Peter's Letters to his Kinfolk. By John Gibson Lockhart. Edited by Peter Garside and Gillian Hughes. The Edinburgh Critical Edition of the Works of John Gibson Lockhart. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. ISBN 9781399500708 (hbk). 2 vols, 976pp. Hbk/ebook. £175.00.

On its publication in 1819, the current editors estimate that J. G. Lockhart’s Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk sold almost four thousand copies in eight months. Lockhart’s book offered an irresistible insider’s view of Edinburgh during its time of literary ascendency, and was heralded by the London Literary Gazette as ‘a lively and entertaining picture of Scotland, Scotsmen, and Scots manners’ (II, p. 34). However, within years the fictionalised travelogue was out of print and described by Carlyle as ‘a worthless book’ (II, p. 46). Whilst two volumes of selections from the book were published in the twentieth century, it remains difficult to source in an unabridged form to this day. This is despite an increasing scholarly interest in the work as both a record of its period and as a literary object in its own right. Peter Garside and Gillian Hughes’s new edition thus offers an essential source text for scholars interested in working with the text and in considering Lockhart’s place within our accounts of Romantic-era Scotland.....