A Colloquium on Scott's Journal
Saturday 16th May 2026
Summary of the Talks
The colloquium explored Sir Walter Scott’s Journal (1825–1832), focusing on its literary, historical, and personal significance. The event featured three speakers: David McClay, Professor Alison Lumden, and Lord Stewart (Angus Stewart), each approaching the Journal from a different angle.
David McClay - Origin and Development of the Journal
David is Head of Development at the British School at Athens.
Before taking up that post he was at the University of Edinburgh Heritage Collections and the National Library of Scotland.
David is also a former Trustee of Abbotsford, the Home of Sir Walter Scott.
David McClay's opening lecture traced the origins and development of Scott’s journal, beginning with his 1825 decision to start keeping a diary after regretting his earlier failure to do so. Inspired in part by reading Byron’s journal and Samuel Pepys’ diary, Scott produced a sustained personal record over roughly 2,337 days. The journal spans a period of severe personal and financial crisis, including the collapse of his publishing firm, the death of his wife Charlotte, and his declining health.
The manuscript itself is physically substantial and was carefully preserved within the Scott family before eventually being sold and now resides in the Morgan Library in New York. Early transcriptions by Scott’s son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, shaped initial published versions, which were later revised and expanded through successive scholarly editions, culminating in the modern annotated edition by W. E. K. Anderson (Sir Eric). The Journal has long been praised for its candour, literary quality, and psychological insight into narrative form.
Professor Ali Lumsden - ‘A pleasure even in living and breathing’: Nature, Consolation and Well-being in Scott’s Journal
While the Journal is a poignant record of the challenges Scott faced towards the end of his life it also offers evidence of his life-long pleasure in trees, walking and nature. This paper will explore the consolations that Scott finds though the natural world as they are recorded in this personal account.
Alison is Regius Chair of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen, where she is General Editor of the Edinburgh Edition and the lead editor for an edition of Walter Scott's poetry. She is also co-director of the University of Aberdeen's Walter Scott Research Centre, which exists to promote all aspects of research on Walter Scott. She has published extensively on Walter Scott and on other aspects of Scottish literature.
A trustee and Honorary Librarian of Scott's library at Abbotsford.
Former Club President (2017-18)
Prof. Ali Lumsden shifted focus to nature, wellbeing, and environmental perception in Scott’s Journal and wider life. Scott’s writing and estate development at Abbotsford demonstrate a consistent belief in the restorative power of landscape, trees, and physical movement. He was an active tree planter and landscape designer, favouring a naturalistic aesthetic rather than formal landscaping.
Across both his fiction and journal, Scott repeatedly connects walking outdoors with improved mental wellbeing. During periods of depression, grief, and financial anxiety, he records relief through walking, tree planting, and engagement with his environment. These entries suggest an intuitive understanding of what might now be called nature-based mental health recovery. His reflections anticipate modern ideas such as “forest bathing” and environmental wellbeing, and his Abbotsford estate becomes both a creative and therapeutic space.
Lord Stewart, Angus Stewart - “I would fight knee deep in blood ere it came to that” - Does this Journal entry for 9 June 1826 give a clue as to why Scott changed the setting of The Bride of Lammermoor from before to after the Union of Scotland with England?
The Honourable Lord Stewart, was a Senator of the College of Justice (2010-2017) having been an advocate (1975-2010), served as Keeper of the Advocates Library (1995-2002). In that role he was inaugural Chair of the Faculty of Advocates Abbotsford Library Project. Former Club President (2024-25).
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[transcript]
Lord Stewart's paper examined Scott’s role as a legal thinker and public official, arguing that a specific journal entry from June 1826 reflects concern about the growing power of the House of Lords over Scottish legal appeals. This, it was argued, influenced his revisions to The Bride of Lammermoor, where Scott altered the historical setting from before the 1707 Union to after it, thereby shifting legal conflicts into a British rather than purely Scottish constitutional framework.
This reinterpretation links Scott’s fiction directly to contemporary anxieties about Scottish legal autonomy and the increasing centralisation of judicial authority in London. The speaker suggested that Scott’s journal reveals not only personal reaction to these changes but also a sense of cultural and institutional loss, which is then encoded into his revised fiction.
Interesting points:
Scott’s Journal is not simply a private diary but a carefully shaped historical document produced during a period of intense personal crisis. Its blend of immediacy and self-conscious presentation makes it both candid and constructed.
A striking theme is how physically active coping strategies recur in the journal. Walking, movement, and immersion in landscape are repeatedly recorded as direct responses to grief, anxiety, and depressive episodes. This gives unusually early documentary evidence of what we would now recognise as nature-based mental health practice.
Ali’s argument highlights Scott as a practical environmental thinker, not just a literary Romantic. His tree planting was systematic, large-scale, and informed by reading and experimentation, effectively making Abbotsford a long-term ecological project as well as a personal estate.
Angus offered a more provocative interpretative claim: that legal and constitutional anxieties in early 19th-century Scotland may have directly influenced revisions to Scott’s fiction. Whether or not one accepts the strength of that causal link, it is a compelling example of how historical fiction can be shaped by contemporary institutional pressures.
Across all three talks, Scott emerges as unusually multidimensional: novelist, diarist, land improver, legal official, and public figure responding in real time to personal and national upheaval.
A final subtle thread is the idea of legacy. The Journal is repeatedly framed not just as self-expression but as communication with the future—whether through writing, landscape, or literature that reworks lived experience into narrative form.
