<p>Sir Walter Syndrome is a literary phenomenon whereby you go from being a giant of world literature, universally feted across the globe, up there with Shakespeare and the Four Great Classic Novels, to being a complete nobody, read only by the dustiest of literary historians, overshadowed even by your nutty estranged New Ager sister-in-law. 
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Notable examples are Walter Scott and Walter Besant. At least Scott can sit back on a lumpy Edinburgh rock protected by his filthy stone canopy and reassure himself that, even though no living soul has so much as glanced into any of his books for well over a hundred years, at least he had the centre of a great national capital laid out in his honour. Meanwhile in London, this is all Besant got.
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<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tpholland/6930335506/">Sir Walter Besant</a>