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• Date: 1872
• Sculptor: Sir John Steell
• Medium & size: Bronze, over lifesize
• Location: Central Park, north of the 65th St. Traverse. If the city streets grid continued in the Park, it would be at about Sixth Ave. and 66th St.

In the early 19th century, the heart-throbs and heroes of the literary world were poets such as Robert Burns, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley … and Walter Scott. Scott became popular and quite wealthy by writing romantic poems set in his native Scotland. The Lady of the Lake, published in 1810, is a love story, a battle of kings, a battle of clans.

Lay of the Last Minstrel turns on lovers from feuding families, a magician’s book, and a goblin page. Marmion, published in 1808, includes such evocative lines as

For a laggard in love and a dastard in war
Was to wed the fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar.

Scott, Marmion, Canto V, st. 12

In 1813, at age 42, Scott was invited to be the poet laureate of Great Britain. Scott refused: he had a different career path in mind, although it was years before the public knew what it was.

In 1814, a novel called Waverley was published anonymously in Edinburgh. Waverley was a romance set in the mid-1700s, at the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Scots Highlanders’ rebellion. The first edition sold out in a matter of days. About twenty more novels of love and adventure followed, all published anonymously “by the author of Waverley.” Among them is Ivanhoe (1819), with Robin Hood, the Black Knight, damsels in distress – plus jousts, burning castles, and a man buried alive.

The tragic Bride of Lammermoor (1819) inspired Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, one of the world’s most popular operas.

Rob Roy (1817) made a Scottish folk hero world famous.

Scott’s name only began to appear on the title pages of these novels thirteen years after Waverley was published. If you enjoy historical novels, take a moment to thank Scott, who invented the genre.

In 1872, on the centennial of Scott’s birth, a group of New Yorkers (“Resident Scotsmen and their sons”) showed their admiration by dedicating Scott’s statue in Central Park. He was the third literary figure to appear there, a few years after Schiller (1859) and only a few months after the Shakespeare sculpture was dedicated early in 1872.

More

• This sculpture is a copy of one that sits in the gigantic Scott monument in Edinburgh.
• Another famous Scott quote, which you may be familiar with from Edward Evertt Hale’s “A Man without a Country” (see here):

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!

– Scott, Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1805

• Scott earned the “sir” before his name not by his literary efforts, but by rediscovering the Scottish crown jewels: see Wikipedia.
• Frederick Douglass’s last name came from a character in Scott’s Lady of the Lake, which his friend Johnson happened to be reading when Frederick escaped from slavery in 1838 and was seeking a new name.
• In Manhattan, the street just north of Washington Square Park was renamed “Waverly Place” in the 1840s, solely because of the popularity of Scott’s novels.
• For more early images of Central Park, see my pages on images through 1860, 1861-1865, and 1866-1870. For more on Central Park in the nineteenth century, see my book Central Park: The Early Years (details here).
• In Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, I demonstrate a method for looking at sculptures in detail, in depth, and on your own. Learn to enjoy your favorite sculptures more, and find new favorites. Available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats. More here.
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