The Heart of Mid-Lothian

Find Out What Scott Really Wrote

Going back to the original manuscripts, a team of scholars has uncovered what Scott originally wrote and intended his public to read before errors, misreadings and expurgations crept in during production.

The Edinburgh Edition offers you:

• A clean, corrected text
• Textual histories
• Explanatory notes
• Verbal changes from the first-edition text
• Full glossaries

Title Description

The Heart of Mid-Lothian is precisely focused on the trials for murder of John Porteous and of Effie Deans in 1736 and 1737. Yet it is a chronicle – Scott's only chronicle – which spans the eighty years of the life of David Deans, whose death takes place in 1751. The most complex of all Scott's narratives, it is also the most challenging in that it raises in an acute fashion the problem of a judicial system that does not produce justice. Scott places this fundamental issue in its immediate political context, in history as represented by the life of Deans, and alongside the justice of Providence as perceived by his daughter Jeanie, the greatest of Scott's heroines.

The Edinburgh Edition of The Heart of Mid-Lothian provides a new text, and in its annotation treats comprehensively the novel's historical, legal, religious and cultural sources.