The Heart of Mid-Lothian [antikvár]

PREFACE The Heart of Mid-Lothian is distinctive among Scott's novels, and is - debatably - his masterpiece. This Penguin Classics edition presents a purified text based on the first edition of 1818, incorporating selected corrections from the manuscript, from corrected printings in Scott's lifetime, and from the interleaved set that Scott prepared for the New Edition of 1830. It is the first time that such an editorial task has been undertaken in respect of this novel - full particulars can be found in the headnote to the Textual Notes, pp. 679-81. There are no large-scale surprises, but the sharpness and richness of Scott's writing is revealed afresh in many details that had been obscured in transcription and printing in the earliest editions and by excessive standardization in later ones. The Editor's Introduction seeks to contextualize and rehistoricize discussion of this contested chef d'ouvre and its genesis and production, to look in some detail at Scott's writing and its implications, and to take account of the kinds of discussion the novel has evoked. Scott's own Introduction and the Notes he added in 1830, originally interspersed between chapters, are grouped together after the main text of the novel; then follow the present Editor's Notes, which seek both to move the modern reader towards the position of an ideal 'original' one (where cultural change has eroded access to meaning) and to document some of the webs and patterns of textuality and allusion that play through Scott's writing, hidden or visible according to a reader's observation and knowledge. Sources for the two dozen apparent quotations still noted as 'untraced' will be welcomed by the editor, but note should be taken of Scott's remarks quoted in the note to the epigraph to Chapter 19. The Editor's Notes offer to supplement and decode aspects of Scott's writing, but modern readers are likely also to need help with Scott's vast and diverse vocabulary of Scots, French, Latin, Gaelic and English dialect. A Glossary, placed late in the volume, offers access of this kind, and also clarifies obsolete and semantically changed words, real and invented place-names and significant names of fictitious characters in the novel. Tony Inglis University of Sussex, 6 January 1992