The Tale of Old Mortality

Going back to the original manuscripts, a team of scholars has uncovered what Scott originally wrote and intended his public to read before errors, misreadings and expurgations crept in during production.

• A clean, corrected text
• Textual histories
• Explanatory notes
• Verbal changes from the first-edition text
• Full glossaries

The Tale of Old Mortality describes the lives – and often violent deaths – the hopes, and the struggles, of the Covenanters in late seventeenth-century Scotland. A tale of extremism, bigotry and cruelty, it is redeemed by its characters' courage and loyalty, and their passionate belief in religious and civil liberty. Considered to be one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century, its influence pervades European writing from Stendhal to Tolstoy.