The Arts

The growing circulation of visual art and its widening appearance in domestic collections and public display is an important moniker of the advance of consumerism, cosmopolitanism and innovation. What once had been (and for much of the eighteenth century still remained) an international aristocratic pastime suffused itself steadily into the houses and purchases of the professional well-to-do, bringing with it variety of origin, variety of subject, and whole new genres which could inflect the manner in which indoor and outdoor environments were represented and understood as they came under the control of society’s elites. Such new images could, in their turn, embed the centrality of questions of landscape, geographical conditions and human societies in the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers who moved in intellectual spheres much removed from the visual arts.

Trades and Professions

Edinburgh’s tightly controlled burgess network, which was regulated by the Town Council, strongly defined the middle orders. It also controlled the limits of what was politically tolerable for those looking to make their way in society via the trade and craft incorporations of the city: Chirurgons and Barbouris (who separated in 1722), Goldsmythis, Skinners and Furriers, Hammermen, Wrights and Masons, Tailors, Baxters, Fleschouris, Curdwainers, Wabstaris, Waekaris [hatters], Bonnet-Makers, and Dyers and Candlemakers. Control of the system was strongly identified with the exercise of political control on a wider stage, as burgess privileges and licensing were an established route to patronage.

Booksellers, Newspapers and Libraries

As we saw in Chapter 2, the development of a strong newspaper and publishing industry was one of the key elements in the development of Edinburgh at the turn of the eighteenth century, which set it apart from other British cities outwith London. In 1661, the Episcopalian playwright and theatre manager Thomas Sydserf (1624–99) was responsible for the appearance of the newspaper the Mercurius Caledonius (The Caledonian Mercury), which reported the reinterment of the Royalist hero James Graham, Marquis of Montrose. There had been an earlier Mercurius Criticus in 1651–2 and a Mercurius Politicus in 1654, albeit these were Cromwellian imports. Edinburgh newspapers were an early innovation, and from the late seventeenth century were to pose a challenge to the imported ‘London-based newspapers’, as well as drawing on them extensively.

Edinburgh and the Canongate 1660–1750: Communications, Networks, the Routers of Change

In 1660, the ‘Guid Toun’ and royal burgh of Edinburgh was very compact. Its nine hundred by five hundred metres has been called ‘a city without streets’, clustered in deep narrow closes round the spine of the Hie Gait/Street, divided from the burgh of regality of the Canongate at St Mary’s Wynd; Leith, a separate burgh effectively subordinate to Edinburgh, lay further off. From the heights of the Hie Gait and its buildings, remote views could be seen, but ‘the city had no formal vistas’. The capital’s cityscape was largely a series of intimate spaces, miniaturised public environments, accessed through close stairs and courts, some closed off for privacy.

Remembering and Inventing Enlightenment

This is a book about the Scottish Enlightenment. It is also a book about Edinburgh, the chief city of that Enlightenment. There have been many books about the Scottish Enlightenment, and about the role of Edinburgh in it: but this one is different. In the chapters that follow, this book will align the importance of Edinburgh for the national economy and national culture at the end of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries with its centrality as a place for the generation of ideas and innovatory practices.

Taverns, Associations and Freemasonry

The importance of clubs and associations in generating the intellectual climate of Enlightenment Edinburgh has been taken as a given ever since the pioneering work done by David McElroy in the 1950s.1 The mechanisms by which they initiated innovation and promoted its diffusion have been less well explored, though networks and an imprecise alignment with that useful but inexact concept, ‘the public sphere’, have formed much of the basis for evaluating the importance of associational life, both in Edinburgh and elsewhere. The exploration of the nature of Edinburgh clubs and societies, and the reasons for their significance, soon brings us back in fact to ground already familiar from earlier chapters.