The Heart of Midlothian (World's Classics S.)

by Claire Lamont (Editor), Claire Lamont (Editor), Sir Walter Scott (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1982

  $5.83

  This novel, which has always been regarded as one of Scott's finest, opens with the Edinburgh riots of 1736. The people of the city have been infuriated by the actions of John Porteous, Captain of the Guard, and when they hear that his death has been reprieved by the distant monarch they ignore the Queen and resolve to take their own revenge. At the centre of the story is Edinburgh's forbidding Tolbooth prison, known by all as the Heart of Midlothian.

• Used

  Paperback
  1991

  $3.27

• Used

  Hardcover
  1976

  $3.27

• New

  Paperback
  1994

  $15.65

  Jeanie Deans, a dairymaid, decides she must walk to London to gain an audience with the Queen. Her sister is to be executed for infanticide and, while refusing to lie to help her case, Jeanie is desperate for a reprieve. Set in the 1730s in a Scotland uneasily united with England, The Heart of Mid-Lothian dramatizes different kinds of justice - that meted out by the Edinburgh mob in the lynching of Captain Porteous, and that encountered by a terrified young girl suspected of killing her baby. Based on an anonymous letter Scot received in 1817, this is the seventh and finest of Scott's 'Waverley' novels. It was an international bestseller and inspired succeeding novelists from Balzac to George Eliot.