The Bride of Lammermoor is the most tragic of Sir Walter Scott's works, and one that clearly resembles the novels of the Gothic tradition. These novels achieved enormous popularity during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, presenting a combination of social elements from both the larger political scene and the more intimate family setting. In this particular work, these entangled but artfully developed threads reveal both the unsettled situation in Britain at the time (the early eighteenth century) and the potentially damaging effects of social disruptions in a family.

In terms of social context, class structure plays a significant role in this work, as it often does in Scott's writing. The fact that Sir William Ashton is, despite his political influence and prominence, of an inferior social rank to his one-time archenemy, the Master of Ravenswood, whose family Ashton has ruined, becomes of great importance as the...