had to be squeezed in between the demands of his legal business and the
hunting, socializing, and entertaining that his lordly aspirations required.
To maintain his output, he had to budget his time, carefully measuring his
productivity in pages per day. As more and more money rolled in,
expenses mounted even faster. The broad acres of choice real estate that
Scott sought did not come cheaply. The pseudo-medieval replica that he
constructed was all the more costly because he wanted it fitted with all the
most modern conveniences and amenities inside – plumbing, gas lighting,
and water closets.
45
To come up with the necessary cash for all these grandiose projects,
Scott resorted to risky strategies: investing in the copyrights of other
authors, editing classics such as Swift and Dryden, and speculating in
what amounted to a futures market in his own unwritten work. From
1809 on, he poured more and more of his rapidly accumulating fortune
into a secret publishing partnership with his printer, John Ballantyne.
By controlling the entire process of literary production, he reckoned
that he could eliminate the need for intermediaries between himself
and the consumer, thereby increasing his profits on his own and others’
creative works. Both from a personal and from a financial perspective,
these investments turned out to be serious mistakes. The editorial
work was thankless and time-consuming, and most of the publishing
ventures were money-losing propositions from the start. Within a few
years, the secret Scott–Ballantyne partnership had fallen dangerously
into debt. During the economic recession of 1812–13, the firm was
swept up in the credit crisis that was uprooting marginal enterprises of
every kind. Only Scott’s heroic efforts (and valuable copyrights) pre-
vented his speculative activities from being publicized amid a tide of red
ink.
46
It was in this economic context that Scott made his decision to begin
writing novels. The sales on his most recent poems, Rokeby and Bridal of
Triermain, had shown signs of weak ness. The consumer market was
saturated. Byron had emerged as the latest hot poet, and Scott was
desperately short of cash. By shifting his product line from poetry to
prose fiction, he could still protect the brand name by publishing anony-
mously. As he sent his manuscript, Waverley, off to the printer, Scott
anxiously awaited the market’s verdict on this latest literary and
45
Lockhart, Life of Scott, I: 189–236; JWS, I: 359–439; Sutherland, Scott: A Critical
Biography, 154–74.
46
Lockhart, Life of Scott, I: 189–215, 226–33; JWS, I: 359–453. Lockhart, Life of Scott,I:
150–317, II: 319–498; JWS, I: 389–453; Sutherland, Scott: A Critical Biography, 109–53;
A. S. Collins, The Profession of Letters: A Study of the Relation of Authors to Patrons,
Publishers, and Public, 1780–1832 (London, 1928), 128–35, 155–60.
36 Imagining Great Britain