When America Read Walter Scott
Ad Meskens / CC BY-SA 3.0
For a generation of North American readers, Walter Scott helped supply the picture of Scotland before they ever came here.
Scott's novels reached North America on an extraordinary scale. Abbotsford records him as the most published author there between 1815 and 1840. The traffic later moved in the other direction as American writers and public figures came to Abbotsford itself. Books moved west; readers and admirers eventually followed them back to the house Scott created.
The library turns an Atlantic publishing story back into a physical room filled with the books Scott collected. The study, armoury and collections around it also show how deliberately Abbotsford was shaped as both a home and a particular vision of Scotland.
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