1812 The morning of 10 March was when Byron, aged 23, ‘awoke and found himself famous’. On the day before that, the age’s most famous poet had been Walter Scott – author of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Marmion and, most spectacularly, The Lady of the Lake (the poem that invented the Scottish tourist industry).
The shrewdest of authors, Scott appreciated, as he said, that ‘Byron bet [i.e. beat] me’. He could not rival the author of Childe Harold when it came to popular verse narrative. So, pragmatist that he was, the Wizard of the North turned to prose narrative.
Legend (energetically promoted by the author himself) had it that Scott had as early as 1805 ‘thrown together’ some seven opening chapters of what would later become Waverley. He’d tinkered with it but could not excite his publishers or himself with a historical romance set at the time of the 1745 uprising. And, anyway, his poetry – which he could write at conversational speed – was earning him thousands of pounds. Young Byron changed all that.
There then occurred the famous episode of the ‘old writing desk’ – one of the hoarier myths of 19th-century literature. On giving up the ur-Waverley in 1805, Scott (allegedly) had tossed the manuscript (i.e. the opening chapters) into a writing desk drawer. On taking up residence in his grand new house at Abbotsford (built lavishly to his own specifications), new and more elegant furniture was required for his study. The old writing desk was thrown into an attic. The yellowing manuscript was ‘entirely forgotten’ and ‘mislaid for several years’.
Fate, in the shape of uncaught salmon (Abbotsford’s grounds had the Tweed running through them), intervened. In autumn 1813, as Scott recalled: ‘I happened to want some fishing tackle for the use of a guest [John Richardson, a fanatical angler] when it occurred to me to search the old writing desk in which I used to keep articles of that nature. I got access to it with some difficulty; and in looking for lines and flies, the long-lost manuscript presented itself. I immediately set to work to complete it according to my original purpose.’
The ‘readiest writer’ of his time (as Carlyle called him), Scott dashed off Waverley in a few weeks and the novel was published (anonymously) in three volumes on 7 July 1814. Its runaway success, and that of a dozen other bestsellers by ‘the author of Waverley’ (Scott did not admit authorship until 1826), tilted the field of literary endeavour towards fiction for a century or more. Scott had made the form not merely respectable but, as Henry James (in another context) put it, discutible.
Scholarly research has exploded the ‘old writing desk’ genesis. Waverley’s manuscript suggests that Scott initially set to work on the project in 1810, not 1805, and never threw his work-in-progress away into some forgotten drawer. Readers have, in general, always preferred the myth – as, indeed, they have always preferred Scott’s romantic account of the ’45 over historical accounts.