The Abbot

Walter Scott’s The Abbot was first published in three volumes by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown in London, Constable and Ballantyne in Edinburgh, in 1820. It was a sequel to the now almost equally forgotten novel The Monastery published earlier in the same year. The Abbot was popular during the 1820s. Indeed it ranks after Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian and Kenilworth in the listing of the ten most popular loaned volumes from the Oslo University Library in the years between 1828 and 1830. In common with many other Scott novels it formed the foundation for an opera. In...