[5] In July 1825 Scott acquired a copy of the Diary of Samuel Pepys, which had just been published for the first time, and according to his son-in-law J. G. Lockhart, "I never observed him more delighted with any book whatsoever".

[12] He resolved to pay off the debts by his own labours as a novelist rather than accept bankruptcy, and the Journal records his unceasing efforts to do this as he writes a series of novels and histories, including Woodstock, The Surgeon's Daughter, The Fair Maid of Perth, Anne of Geierstein, Count Robert of Paris, The Siege of Malta, Bizarro, The Life of Napoleon Buonaparte and Tales of a Grandfather.

In 1891 Algernon Swinburne wrote that "The too long delayed publication of his Journal is in every way an almost priceless benefit; but as a final illustration and attestation of a character almost incomparably lovable, admirable, and noble, it is a gift altogether beyond price.

"[15] The biographer Hesketh Pearson thought it "Perhaps the most valuable, certainly the most moving, of all his productions; and, since it displays a man whose goodness of heart balanced his greatness of mind, incomparably the most interesting work of its kind ever written.

"[23] The novelist John Buchan wrote that "It is one of the most complete expressions of a human soul that we possess… There is no reticence and no posturing, because he is speaking to his own soul…The greatest figure he ever drew is in the Journal, and it is the man Walter Scott.

Scott was not making himself out to be someone that he was not; rather, the Journal is his record of how he made himself conform to the heroic standards of his own fictions…Scott was intent on facing [his difficulties and sorrows] with the bravado of Burley and the stubbornness of Jeanie Deans.

He thought that Scott, foreseeing eventual publication, took the opportunity to influence history's view of his financial crisis: "In these appallingly humiliating circumstances it evidently became more important than ever that he should preserve a noble image of himself in extremis for posterity.