Sir Walter Scott, was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright and poet. Many of his works remain classics and include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Waverley, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. Peter Garside was educated at Cambridge and Harvard Universities and taught English Literature for more than thirty years at Cardiff University, where he became Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research. Subsequently he was appointed Professor of Bibliography and Textual Studies at the University of Edinburgh, where he is now a Professorial Fellow. He was one of the general editors of the bibliographical survey The English Novel 1770-1829 (2000) and has since co-edited the critical collection English and British Fiction 1750-1820 (2015). More recent work includes editions of Walter Scott’s Shorter Poems (2020) and J. G. Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (2 volumes, 2022).

The new edition of the Waverley Novels is important not just for those interested in Scott and Scottish literature, but also for those in the fields of bibliography, textual criticism and the History of the Book... If any scholar was well placed to establish an 'ideal text' of Waverley, it is Peter Garside... The meticulous care with which the numerous emendations to the texts have been considered makes these volumes a landmark series for modern editing, as well as serving the practical purpose of restoring Scott's texts to their original form.