THE ANTIQUARY [A Waverley Novel]

Edinburgh: Cadell & Company, 1829. 2 volumes. First Printing from the First Complete Collected Edition of the Waverley Novels. With finely engraved frontispieces and title-pages to each volume Small 8vo, handsomely bound in antique three-quarter crushed green morocco over marbled paper covered boards, the spines with raised bands, two compartments lettered in gilt, top edges gilt. [xxii], 325; 340 pp. A handsome set, very well preserved, the bindings in pleasing condition, strong and tight, the text-blocks clean and the books sound, a little mellowing to the green as is nearly always the case.. A HANDSOME SET FROM THE FIRST EDITION OF THE COLLECTED WORKS. THE ANITIQUARY is the third of the Waverley novels by Walter Scott, and centers on the character of an antiquary: an amateur historian, archaeologist and collector of items of dubious antiquity. He is the eponymous character and for all practical purposes the hero, though the characters of Lovel and Isabella Wardour provide the conventional love interest. THE ANTIQUARY was Scott's own favourite of his novels, and is one of his most critically well-regarded works; H. J. C. Grierson, for example, wrote that "Not many, apart from Shakespeare, could write scenes in which truth and poetry, realism and romance, are more wonderfully presented."
Scott wrote in an advertisement to the novel that his purpose in writing it, similar to that of his novels WAVERLY and GUY MANNERING, was to document Scottish life of a certain period, in this case the last decade of the 18th century. The action can be located in July and August 1794. It is, in short, a novel of manners, and its theme is the influence of the past on the present. In tone it is predominantly comic, though the humour is offset with episodes of melodrama and pathos.