Despite his enormous output as a novelist, poet, biographer and historian, Sir Walter Scott only embarked on his literary career in early middle age. In the face of constant ill-health and financial and domestic troubles, he successfully combined the activities of a best-selling author with that of a lawyer, landowner, Border farmer and part-time soldier. This critical study of his life and work attempts to reassess his great influence on literature by looking back through the indifference which has surrounded Scott in this century, and the idolatry of the Victorians, to recapture his work as it appeared to his contemporaries. All of his novels are analyzed and his influence assessed not only on the literary field but also in the worlds of art, architecture, opera and domestic manners, and by figures as diverse as Lord Byron, Queen Victoria, Dickens, Donizetti, Pugin and Victor Hugo.