Physical description

Waverley Novels Tales of my Landlord Set-2 Vol 10, Light brown hardcover lettering in black text.
Author: Sir Walter Scott
Publisher: Fisher Son & Co
Date: 1836

Publication type

fiction

Inscriptions & markings

The label on spine with typed text PAT FIC SCO
Paste down front end paper has a sticker from Warrnambool Public Library
Front loose end paper has a sticker from Corangamite Regional Library Service

Summary

The subject volume “Waverley Novels Vol 10” published by Fisher Son & Co (1838) is part of a collected edition of Sir Walter Scott's works, containing stories from the "Tales of My Landlord" series.
"Tales of My Landlord" forms a key subset of Scott's Waverley Novels, presented as fictional tales gathered by characters like Peter Pattieson from the landlord of the Wallace “Inn at Gandercleugh”. The series spans multiple books across four sub-series, including “The Black Dwarf” (1707 setting), “Old Mortality” (1679–1689), “The Heart of Midlothian” (1736), “The Bride of Lammermoor” (1709–1711), “A Legend of Montrose” (1644–1645), “Count Robert of Paris” (1097), and “Castle Dangerous” (1307). Vol 46 in the 1838 Fisher edition reprints later entries like “Count Robert of Paris” or “Castle Dangerous” from the fourth series, as these stories originally appeared in Scott's Magnum Opus collected volume editions, the first from 1816. With the influential 48-volume “Magnum Opus” edition from 1829–1833 by Robert Cadell, serving as the basis for later collected published sets like Fisher's.
In the “Second Series” is the one that includes The Heart of MidLothian, a major Scott novel set around the 1736 Porteous riots in Edinburgh.
The story was presented as a collection of stories gathered from a fictional landlord, edited by the imagined figures Peter Pattieson and Jedediah Cleishbotham. In the second series, the central novel, “The Heart of MidLothian, follows crime, justice, and moral conflict in 18th-century Scotland, especially the case of Effie Deans the fictional character in the novel. She is Jeanie Dean’s younger sister presented as pretty, impulsive, and more socially vulnerable than her sister Jeanie. In the novel, she is accused of killing her illegitimate child, though the truth is more complicated, and Jeanie travels to London to seek a pardon for her. Therefore her story centres on an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, a charge of child murder, and the efforts made to save her life, as well as the social consequences of her trial.