Walter Scott

Scott trained as an advocate in Edinburgh, lamed by childhood polio, and first made his name collecting and imitating Scottish border ballads before turning, at forty-three, to prose fiction he was embarrassed enough to publish anonymously.

Waverley (1814), a callow young Englishman drawn into the doomed Jacobite rising of 1745, sold out instantly and launched a string of 'Waverley novels' that made him the best-selling and best-paid author in Europe, still published under the coy byline 'the Author of Waverley' for over a decade.

He poured his fortune into building Abbotsford, his baronial estate, then lost everything in the publishing crash of 1826; rather than declare bankruptcy, he spent his last six years writing at a killing pace to clear the debt through work alone, dying, largely successful in that aim, in 1832.