Crowded with Genius: Edinburgh, 1745-1789

by James Buchan

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061870606
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/13/2009
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	546,968
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

James Buchan is a novelist and critic. He is the author of The Persian Bride, a New York Times Notable Book, as well as Frozen Desire, an examination of money that received the Duff Cooper Prize. He has also won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Buchan is a contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the New York Observer, and a former foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. He lives in Norfolk, England.

Read an Excerpt

Crowded with Genius
The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind

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 ...

Crowded with Genius
The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind. Copyright © by James Buchan. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

In Britain this book was published last year as Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World. A rather flat title, in my view. I think Crowded with Genius better describes James Buchan's tightly packed, rich but demanding and just slightly overwhelming work of intellectual history. — Michael Dirda

The Washington Post

In a span of 50 years in the late 18th century, Edinburgh, a city of merely 40,000 inhabitants, contained some of the Enlightenment's most important thinkers, such as philosopher David Hume, economist Adam Smith, biographer James Boswell and scientist James Hutton. Buchan, a Whitbread-winning novelist and critic, brings this remarkable era to life, opening with a brief history of the failed rebellion of 1745 and the romanticism that lingered in the Scottish psyche. He also stresses the importance of the Presbyterian Church, but emphasizes that it lost much of its power over Scottish intellectuals. One such intellectual was the influential philosopher David Hume, who was attacked as a heretic but being, in his own words, "naturally of cheerful and sanguine temper," he "soon recovered the blow." A similarly sharp portrait is painted of the life and work of Adam Smith, whose work expressed the rise of the power of commercialism. Buchan also devotes some of his narrative to science, examining Edinburgh as a global center of medical education, and to literature, in which Scotsmen such as novelist Henry Mackenzie and poet Robert Burns would blaze the way for the Age of Romanticism. Throughout, Buchan writes well and does a fine job arguing the case for Edinburgh's disproportionately large impact on 18th-century intellectual history. Yet much of this material has been covered before, most recently in Arthur Herman's enjoyable How the Scots Invented the Modern World, which many readers might find more accessible on complex matters like Hume's philosophy. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Nov. 28) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Until the early 1700s, Edinburgh, Scotland, was considered a smelly backwater, mockingly known as auld reekie. After the union with England, the city became, for a short time, the epicenter of learning, contributing enormously to the age of science and reason. Men such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and James Hutton were only a few of the influential figures that contributed to this modern-day Athens. In addition to the huge strides made in medicine, agriculture, and economics, novelist and critic Buchan (The Persian Bride; Frozen Desire) discusses Edinburgh's cultural reawakening and its focus on building projects to boost its world-class status. He argues that the "well-established Protestant institutions" in Scotland contributed greatly to the intellectual and creative innovations that characterized Edinburgh in the 18th century, yet it was the very questioning of strict Calvinism that freed men's minds as they attempted to understand the world around them. Much is made of the philosophical underpinnings of Edinburgh's achievements, which unfortunately can make for dry and ponderous reading. This book will be of interest chiefly to serious students of Scottish history. Recommended for academic libraries and large public libraries with special collections in British history.-Isabel Coates, MISt, CCRA-Toronto West Tax Office, Mississauga, Ont. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A lively portrait of the city once called the "Athens of the north"—and for good reason. As English novelist and journalist Buchan (Frozen Desire: The Meaning of Money, 1997, etc.) writes, the Edinburgh of 1745 was "inconvenient, dirty, old-fashioned, alcoholic, quarrelsome, and poor." Then came the Battle of Culloden Moor, which has been called the last fight of the medieval era, and the de facto annexation of Scotland by England, all of which caused Scotland's great minds to flock to the city; remake it by draining lochs, building bridges over gullies, and constructing sturdy houses and public buildings; and down a sea of coffee, tea, and whiskey while conjuring up marvelous ideas. In 1755, Diderot and company, Buchan writes, still devoted only "a single contemptuous paragraph" to the whole of Scotland, but only seven years later Voltaire was proclaiming that all the best ideas about everything "from epic poetry to gardening" were coming from the Scottish citadel. What had happened in that short span was nothing short of a Gaelic renaissance, in which philosophers such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, poets such as James MacPherson and Robert Burns, and practical and theoretical scientists such as James Black and James Hutton were crossing disciplinary boundaries, talking with one another, and advancing new learning that quickly spread across the Western world. An Athens it may have been, but these celebrants made of Edinburgh ("a classical town rescued from the frigid by a Gothic town rescued from the grotesque," Buchan writes in a memorable turn) a kind of Sparta, too, which insisted that commerce and industry were insufficient without virtu. Whatever the case,Buchan makes a good argument for its having been a great place to be. If he's a little imprecise on how Edinburgh eventually became a vital center of European civilization, he does a nice job of describing daily life among its intellectual set, of charting their ideas, and of evoking days gone by. A readable companion to Arthur Herman's like-minded How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2001).

Kirkus Reviews