Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels Ivanhoe (1819), Rob Roy (1817), Waverley (1814), Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), along with the narrative poems Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810). He had a major impact on European and American literature.

As an advocate, judge, and legal administrator by profession, he combined writing and editing with his daily work as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire. He was prominent in Edinburgh's Tory establishment, active in the Highland Society, long time a president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1820–1832), and a vice president of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1827–1829). His knowledge of history and literary facility equipped him to establish the historical novel genre as an exemplar of European Romanticism. He became a baronet of Abbotsford in the County of Roxburgh, Scotland, on 22 April 1820; the title became extinct upon his son's death in 1847.

Early life

Walter Scott was born on 15 August 1771, in a third-floor apartment on College Wynd in the Old Town, Edinburgh, a narrow alleyway leading from the Cowgate to the gates of the old University of Edinburgh. He was the ninth child (six having died in infancy) of Walter Scott (1729–1799), a member of a cadet branch of the Clan Scott and a Writer to the Signet, and his wife Anne Rutherford, a sister of Daniel Rutherford and a descendant both of the Clan Swinton and of the Haliburton family (descent from which granted Walter's family the hereditary right of burial in Dryburgh Abbey).

Walter was, through the Haliburtons, a cousin of the London property developer James Burton (d.