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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780199538393
ISBN number: 0199538395
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 624
Printing Date: February 15, 2009
Publishing house: Oxford University Press, USA
Sale Popularity Level: 658727
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
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 cente of the story is Edinburgh's forbidding Tolbooth prison, known by all as the Heart of Midlothian.
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Rated by buyers -
The fact that this monster of a novel was a bestseller at its time (1818) possibly tells us that 'progress' has reduced the time that we are willing to spend on reading. So for me. I was looking for the usual half dozen pocket books to take on a trip of a few days. This one was the last Scott that was still in my shelf. For lack of space I relegate books that I have read and that are not top favorites to either box storage in the garage or to 2nd hand book sales at school charities. This one I had not read yet. I will probably never have the stamina for it, unless I am marooned on the proverbial island and it happens to be in my hand luggage.
I did read the introductions and browsed through some chapters. Maybe another time. Possibly never, though I do remember that Scott's mansion Abbotsford near Edinburgh is one of only four writer's houses turned museum that I visited. The other three are Goethe's birth house in Frankfurt, the Joyce museum in Dublin (of which I can't remember for certain right now whether he ever lived there), and Nabokov's childhood appartment in St.Petersburg.
I think my Scott time is over, so if you wait for the subsequent instalment of my Melville excursions, don't worry, I am not sidetracked. Redburn will be next, but I am travelling a lot these days, and I don't take hardcovers on trips.
Why then do I post a review on the 'Heart'? I was impressed by the editor's story of his trouble with identifying the right text for this publication. The writer, Scott, was a highly literate man in a modern society of his time, who even owned the publishing house himself, indirectly. The book was an international bestseller despite its folksiness and the excessive use of 'dialect' English. Finding out 200 years later which text is 'authoritative' can be damned hard.
You see what I am driving at. Text reconstruction is hard and often impossible. How then can a text that was transmitted orally for decades, if not centuries, before it was committed to paper, have an 'authoritative' version that has any plausible relation to its 'author'?
The 'Heart' is in a box in the garage now, in case you wondered.
Rated by buyers -
Written in 1818, "The Heart Of Midlothian" is one of the most famous works of the great Scottish Writer, Sir Walter Scott. It is set largely in Scotland in the time between the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 and revolves around the Edinburgh riots of 1736 that saw the lynching of John Porteous, Captain of the City Guard, and the subsequent retaliation by the English Crown. Intimately connected with this is the story of Effie Deans, condemned to death on the assumption of having had her child killed, despite a total lack of evidence and the efforts of her sister Jeanie to see her freed. Incidentally the "Heart of Midlothian" was the Edinburgh Tollhouse or Jail, which was later pulled down and removed.
It is a longish read at 507 pages, but by no means long compared to many of the bloated works of recent years. It took me a very long time to read, not because of its length but because its style was so dry and tedious and so full of unnecessary detail as to prevent me reading more than a chapter or two at a time, and there are 52 chapters. A random example:
"There was not a window in all the lofty tenements around it, or in the steep and crooked street called the Bow, by which the fatal procession was to descend, that was not absolutely filled with spectators. The uncommon height and antique appearance of these houses, some of which were formerly the property of the Knights Templars, and the Knights of St John, and still exhibit on their fronts and gables the iron cross of these orders, gave additional effect to the scene in itself so striking."
There's nothing wrong with this language, and the excessive detail may be interesting to some, but for me it makes dreary read.
Scott was a lawyer by trade, and he carries his work with him in this novel. Not only does it read as though declaimed by a barrister at the Assizes, but it is full of lawyers, would be lawyers, lawyer's humour and lawyer's Latin. For example:
"He has been a candidate for our remedium miserabile" said Mr Hardie, "commonly called a cessio bonorum. As there are divines who have doubted the eternity of future punishments, so the Scotch lawyers seem to have thought that the crime of poverty might be atoned for by something short of perpetual imprisonment. After a month's confinement, you must know, a prisoner for debt is entitled, on a sufficient statement to our Supreme Court, setting forth the amount of his funds, and the nature of his misfortunes, and surrendering all his effects to his creditors, to claim to be discharged from prison".
"I had heard", I replied, "of such a humane regulation".
"Yes", said Halkit, "and the beauty of it is, as the foreign fellow said, you may get the cessio when the bonorums are all spent. ..."
The characters Halkit and Hardie and all their legal carry-on in the very first chapter are entirely unnecessary as is the character Bartoline Saddletree, who's utterances throughout the book are tedious in the extreme, not only to the reader, but also to the other characters who are forced to listen to him. Obviously Scott had not the art of self editing, being entirely unable to cull his own dross, and the book is much the weaker for it.
And now we come to the matter of religion. There is a great deal of religion in this book, and in my opinion at least, a great deal too much. I know that many folk in those days took the cult of Jehovah far more seriously than they do today, but it makes for boring reading. There can surely be few indeed who care a fig about the Cameronian Covenanters and their nit picking issues with the Protestant Church. For example:
"There remained a third stumbling block - the oaths to government exacted from the established clergymen, in which they acknowledge an Erastian king and parliament, and homologate the incorporating union between England and Scotland, through which the latter kingdom had become part and parcel of the former, wherein Prelacy, the sister of Popery, had made fast her throne, and elevated the horns of her mitre. These were the symptoms of defection which had often made David cry out. "My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at the very heart!" ...
These oaths were, therefore, a deep compliance and a dire abomination - a sin and a snare, and a danger and a defection. But this shibboleth was not always exacted."...
There may well have been people like the tiresome David Deans, and modern students of Christian history may be fascinated with the intricacies of Protestant doctrine but for the rest of us it just gets in the way of the story.
Scott may, perhaps, have excuses for the above flaws, but what he can not excuse himself from is the books greatest flaw: the one dimensionality of the main characters. Jeanie the heroine is, to put it baldly, a drip. A courageous, do it herself woman, willing and able to risk her life and honour to save her sister. A steadfast Protestant willing ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
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I've read some long novels in my time, but this one I couldn't bring myself to more than skip through, aside from the very first 90 pages, which excitingly detail the porteous riots. Scott might have had an interesting idelogical point to make about religion, but the story he found to tell it through was not worth 580-odd pages. Jeanie Deans story is more like a poor endeavor at Jane Austen, who will she marry, how does her marriage go. Scott's interest is clearly in the supporting players, Douce Davie Deans and Dumbiedikes, who are aligned with whatever religious movement Scott didn't like. Honestly, if you don't care much for religious differences, you'll be skipping as I was. Too much character description and not enough character in action; the story doesn't fit the concept, and tells a story in 580 words what probably deserved 220 or less, for economic reasons, to sell the full three volumes (according to the introduction).
Scott is famous for being immensely popular: but unlike Dickens, I'm struggling to see why. I will give him another chance some day. I've got Waverley, Old Mortality and Ivanhoe sitting on my shelf - I haven't given up on him yet.
Rated by buyers 
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Having been asked to spend a few weeks at a remote Naval base in the former “German Democratic Republic”, I had plenty of time on my hands to read Walter Scott’s “Heart of Midlothian” in the Oxford World’s Classics edition (with notes, 580 pages), something that whiled away the time more than satisfactorily, this novel being perhaps the best that Scott ever wrote. In his previous Waverley novel, “Old Mortality”, he had described the unruly, extreme tendencies of Covenanter Calvinism. In this book, he shows us the other side of the strict Biblical piety he had got to know during his own childhood. The novel is based on two true stories, the Porteous riots in Edinburgh, and the heroics of one Helen Walker, a simple Scots lass who walked to London to save her sister from an unjustly imposed death penalty for child murder. Scott’s way of combining these two stories, making the leader of the riot to be the father of the child that had disappeared, is neither historical nor particularly convincing, and the fate of the child is, indeed, a horrible one. But for me, the most interesting aspect of the book was the description of the Christianity practised by Lowland Scots at the beginning of the 18th century. Davie Deans, the father of Scott’s heroine, is something of a Cameronian or strict covenanter, and it is, perhaps, his very strictness which drives his young daughter Effie to the worldly pursuits that he so much abhorrs. But Davie Deans is an honest soul, and despite his wordy arguments with his neighbours, emerges as a very sympathetic figure, who, towards the end of the book, reaches something of a compromise to enable himself and his elder daughter to live in fairly comfortable circumstances; this, surely, is a picture of how Scott sees the development of theological Calvinism, forced to come to terms with the political and social realities of a Scotland dominated by “prelatist” English interests. Jeannie Deans, Scott’s rather romanticized version of Helen Walker, is an equally strict believer, but her faith expresses itself not in words but in actions, and this is what makes her both a charming heroine and a symbol of what, according to Scott, is best in Christianity and Calvinism.
As for the rest of the book, it is the descriptions of the Porteous riots and the storming of the Edinburgh prison, the “Heart of Midlothian”, at the beginning which make the greatest impression, followed perhaps by the trial scenes and then the interviews in London with the Duke of Argyll and with Queen Caroline, wife of George II. The last part of the book, which is due entirely to Scott’s imagination and has no basis in reality, is more disappointing, as though Scott thought he could not publish a novel without at least some scenes in the Highlands, scenes which here do not ring absolutely true.
Reading Scott is never easy, but the World’s Classics edition makes a brave endeavor at facilitating the procedure with copious explanatory notes, a historical overview and a glossary which, while not containing every difficult word, is comprehensive enough to help the reader through the intricacies of Scottish legal Latin and Lowland dialect.
Rated by buyers -
Heart of Midlothian is best known yesterday in Scotland as the name of a football team from Edinburgh. Many may be aware that the team took its name from a novel, but Scott's story is little read nowadays so few indeed are aware that the novel took its name from a prison. This prison was situated in the centre of Edinburgh in the county of Midlothian, until it was torn down in 1817, and no doubt a certain irony was intended when it became known as The Heart of Midlothian. Scott's novel focuses on the prison firstly in its description of the Porteous riot of 1736 when a mob stormed the prison in order to revenge itself on a prisoner who it seemed was to escape justice. More importantly it is to this prison that Effie Deans is sent for the crime of child murder, because she has kept the fact of her pregnancy secret and cannot produce the child. Effie faces the prospect of execution even though there is no evidence that she has killed her baby. The law considered her secrecy as evidence enough of her guilt. This leads to a terrible dilemma for the novel's heroine Jeannie Deans. If she would merely say that she had been told of her sister's pregnancy, Effie would go free. Jeannie will go to any lengths to free her sister, but she will not lie. In her search for justice Jeannie must walk to London and her extraordinary journey takes her to the very top of 18th century society.
Jeannie Deans is the greatest of Scott's heroines. She is strong both physically and morally. While she may not have the education of some of those she meets, she more than matches their learning with her own common sense. It is the investigation of her character, which makes the novel so interesting. The story is well told and is often exciting with lots of suspense and emotion, but Scott is less concerned with romance in this novel than in some of his others. The story of Jeannie's love for her childhood friend Reuben Butler is important, but told in such a way as to emphasise Jeannie's morals and sense rather than her romantic inclinations. If there is a romantic heroine in the novel, it is Effie, but her wilful, petulant nature together with her involvement with a rake is contrasted unfavourably with the behaviour and character of her sister. Heart of Midlothian is a long novel perhaps too long, as the fourth part is not quite as good as the very first three. It is also quite a difficult read with a good deal of difficult legalistic language and a greater than usual amount of Scots dialect. The best edition of the novel is undoubtedly that edited by David Hewitt and Alison Lumsden. The editors have gone back to Scott's manuscript and the very first edition of the novel in order to correct numerous errors and restore a number of important readings, which have previously been lost. The result is a stunning example of modern editorial scholarship, which provides the reader with a text, which is easier and more enjoyable to read. This edition moreover has an extensive set of notes and a full glossary both of which are essential if Scott's text is to be fully understood. Heart of Midlothian is perhaps not the best place to begin reading Scott. But it is a novel, which anyone who reads Scott should aim towards, for it is quite possibly the best of the Waverley novels.
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