2/2 Walter Scott's Castle - Secret Knowledge

of the city and a country squire, a legal brain and a romantic poet. Nothing illustrates Scott's omnivorous interests as much as his library. Over the past ten years, work has gone on to catalogue the huge collection, revealing just how amazingly diverse it is. I think the library is the unwritten autobiography of Scott. I mean, we can see his huge range of interests and the contents, ranging from popular culture to very high, serious tomes. It's not just Shakespeare and the classics, is it? Not at all, no. It's very hard to find a subject that he doesn't have a book on, in fact. You've actually got some of the library here, which I feel in awe that we're actually getting to touch his own books. I've seen them so often behind the cages. This is the first book of fairy stories published by the Grimm brothers that Scott wrote and asked them to send to him. Scott then sent them books in return and this is a letter from Jacob Grimm to Scott. He wrote in German and Scott wrote in English. That's astonishing. Why was Scott obsessed with fairy stories? Well, it obviously came, I would think, from his childhood, when he was ill and he went to the Borders and was brought up by his grandparents, who told him all the Border stories, which, you know, may be the very beginning of his life as a writer. Although we think of him as a sort of 18th-century man of reason, he's really fascinated by things like witchcraft. That's right, yes, he had a huge collection of witchcraft and they were the few books that, in his time, he kept behind locked doors, actually. This is a manuscript, a Rosicrucian manuscript. It was probably made so it could be circulated clandestinely because they were considered politically a bit dangerous and it has all kinds of illustrations of esoteric things. There's the Ark of the Covenant with the two cherubs, astrology and Kabbalah and alchemy. He was almost a kind of precursor to Dan Brown in this way. Yes, Dan Brown would be at home here. What's this final book? Now, this is really interesting because this is the first book that was published in Tasmania. It's about Michael Hyre, who is a bushranger and outlaw. I just love these kinds of things. The narrative of the chief atrocities committed by this great murderer and his associates during a period of six years in Van Diemen's Land. It's almost like The Sun, isn't it? He has a lot of books that are like The Sun, actually. Scott has a huge collection of what he calls eccentric biographies. He's very, very interested in highway women, in pirates, in people that lived on the edge of life. Scott's day job as a lawyer and sheriff meant he was well acquainted with the less respectable and even the violent side of life. And he had a sneaking sympathy with the perpetrators. One poacher who turned up in his dock, Tom Purdy, ended up as his factotum and gardener. Violence and violent men always held a certain glamour for Scott. If any contemporary author had a collection of weapons like this in their home, then I can imagine that they would be receiving a visit from the local constabulary. You have to wonder why Scott had such a collection. Well, Scott suffered from polio as a child, and his disability meant he never achieved his genuine ambition to be a soldier. Nearly everywhere in Abbotsford, you can sense its creator's frustrated desire to be a man of action. But there are one or two places where you get a glimpse of an altogether more private and tender side to Scott's personality. This is the drawing room, and it's absolutely exquisite. The wallpaper was specially made in China, and I could spend hours looking at the crowded, colourful life it contains. Scott, of course, had a taste for the exotic. He wrote novels set in Palestine and India. But if this room seems rather different from others in Abbotsford, that's because this was the domain of Lady Scott. Scott married French-born Charlotte Charpentier in 1797, after a courtship that lasted only three weeks. She was the love of his life. Unlike Byron or Burns, Scott wasn't a ladies' man. In fact, he was delightfully faithful. After Charlotte's death, Scott said that he had been heartbroken for two years. My heart handsomely pieced together again, but the crack will remain to my dying day. 1826 was Scott's very own annus horribilis. Haunted by Charlotte's death, he sought solace in his beautiful gardens. But this was the year another unexpected disaster struck. Life at Abbotsford would never be the same again. In 1826, Scott's London publisher lost a great deal of money after having invested in hops for ale, of all things. As the publisher tried to balance the books, a dreadful secret was revealed. The whole time, Scott had been a sleeping partner in the business, and the company had insufficient capital to cover its debts. Scott found himself personally liable for £117,000. That's the equivalent, in today's money, of £5.8 million. Scott's business partners took the easy route and filed for bankruptcy, but that was an option that Scott could not countenance. If he filed for bankruptcy, he would lose Abbotsford. Scott chose not to declare himself bankrupt. Instead, he would write himself out of debt, just as he had written himself into a fortune. My own right hand shall pay, he said. Anything to keep his most beloved creation, Abbotsford. This secret staircase was originally a playful piece of stagecraft, allowing the Wizard of the North to magically disappear from his study when unwelcome guests came to call. But it now became a necessity. Every morning, before dawn, he would come quietly down these steps, sparing his household the brutally early start that his work now demanded of him. The man who had once imagined a steam-powered loom for churning out novels now had to turn himself into a writing machine. But not even a man of Scott's colossal energies and vivid imagination could outrun his troubles. In the early 1830s, he suffered a series of strokes and was sent by his doctor to the Mediterranean in the hope that the warmer climate would help him. It didn't. His final wish was to die at home. Scott became more and more ill. He was trepanned, a hole drilled into his skull. A friend said he appeared like a man mortally drunk. At times, Scott hallucinated he was King Lear. Abbotsford had been a museum, a stage set, a showcase for new technology, a stately pleasure dome for parties and conviviality. Now it was also a mausoleum. Scott's bed was brought down here to the dining room so that in his dying moments, he could gaze out over his beloved River Tweed. Almost immediately after Scott's death in 1832, Abbotsford became a literary shrine, a place of pilgrimage. Scott's castle attracted huge numbers of visitors, including some of the greatest names of the day. In here we've got Charles Dickens and his wife at the bottom here. Charles Dickens, that's Charles Dickens. And just Mrs Dickens. And Mrs Dickens, yes. Wonderful. And then in this other one, we have Oscar Wilde's signature. He came to visit the house here. There it is, Oscar Wilde London, between somebody from Copenhagen and somebody from Galashield. Yes. It's a pity we don't get a comments section down the side as well. Indeed, yes. So, Janette, your family has a very long-standing connection with Abbotsford. Yes, my family have been working here since 1900, actually. My great-grandfather came here to work as a forester in 1900, and there's been family work here ever since, including myself, for quite a considerable time. So when you first started working here, what kind of people were coming to Abbotsford then? People from all over the world, America, Canada, Australia. But the surprise visitors that we had were actually Russian trawler men. They had sailed into Allapool and then, on their days off, they made their way down here to Abbotsford. So, from Allapool, that must be a 500-mile round trip. It is indeed. It really shows you how highly he was regarded outside of the British Isles. Definitely, yes. It's the last few days before Abbotsford reopens to the public. There's a real sense of excitement in the air. This project isn't just about restoring Scott's home. In a way, it's also about re-examining his legacy. Whereas Walter Scott has remained popular and widely read abroad, at home, critics have sought to demolish him. He's decried as the inventor of twee Scottishness and Celtified pageantry. In some ways, the Wizard of the North became a victim of his own success. The spell he cast over Scottish history was so powerful that it almost became a parody. Just as Abbotsford started a craze for crow-stepped gables and thistle-topped turrets, so, it's argued, Scott's novels and poems plundered the past to build a vision of Scotland unblemished by a majority. But for me, the real question is whether, without Scott, we would have any national identity at all. I think in some ways we're in danger of losing Scott's most important message. His books and this building show us how you can own the past without being imprisoned by it. After all, this was the man who transformed the mucky farmyard of Clarty Hall into the playful fantasy of Abbotsford. As he himself said, there's nothing so easy to invent as a tradition. I think we should be rather grateful to have had an inventor of such imagination and such generosity. Still to come here on BBC4, there's another fight for the semi-finals on the cards as the Catlovers meet the festival fans in Only Connect. That's here in just a moment. Plus, brand-new drama begins at nine with How's That? Kerry Packer's War.