WALTER SCOTT, celebrated by Marxist critic Gyorgy Lukacs as the founder of the historical novel, was born in Edinburgh 250 years ago on August 15, 1771.

Born into the upper middle class, his family preserved a sense of tradition of one of the great Scottish clans. Like Rabbie Burns, Scott grew up with the songs and legends of Scotland, a cultural awareness that created a deep sense of national identity.

Scott’s collection Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a ballad anthology, made him famous. Besides writing, he was deputy sheriff of Selkirkshire, part-owner of a printing press and later a publishing house. Growing debts, however, impacted on his writing.

But in 1813 Scott rediscovered the unfinished manuscript of the novel Waverley about the Jacobite uprising of 1745, which he rapidly finished. Published anonymously, it was enthusiastically received.

In it, Scott portrayed the whole range of Scottish society, from beggars and farm labourers to the bourgeoisie, the professions and the landowning aristocracy, along with outlandish Highlanders as well as the political and religious conflicts that shook Scotland in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Scott’s masterpieces include Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and his most popular novel, Ivanhoe (1819). Unfortunately, the haste with which he wrote affected his health and his writing. In 1831 his health deteriorated badly and he died in September 1832.

Scott lived in an era of enormous upheaval. It was a time of revolutions in France and North America, uprisings in Haiti and Ireland, the Napoleonic wars, the expansion of the British empire, the slave trade, enclosure of land for the purpose of sheep farming, increasing capitalist “rationalisation” of the countryside and the Highland clearances.

The beginnings of the industrial revolution consolidated the power of the bourgeoisie and the first political organisations of the working class emerged. Suddenly, the progression from one society to another became tangible.

As Lukacs argues in The Historical Novel, this genre emerges with Scott. There had been novels with historical themes in the 17th and 18th centuries but their characters and plots were taken from the time of the authors, who did not yet grasp their own epoch as historical.

For Scott, outstanding historical figures represent a movement encompassing large sections of the people, uniting various sides of this movement and the aspirations of the people. Scott’s plots show how the crisis arose and he illuminates, according to Lukacs, how a particular time produces a heroic person, whose task it becomes to solve historically specific problems.

These leaders, directly linked to the people, often overshadow the main characters. Historical authenticity is achieved by interweaving personal stories with historical upheavals.

The central historical conflict of Ivanhoe is between the Anglo-Saxon people and the feudal Norman upper class. Here, as elsewhere, Scott’s political conservatism is reflected in a desire for compromise. But Robin Hood emerges as heroic and, as Lukacs notes, the experience of the French Revolution is in the background.

Rob Roy describes the first Jacobite uprising of 1715 to restore the Catholic Stuart dynasty and Scottish independence. With Rob Roy MacGregor, Scott creates a genuine folk hero. His passion and his deeply poetic language show the failure of the rising and the defeat of clan society to be a tragic event.

The English narrator Frank Osbaldistone takes the common ground. He marries his Catholic cousin, closely associated with the Jacobins, thus achieving  the union between Presbyterians and Catholics favoured by Scott.

The Heart of Midlothian opens with the Porteous riots sparked by the killing of innocent civilians by troops during a disturbance at a public hanging in Edinburgh in 1736. As the critic Arnold Kettle noted, Scott unfolds a social spectrum in the novel, ranging from the urban underworld to the Queen.

At the centre of a historically authentic narrative is Jeanie Deans. From a rural Puritan background, she is perhaps Scott’s greatest female character. Her unmarried sister Effie is accused of infanticide and her trial is the novel's central event, revealing the clashing values of the old rural world and that of the modern money-centred city.

Jeanie’s Puritan conscience forbids her to commit perjury that could save her sister and her later struggle to save Effie reveals her deep humanity and courage. Scott brings history to life with this portrayal of human resilience in a specific historical situation and he conveys the conflict between the people and the military, along with the hostility of the Scots towards the English state.

Scott’s characters never exist outside their time. He reflects the complex relationship between personal and social forces in a person’s life and with his portrayal of historically specific circumstances and the vitality of ordinary people, he prepares the ground for Dickens.

And that significance has to be recognised at a time when history is vanishing from school curricula and its awareness deliberately erased, reinforced by historical novels portraying characters as unhistorical, conveying the sense that people never develop, that society cannot and will not change.

But, as Scott demonstrates, another kind of historical novel is possible — one that shows history as upheaval and people themselves as historical.