The Heart of Mid-Lothian is precisely focused on the trials for murder of John Porteous and of Effie Deans in 1736 and 1737. Yet it is Scott's only chronicle, spanning the eighty years of the life of David Deans, whose death takes place in 1751. It is the most complex of all Scott's narratives. It is also the most challenging in that it raises in an acute fashion the problem of a judicial system that does not produce justice, and places it within not just the immediate political context, but within history as represented by the life of Deans, and the justice of Providence as perceived by his daughter Jeanie, the greatest of Scott's heroines.