In the absence of a surviving manuscript of Lawrie Todd, the sources for this text are the three editions published during Galt's lifetime in which he is known to have been involved. The first was published in a three-volume format by Colburn and Bentley in London in January of 1830; it was reprinted with some corrections in a second edition that same year. After Richard Bentley took sole control of the firm, a new one-volume edition, “revised, corrected, and illustrated with a new introduction, notes, etc. by the author” was issued as No. XXI of Bentley's “Standard Novels” in 1832. This essay describes the differences among those editions and their relation to the present text.

The 1830 Editions

The 1830 editions of Lawrie Todd present the text in nine sequentially numbered parts. Most parts have twelve chapters, but that uniformity is not maintained: part 3 has sixteen chapters; part 9 only nine; parts 1 and 2 each have eleven. The chapters are numbered separately in each part. Following part 9 is an appendix of letters concerning the yellow fever outbreak in New York, which is significant in the plot of the novel, and a glossary of the Scottish words and “Yankeyisms” that enliven the dialogue and narration throughout. A brief preface precedes part 1. A short list of errata appears between the appendix and glossary in the first edition only. The nine parts are evenly divided among the three volumes; the pages are numbered separately in each volume.

There are approximately one hundred differences between the texts of the two 1830 editions, mostly involving corrections of misspellings or changes in punctuation. Two chapters numbered 11 are correctly renumbered as 10 and 11. An epigraph is supplied for the only chapter (chapter 5 in part 2) to have been missing one. Only some of the items on the first-edition errata list were corrected, so the second edition retains a mistaken reference to Mrs Greenknowe's first name as “Sarah” instead of “Martha”; the other overlooked errata are less startling to readers. There are, however, some notable deletions and insertions of phrases.