A01=John Gibson Lockhart
Author_John Gibson Lockhart
Category=DSBF
Category=DSK
Category=FBC
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John Gibson Lockhart
Novel
Religious History
Romanticism
Rome
Scottish Fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9781399553537
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jan 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Valerius, A Roman Story, Lockhart’s first novel and what has been called ‘the first classical novel in English’, was first published in 1821 and extensively revised for Blackwood’s Standard Novels (1842) two decades later. This revised edition – Lockhart’s final edition – is the text presented in this new scholarly edition. The title character, a young Roman Briton, narrates and reflects upon his journey to Rome in the time of Trajan. The novel is part history, part travel narrative, part love story and part thriller, as Valerius’s personal journey is carefully interwoven with the history, culture, and politics of the Roman Empire in a time of Christian persecution. Lockhart offers Romantic fiction a new character and invites readers to consider conditions of nineteenth-century Britain through Roman life. This edition, with its extensive explanatory notes, provides the modern reader with the scholarly resources to re-evaluate Valerius and Lockhart’s place in the history of the Scottish novel and Romantic fiction.
Thomas C. Richardson is Professor of English Emeritus at Mississippi University for Women. He is the editor of Some Passages in the Life of Mr Adam Blair and The History of Matthew Wald in the Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Works of John Gibson Lockhart, as well as the two-volume edition of James Hogg’s Contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in the Stirling / South Carolina Research Edition of the Collected Works of James Hogg.
