Scott's novels finally corrected

Published on Saturday 5 December 2009 18:53

SCHOLARS have finally removed the last of 30,000 gaffes and typesetting errors from the collected works of Sir Walter Scott.

After an epic 25-year project, academics have republished the Talisman, the last of the writer's 28 novels to be thoroughly corrected.

Prof David Hewitt, editor-in-chief of the new Edinburgh edition of the Waverley Novels, said all the books were now "as Scott would have wanted".

Hewitt and an army of editors were able to fix the collected works of Scott only after tracking down original manuscripts and early 19th century proof sheets from libraries and collections in London, Edinburgh, New York and Moscow. They were shocked to find books littered with mistakes, 1,000 per book, five or six per page.

Hewitt yesterday detailed five errors on just one page of Waverley, Scott's first and most famous novel. They included the word "accident" printed as "incident", "which" as "whom", and "lord" as "laird".

Hewitt, 67, has been re-editing Scott since he was appointed to his current job in 1984. His team was shocked by the mistakes it found. "We really couldn't believe it, to start with. But the more we worked, the more we found out."

Scott himself never noticed the errors. He never checked proofs because he was already excited by his latest project.

Scott was the most famous writer in the world in his day, though his reputation, at its peak when he died in 1832, faded until the 1960s.

Hewitt said: "He is not going to be popular like Jane Austen is popular. He makes really big linguistic demands. All that Scots language is magnificent — but it is very hard to read. Intellectually it is demanding too — you have to pay attention. For all that, we have already sold 50,00 to 70,000 volumes in this edition alone."