Fiction · 1816
The Black Dwarf
On the moors above the Scottish border, in the year of the 1708 Jacobite alarm, a misshapen solitary appears and builds himself a hut of stones on Mucklestane Moor. The country people take him for a warlock and call him Canny Elshie; he tells everyone who comes to him that the world is evil and that he wants nothing to do with it, and then keeps helping them — the young farmer Hobbie Elliot when his house is burned and his sweetheart carried off, and Isabella Vere when her father tries to force her into a marriage to buy his way out of a conspiracy.
Walter Scott published the novel in 1816 as the first of the Tales of My Landlord, in the same volumes as Old Mortality. He is said to have cut it short after his publisher objected to the direction it was taking, and it is the briefest of the Waverley novels.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text.
Contents
- Epigraph
- Chapter I — Tales of My Landlord
- Introduction
- Chapter II — Jedediah Cleishbotham: Introduction to the Black Dwarf
- Chapter I
- Chapter II
- Chapter III
- Chapter IV
- Chapter V
- Chapter VI
- Chapter VII
- Chapter VIII
- Chapter IX
- Chapter X
- Chapter XI
- Chapter XII
- Chapter XIII
- Chapter XIV
- Chapter XV
- Chapter XVI
- Chapter XVII
- Chapter XVIII
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
Source mind
About the author
1771–1832 · Romantic
Walter Scott (1771–1832) was born in Edinburgh, practised as an advocate, and held the offices of Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire and Clerk of Session for most of his life. He was the most popular poet in Britain — The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion, The Lady of the Lake — before turning, anonymously, to the Waverley novels in 1814. Ivanhoe (1819) was the first he set outside Scotland. Made a baronet in 1820, he was ruined by his publishers’ failure in 1826 and wrote on to pay the debts.
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