INTRODUCTION

The opening sentence that Scott provided for the introduction to the Magnum Opus edition of The Bride of Lammermoor is familiar: “The Author, on a former occasion, declined giving the real source from which he drew the tragic subject of this history, because, though occurring at a distant period, it might possibly be unpleasant to the feelings of the descendants of the parties.” The former occasion to which Scott alluded was probably the writing of the introduction to Chronicles of the Canongate in 1827. This means that, as first published in 1819, the novel opened with Peter Pattieson's entertaining account of the life of Dick Tinto, the obscure painter, and of the latter's discussions with Pattieson on the respective merits of narrative in the novel and in the pictorial arts. Tinto had made sketches of an ancient castle, but from legends that he had learned concerning the castle, he had become tempted, instead of drawing the ruins in the landscape, to represent the most interesting legend in a historical painting. This legend was, of course, that of The Bride of Lammermoor which Pattieson proceeded to tell (Bride (n 1) 23–25). Neither Tinto nor Pattieson – nor, for that matter, Jedediah Cleishbotham as editor – referred to the story of the unfortunate Janet Dalrymple, which Scott identified in the Magnum edition in 1830 as the source of his “ower true tale” (Bride (n 1) 340), and the historical and legendary material on which Scott drew has been the subject of scholarly investigation, confirming how Scott used various versions of the story of Janet Dalrymple to form his own tale.

Recent scholarship has shown the extensive nature of the revisions Scott made for the Magnum Opus edition of The Bride of Lammermoor. The most important of these changes were those redating the period of the action of the novel to after the Union of 1707; they do not appear, however, to have a bearing on why Scott felt reticent about alluding to the Dalrymple legend until 1830. Indeed, the explanation Scott gave in 1830 seems undoubtedly to have been the motive for his omitting any mention of Janet Dalrymple. The reasons for doing so in 1819 and shortly thereafter were, however, much more compelling than has hitherto been noticed in the critical literature on The Bride of Lammermoor.