A new scholarly reader's edition · 15 August 2026
Reginald Dalton
Reginald Dalton first appeared in three volumes in 1823, published in Edinburgh by William Blackwood. It follows the fortunes of its young title character — the only son of a country clergyman — from a quiet rural upbringing into the noise and temptation of student life at Oxford: friendships and rivalries, mounting debts, a duel, a first and consuming love, and a tangled question of inheritance that threatens everything he hopes for. It is at once a coming-of-age story and a sharp, affectionate portrait of English university life in the early nineteenth century.
John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854) was a Scottish novelist, critic, and biographer, and one of the keenest pens in the circle of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. He is remembered today above all as the son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott and the author of the monumental Life of Scott — but in the 1820s he was a novelist in his own right. Lockhart knew Oxford from the inside, having been a scholar of Balliol College, and Reginald Dalton draws on that world with a knowing and often unsparing eye.
About this edition
This Acorn Abbey Books edition is a scholarly reader's edition: a clean, carefully set modern text of a novel long out of print and little read, prepared for readers who want to meet Lockhart's fiction on its own terms rather than in a scanned facsimile. It is a hefty volume of 598 pages, published on 15 August 2026 in hardback, paperback, and Kindle formats.
Editions and ISBNs
Hardback · ISBN 978-1-949450-05-7 · US $34.99 / UK £32.99
Paperback · ISBN 978-1-949450-06-4 · US $19.99 / UK £19.99
Kindle edition · ISBN 978-1-949450-07-1 · US $7.99 / UK £6.99
Booksellers can order the hardback and paperback through their usual trade distributor (Ingram in the US; Gardners in the UK). If you'd like a copy, the surest way is to ask your local bookshop to order it by ISBN.