Tales of My Landlord

A scene from The Bride of Lammermoor

Tales of my Landlord is a series of novels by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) that form a subset of the so-called Waverley Novels. There are four series:

Title Published Main setting Period
Tales of My Landlord, 1st series:
   The Black Dwarf 1816 Scottish Borders 1707
   The Tale of Old Mortality 1816 Southern Scotland 1679–89
Tales of my Landlord, 2nd series:
   The Heart of Midlothian 1818 Edinburgh, Richmond, London, 1736
Tales of my Landlord, 3rd series:
   The Bride of Lammermoor 1819 East Lothian 1709–11
   A Legend of Montrose 1819 Scottish Highlands 1644–5
Tales of my Landlord, 4th series:
  Count Robert of Paris 1832 Constantinople, Scutari 1097
  Castle Dangerous 1832 Kirkcudbrightshire 1307

Of these, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor have been the most successful, and Old Mortality is considered by modern critics to be among Scott's best work. The fourth were the least successful.

They were so called, because they were supposed to be tales collected from the (fictional) landlord of the Wallace Inn at Gandercleugh, compiled by a "Peter Pattieson", and edited and sent to the publisher by Jedediah Cleishbotham. This is gone into in great depth in the introduction to The Black Dwarf.

The first series was planned to comprise four volumes, each containing a separate novel, but Scott — by his own admission — botched The Black Dwarf, and Old Mortality came to be three volumes in its own right. . The other three series thus consisted of two volumes each, or just one, in the case of the second.

They were supposed to reflect aspects of Scottish regional life.

See also


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