In the early eighteenth century, Edinburgh was a filthy backwater town synonymous with poverty and disease. Yet by century's end, it had become the marvel of modern Europe, home to the finest minds of the day and their breathtaking innovations in architecture, politics, science, the arts, and economics—all of which continue to echo loudly today.

Adam Smith penned The Wealth of Nations. James Boswell produced The Life of Samuel Johnson. Alongside them, pioneers such as David Hume, Robert Burns, James Hutton, and Sir Walter Scott transformed the way we understand our perceptions and feelings, sickness and health, relations between the sexes, the natural world, and the purpose of existence.

In Crowded with Genius, James Buchan beautifully reconstructs the intimate geographic scale and boundless intellectual milieu of Enlightenment Edinburgh. With the scholarship of a historian and the elegance of a novelist, he tells the story of the triumph of this unlikely town and the men whose vision brought it into being.

Crowded with Genius

The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the MindBy Buchan, James

Perennial

ISBN: 006055889X

Chapter One

Auld Reekie

Edinburgh in the warm September of 1745 was a handsome, cramped and discontented provincial town of approximately 40,000 people, just embarking on modernity. As a capital city, it was nothing much. It had lost its royal court to London in 1603, when King James VI succeeded to the English throne, and its nobility followed at the amalgamation of the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707. Edinburgh had no manufacturing, and its trade was a set of pettifogging monopolies, down to who had the right to rent out the pall at burials or run coaches to the port of Leith. The town lived off lawyers attending on the Court of Session and clergymen coming to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and gentry sending their children up to school and spending the winter in town. In the first age of millionaires, an Edinburgh family was rich with £1,000 a year.

There were nine Presbyterian churches, each with two ministers, and two more outside the walls; two banks (which survive) and a couple of general merchants that could discount commercial bills; two thrice-weekly newspapers (one Whig, one Jacobite) and The Scots Magazine, founded in 1739 and full of trials, poetry, bills of mortality, and a narrative of Scots and world affairs; four printing-works to garble Bibles and law papers; offices of the Friendly and Sun Fire Insurance schemes; a fund for the widows of ministers of the Kirk; a few brewers between the Cowgate and the walls; and three mail coaches to London a week: though there were men alive to tell Sir Walter Scott that once the return mail brought just a single letter for the whole of Scotland. A stagecoach ran monthly to London, spending at least ten days on the road, though a private chaise could do the journey faster. It was not until the time of Robert Burns's visit in 1787 that the journey was cut to sixty hours.

The parliamentary Union with England in 1707 and the abolition of the Scottish Privy Council a year later had demolished the formal administration of Scotland. In as much as the country was ruled at all during the long ascendancy in London of Sir Robert Walpole, it was controlled by the Duke of Argyll and a clutch of law officers. The Edinburgh Town Council, whose constitution had been violently disputed but altered very little since the time of James VI, was a permanent oligarchy that nominated its own successor from candidates submitted by restrictive merchant and craft guilds and even elected the town's MP. Advocates and clergymen, being unincorporated, had no say in either election.

The Council met in a building in Parliament Close hard against the south-west corner of the high church of St Giles and did its drinking at Lucky Wilson's tavern in Writers' Court. Its ordinary membership was twenty-five, which could be expanded under precise and obscure conditions to thirty-three. In the words of a reforming pamphlet of 1746, 'Is it a Small Matter, with you, that the Gentlemen in the Administration of this great City, who should represent near Forty Thousand, do at no time represent Forty of the Inhabitants.' 'Omnipotent, corrupt, impenetrable,' as a witness wrote of the nineteenth-century councillors, ?they might have been sitting in Venice.' They controlled the trade of the town and of the Port of Leith, the street-lights and weights and measures and water supply, and named the ministers to the kirks, the doctors to the High School and the under-janitors to the College. As for the College professors, the magistrates might arrive in a body unannounced to hear a new appointment lecture. The purpose of the Council was to maintain peace between the guilds and, in alliance with the Kirk-sessions and the Presbytery, an atmosphere of unctuous piety.

From a distance the town was a palisade of towers rising, in the phrase of Robert Chambers, 'from a palace on the plain to a castle in the air'. Between Castle Hill and Holyrood ran what Daniel Defoe called 'the most spacious, the longest, and best inhabited Street in Europe'. It was called in its upper section the Lawnmarket; then lower down the High Street, which was closed at the bottom by the gate called the Netherbow Port; and, at the bottom, the Canongate. In parts the street was so broad that five carriages could have moved abreast, but so high-cambered that four of them would have overturned.

Confined by its site, the Lawnmarket and High Street made a sort of antique Manhattan. With nowhere else to go, the pressure of population had squeezed the stone apartment blocks or 'lands' upwards. Those at the back of Parliament Close towered twelve storeys above the Cowgate. Seen from the shores of the Firth of Forth, the garlands of wood -- and peat-smoke round these pinnacles had given rise to a nickname for the town: Auld Reekie.

Between the lands, the wynds and closes ran steeply down ravines to the waters of the North Loch, or to the Cowgate. In those filthy lanes, between sagging houses showing their gables to the street and pigs rooting in the gutters, every condition mingled. As a young medical student named Oliver Goldsmith wrote in 1753 or 1754, 'you might see a well-dressed duchess issuing from a dirty close'. Indeed, Jane Maxwell, who in the second half of the eighteenth century became Duchess of Gordon and the leader of Edinburgh society, was once seen riding up the High Street on a sow which her sister drove on with a stick.

The lands themselves accommodated dancing-masters and Lords of Session and all sorts in between. The dark scale-stairs were upright streets, a thoroughfare of Musselburgh fishwives, sweeps or coal-porters and barefoot housemaids. Sir Walter Scott, who had lost six siblings to the bad air of College Wynd ...

Continues...

Excerpted from Crowded with Geniusby Buchan, James Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.