It was Sir Walter Scott who invented the word ‘glamour’, although it had a slightly different meaning than it does now. He took it from the old Scottish word ‘gramarye’, which means a spell that enchants the eye, and it appears in his 1805 poem, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Today’s social media influencers should be very grateful! [1]
Sir Walter Scott was a Scottish historical novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics. He was among the first to draw upon history as source material for his fiction and is generally referred to as the father of the historical novel.
Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 15 August 1771. His father was a farmer and his mother, Anne Rutherford, was the daughter of Dr John Rutherford, one of the founders of the medical school of Edinburgh. Mrs Scott was fond of poetry and anecdotes, and it was from her that Walter received his love of reading. Walter was one of ten children and contracted polio as a toddler leaving him lame for the rest of his life.
Scott attended Edinburgh University arts and law and was apprenticed to his father in 1786. In 1797 Scott married Charlotte Carpentier, and together they had five children. It was a happy marriage, broken only by Charlotte’s death thirty years later in 1826.
In 1814 his first novel, Waverley, set in the time of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion was published anonymously. Its worldwide success prompted further editions of the series, each with a Scottish historical setting. The final was Rob Roy, published in 1817, which sold out its original print run of 10,000 in two weeks. Ivanhoe, published in 1819, was set in the England of Richard I, and its success started a second series of novels, again produced in rapid order.
Scott’s popularity, both socially and as a writer, was almost unparalleled. Receiving his title and baronetcy from King George IV in the spring of 1820, he died, Sir Walter Scott, in 1832.