The Heart of Midlothian

The Heart of Midlothian is precisely focused on the trials for the murder of John Porteous and Effie Deans in 1736 and 1737. Yet it is Scott’s only chronicle, spanning the 80 years of the life of David Deans, whose death takes place in 1751. It is the most complex of all Scott’s narratives. It is also the most challenging in that it raises in an acute fashion the problem of a judicial system that does not produce justice, and places it within not just the immediate political context, but within history as represented by the life of Deans, and the justice of Providence as perceived by his daughter Jeanie, the greatest of Scott’s heroines.