suggests that Melrose Street, Edinburgh Street and Lorne Street in South Belfast can now be added to this group if they are not simply geographical names. John J. Marshall suggested that Melrose Street honours Sir Walter Scott (Marshall, Belfast Telegraph, 26/02/1941). It is possible that the same applies to Lorne Street. Edith of Lorn is an important character in Scott's poem The Lord of the Isles (1815) and features as one of the sculptures on the lower part of the Scott Monument in Edinburgh.
Two more Scott-inspired names which have been identified recently are Roslyn Street and Hawthornden Road / Way, etc. They can be taken together because the names are derived from places in the same landscape. Roslyn Street is named after the village of Roslin in Midlothian, south of Edinburgh, known for Rosslyn Chapel and Rosslyn Castle (note the different spellings, Roslyn is a third historical spelling). Roslin was of interest to Walter Scott, both for the beauty of its glen and for the history of its antiquities. Hawthornden Castle is also situated on the edge of Roslin Glen, one mile downstream. It was here that poet William Drummond (1585-1649) was born and resided. This landscape is described in Canto VI of Scott's poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805):
O'er Roslin all that dreary night
A wondrous blaze was seen to gleam;
'Twas broader than the watch-fire's light,
And redder than the bright moonbeam.
It glar'd on Roslin's castled rock,
It ruddied all the copse wood glen;
'Twas seen from Dryden's groves of oak
And seen from cavern'd Hawthorn-den.
Seem'd all on fire that chapel proud,
Where Roslin's chiefs uncoffin'd lie,
Each Baron, for a sable shroud,
Sheath'd in his iron panoply.
Roslin Glen has attracted numerous other writers and artists over the centuries, particularly the Romantics. Visitors include: Ben Jonson (who came to visit Drummond); Samuel Johnson and James Boswell; Robert Burns; Dorothy and William Wordsworth; Lord George Byron; and J.M.W. Turner. Shown on the left is Turner’s drawing of Roslin Castle for Walter Scott's Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland (Vol. II) (1826). Rosslyn Chapel also featured in Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code (2003). This impressive list of visitors shows the importance of Roslin Glen as a cultural landscape, comparable with the English Lake District or Yeats Country in Co. Sligo. It is very appropriate, therefore, that Hawthornden Castle is now a writers' retreat. It is operated by the Hawthornden Foundation, which funds various literary programmes and awards the Hawthornden Prize, one of the oldest literary prizes. This award has been won several times by Irish and Northern Irish writers: Seán O'Casey, Juno and the Paycock (1925); Kate O'Brien, Without My Cloak (1931); William Trevor, The Old Boys (1965); Michael Longley, The Weather In Japan (2000); Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath (2002); Colm Tóibín (2015).
Last but not least, Sandyknowes Roundabout on the M2 near Mallusk is named after a house that formerly stood here. The house may have been name in reference to Scott’s boyhood home, with the addition of a plural -s.
Of course, Belfast is not particularly remarkable in having so many names that honour Scott as a writer. Many more examples would be found if one were to examine Scottish or English cities. Edinburgh alone has more than thirty such streets including Saddletree Loan, Hazelwood Grove and Redgauntlet Terrace. One of the city’s top football clubs is Heart of Midlothian FC, known popularly as Hearts. Heart of Midlothian (1818) was the seventh Waverley novel. It was the first to have a female protagonist, Jeanie Deans, idealised for her piety and moral rectitude. Heart of Midlothian was an odd choice for the name of a sports club, given that the title refers to the Old Tolbooth prison in Edinburgh, located at the centre of the county of Midlothian, where Jeanie’s sister Effie is incarcerated for the alleged murder of her baby. The novel centres on Jeanie’s efforts to free her sister, whom she believes to be innocent.
Edinburgh’s main railway terminus is Waverley Station. Scott’s works were also heavily drawn upon when it came to naming British locomotives, more so than any other writer, a point which has been highlighted by Professor Richard Coates (2023: 441). These include Jeanie Deans, Lucy Ashton (from the heroine of The Bride of Lammermoor), Rob Roy, Redgauntlet, Fair Maid (from The Fair Maid of Perth), Quentin Durward, Lady of Avenel (from The Monastery) and Dandie Dinmont (a character from Guy Mannering). All these were locomotives of the NBR J class, numbering over forty and built 1909-20 (NBR J class - Wikipedia). There is a certain irony in the fact that Scott’s works, which were largely set in a rural past, before the Industrial Revolution, were ransacked to provide names for machines which were the epitome of modernity, drastically shortening the distance between cities and charging full steam ahead into the future.
You might also recognise Dandie Dinmont as a type of terrier. James Davidson, who is credited with creating this unusual breed (it combines body of a dachshund with the head of a Yorkie), is believed to have been the real-life inspiration for the character Dandie Dinmont.
So, we have seen plenty of evidence of Scott’s importance and popularity, but why was he commemorated above all other writers in the nineteenth century? Why, for example, were so many more houses and streets in Belfast named in honour of his creations than, say, Robert Burns, considered Scotland’s national poet? After all, Burns was appreciated enough in this city for the official establishment in 1872 of the Belfast Burns Club, which is still active today. It was Burns, not Scott, who was voted the greatest ever Scot in a 2009 poll on STV. Besides sheer popularity, two other factors help to explain this phenomenon: politics and timing. Scott was part of the Edinburgh Tory establishment. He was also overtly pro-Union with regard to the incorporation of both Scotland and Ireland into the United Kingdom. His politics was implicit in his writing and his conservatism would have endeared him to the Protestant and Unionist powerbrokers in Belfast, the developers, builders and politicians, much more so than the radical Burns, who served as an inspiration both to liberalism and socialism. One clear example is his 1795 poem A Man’s A Man For A’ That, noted for its egalitarian sentiment. The same political factor would account for the cluster of Disraeli street names compared to Dickens’ meagre tally of one (Copperfield Street). We have seen similar politics at play in the choice of other street names, such as the series of streets off Dublin Road which commemorate pro-union peers: the Marquess of Salisbury, Marquess of Hartington, Baron Ashbourne, Baron Ventry, Lord Pakenham (Earl of Longford) and Lord Apsley. As for timing, the rise of Scott’s star coincided with a time of great expansion of many cities due to industrialisation. It was also the advent of the steam age, hence Waverley Station and all those locomotives. Belfast burgeoned in the early nineteenth century with the growth of textile industries, especially linen. Then, there was a second boom in the late nineteenth century due to manufacturing and heavy engineering, including shipbuilding. Between the census years of 1851 and 1901 the population almost quadrupled. Many new street names were required in response to this growth. Scott was simply in the right place at the right time to ride this wave.
References
Alexander, J. H., and David Hewitt (eds). 1993. Scott in Carnival: Selected Papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference, Edinburgh, 1991. Aberdeen.
Benn, George. 1877-80. A History of the Town of Belfast, 2 vols (new edn. 2008). Belfast.
Coates, Richard. 2023. ‘The Naming of Railway Locomotives in Britain as a Cultural Indicator, 1846-1954’, Bijak, U., Swoboda, P. & Walkowiak, J. B. (eds), Proceedings of the 27th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences: Onomastics in Interaction With Other Branches of Science. Volume 3: General and Applied Onomastics, Literary Onomastics, Chrematonomastics, Reports, 433-48. Kraków.
Leavis, F. R. 1948. The Great Tradition. London.
O’G. 1832. ‘Sir Walter Scott’s Visit to Ireland’, Dublin Penny Journal, vol. 1, no. 25, December 15. Available online at: https://www.libraryireland.com/articles/WalterScottIrelandDPJ1-25/ (accessed 11/02/2025).
Szaffner, Emilia. 2006. ‘The Hungarian Reception of Walter Scott in the Nineteenth Century’, Pittock, M. (ed.), The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, 138-56. London.
About Paul Tempan
Paul Tempan has lived in Belfast since 2001 and has travelled Ireland as a hill-walker and as a tour guide. He undertook doctoral research on Irish place-names at Queen's University Belfast (2007-11) and worked as a research assistant, later a researcher fellow, at the Northern Ireland Place-Name Project (2006-13). He now works with Libraries NI and is an independent researcher.