Walter Scott eBooks

The Heart of Mid-Lothian. E-book. Formato EPUB Walter Scott   -  Gianluca, 2020  - 

The Heart of Midlothian is the seventh of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels. The title of the book refers to the Old Tolbooth prison in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the time in the heart of the Scottish county of Midlothian. The historical backdrop was the event known as the Porteous Riots. In 1736, a riot broke out in Edinburgh over the execution of two smugglers. The Captain of the City Guards, Captain John Porteous, ordered the soldiers to fire into the crowd, killing several people. Porteous was later killed by a lynch mob who stormed the Old Tolbooth. Scott's telling emphasises the gruesome details of the killing: he is lynched from a dyer's pole, using a rope taken from a local draper's shop. After a short while he is dragged down and stripped of his nightgown and shirt, which is then wrapped around his head before he was hauled up again. However, the mob had not tied his hands and, as he struggled free, they break his arm and shoulder, while another attempts to set light to his naked foot. He is taken down a further time and cruelly beaten before being hung up again, and dies a short while later, just before midnight on 7 September 1736.

Waverley. E-book. Formato EPUB Walter Scott   -  Gianluca, 2020  - 

Published anonymously in 1814 as Scott's first venture into prose fiction, this is often regarded as the first historical novel in the western tradition. It became so popular that Scott's later novels were advertised as being 'by the author of Waverley'. His series of works on similar themes written during the same period have become collectively known as the 'Waverley Novels'. It is set in the time of the Jacobite uprising of 1745 which sought to restore the Stuart dynasty in the person of Charles Edward Stuart, known as 'Bonnie Prince Charlie'. A young English dreamer and soldier, Edward Waverley, is sent to Scotland that year. He journeys north from his aristocratic family home, Waverley-Honour, in the south of England, first to the Scottish Lowlands and the home of family friend Baron Bradwardine, then into the Highlands and the heart of the rebellion and its aftermath.