Heart of Mid-Lothian, Vol. 1

This novel, regarded as one of Scott's finest, opens with the Edinburgh riots of 1736. The people have been infuriated by the actions of John Porteous, Captain of the Guard; when his life is saved by the distant monarch they ignore the Queen and resolve to take their own revenge. Closely connected with these events is the story of the novel's heroine, Jeanie Deans, a peasant girl of remarkable religious faith. Like the people of Edinburgh she refuses to accept a legal decision, in this case against her sister Effie, condemned under a harsh law of child-murder. The novel follows Jeanie's prodigious determination to save her sister's life. At the centre of both narratives is Edinburgh's forbidding prison, the Tolbooth, known by all as the Heart of Midlothian.

Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh in 1771. Educated for the law, he obtained the office of sheriff-depute of Selkirkshire in 1799 and in 1806 the office of clerk of session, a post whose duties he fulfilled for some twenty-five years. His lifelong interest in Scottish antiquity and the ballads which recorded Scottish history led him to try his hand at narrative poems of adventure and action. The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady of the Lake (1810) made his reputation as one of the leading poets of his time. A novel, Waverley, which he had begun in 1805, was published anonymously in 1814. Subsequent novels appeared with the note “by the author of Waverley”; hence his novels often are called collectively “the Waverley novels.” Some of the most famous of these are Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), Ivanhoe (1819), Kenilworth (1821), and Quentin Durward (1823). In recognition of his literary work Scott was made a baronet in 1819. During his last years he held various official positions and published biographies, editions of Swift and Dryden, tales, lyric poetry, and various studies of history and antiquity. He died in 1832.