After nearly
ten years spent in preparation, Peter
Garside's new scholarly edition of Walter Scott's
Waverley; or 'tis Sixty Years Since (1814)
will be published by Edinburgh University Press in November
2007. Like its final chapter, ‘A Postscript, which should
have been a Preface', it appears as one of the last
in the new Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels,
so that the full weight of experience gained from editing
Scott's fiction can be brought to understanding his
most influential novel, the one which gave its name
to the Waverley Novels. The text, based on the first
edition with detailed attention to the author's original
manuscript, is significantly different from its predecessors,
offering in all some 1600 emendations.
An extensive
‘Essay on the Test' deals among other things with issues
surrounding the genesis of this novel, and more particularly
the questions involved in dating its earliest chapters.
These are complex and have led to a variety of interpretations.
As a whole the editor endorses the view that the novel
was begun in 1808 (not in 1805 as traditional accounts
have argued), continued in 1810, and completed in 1813-14.
Within this overall pattern new information and insights
are offered about Scott's activity and input at such
points of engagement.
The main events
in Waverley take place at the time of the
Jacobite rising of 1745-46, with its hero's private
adventures interconnecting at various points with this
last main effort to restore the Stuart family as monarchs.
Through Waverley 's upbringing at Waverley-Honour, and
his first-hand experiences of two main motor forces
of Jacobite opposition in Scotland , the novel also
offers a wider overview of Jacobitism as a cultural
and historical phenomenon. The new edition's extensive
annotation provides an array of new information concerning
issues such as Scott's sources and the topographical
and chronological organisation of the novel.
With the publication
of this volume and Peveril of the Peak (1822),
edited by Alison Lumsden, the Edinburgh Edition has
produced 23 out of the 28 main volumes which will be
complete this major and groundbreaking new edition of
the Waverley Novels. It is anticipated that the remaining
five volumes will be published by 2009, completing twenty-five
years of research spent preparing this edition, under
its Editor-in-Chief David Hewitt.
Peter Garside
is Professor of Bibliography and Textual Studies at
the University of Edinburgh . There are plans for an
International Conference on Textual Editing to take
place at Edinburgh University in 2008, hosted by the
Centre for History of the Book.
Further details
are available on the Edinburgh University Press web
site.
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