Special Collections
Book of the Month, September 2005
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The romantic poem Lay of the Last Minstrel , 200 years old this year, is Sir Walter Scott's first considerable original work. It is a six-canto metrical romance in irregular stanzas, enclosing several ballads and at least 3,000 allusions to other literary texts. In it an ancient minstrel, the last of his race, laments the decline of his art and his nation as in the late 1690s he narrates to the first Duchess of Buccleuch his involved and violent tale of her ancestors in the mid-sixteenth century, when Scotland and England were enemies. The story tells of feud, witchcraft and frustrated love.
Scott wrote the work over an extended period, making references thought to pertain to it, or an earlier form of it, from 1792 onwards. According to one account the disapprobation of friends caused him to burn its first version, and he returned to the poem in 1802, while spending three days in bed to recover from having been kicked by a horse. By 21 August 1804 Ballantyne received the manuscript for typesetting, and the first 750 copies were published on 12 January 1805 . The poem was an immediate success. By 1807 it had reached its sixth edition; the second to sixth editions combined account for 10,750 copies. By Scott's death in 1832 21 British editions of the poem had appeared, 16 in separate editions and 5 in collected editions of Scott's work, and it has been republished, translated, adapted many times since.
Most of Senate House Library's first editions of Scott's works were collected by Sir Louis Sterling (1879-1958) and are in the Sterling Library. The two copies of the Lay , surprisingly are not; one is from the general collections and the other from the library of the bishop Beilby Porteus (1731-1809), who by reading contemporary literature acquired several first editions of literary works in addition to the theological and devotional works and items of social concern which form the bulk of his 4,000-volume strong collection.
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