1. Genesis of the Novel

The History of Matthew Wald was first published anonymously late in March 1824 by William Blackwood in Edinburgh and T. Cadell in London, the last of John Gibson Lockhart's four novels in as many years and, according to early reviews, ‘superior in point of writing’ to, and at the same time, ‘rich with the highest merits’ of, his other novels: Valerius, A Roman Story (1821), Some Passages in the Life of Mr Adam Blair, Minister of the Gospel at Cross-Meikle (1822; 2nd edn 1824), and Reginald Dalton (1823). Matthew Wald was republished in 1843 together with Adam Blair in the Blackwood's Standard Novels series and was reprinted multiple times in that series. Lockhart did not revise Matthew Wald for the Blackwood's Standard Novels edition beyond, perhaps, a very small number of words, but the edition also includes minor changes to spelling and punctuation that can be attributed largely to the printer's preferences. The first edition of 1824, then, serves as the copy text for the present edition with minor emendations to correct printing errors, to provide textual consistency, and to include the word changes of the 1843 edition.

Lockhart had an early interest in novel writing, and in 1814, at age twenty, he wrote to his friend Jonathan Christie of his intention to write a Scottish novel that would be ‘a receptacle of an immense quantity of anecdotes and observations I have made concerning the state of the Scotch, chiefly their clergy and elders. It is to me wonderful how the Scotch character has been neglected’. By November 1814 he had made sufficient progress to think of contacting the London publisher, John Murray, about publishing ‘two volumes of nonsense’, as he explained to Christie: