Edinburgh Now and Then

Pat here:

As a lover of Georgian and Regency history, I’ve always been fascinated by Edinburgh. The image of an ancient city crushed together between a fort castle on a hill and a palace a mile away, with the New City slowly forming beneath it, has made me crazy until I could actually see it for myself. And now that I have, I’m dying to write about it. The wynds and the university across the bridge and a towering fortress and a palace are like something out of Pratchett.

The area around modern Edinburgh has been occupied since the early Middle Ages, thanks to the promontories that make for excellent lookouts and secure settlements. By the middle of the 14^th century, the old town was already being called the capital of Scotland. New Town was established about mid 18^th century, just about the time my first Malcolms showed up in my authorial universe.

Just as a fun factoid—in the 16^th century, the Scots built walls around most of the city to prevent an English invasion. That worked well, didn’t it? In the process, what they did was create a city of 140 acres that had to build upward to expand, thus creating the crazy quilt of tall buildings and narrow lanes, in an attempt to cram everyone inside the walls. By the first half of the 18^th century, Edinburgh was one of the most overpopulated, unsanitary towns in Europe. Because of this overcrowding, tradesmen, aristocrats, and professionals lived and worked in close proximity, often in the same building, thus creating one of the more egalitarian societies of the time.

Sir Gilbert Elliot described the town in the 1700s:

“Placed upon a ridge of a hill, it admits but of one good street, running from east to west, and even this is tolerably accessible only from one quarter. The narrow lanes leading to the north and south, by reason of their steepness, narrowness and dirtiness, can only be considered as so many unavoidable nuisances. Confined by the small compass of the walls, and the narrow limits of the royalty, which scarcely extends beyond the walls, the houses stand more crowded than in any other town in Europe, and are built to a height that is almost incredible.^”

As I said earlier, by mid-18^th century this situation became untenable and rafts of architects and engineers began building the New Town to the north of the steep hills of Old Town. Little by little, the professionals moved from the crumbling old city to the fresh new houses, tenements, and landscaped terraces below. The 18^th century brought a huge boom in intellectual enlightenment, including the establishment of the famed Faculty of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. The town expanded exponentially.

My interest for the current notion playing in my brain kicks in during the Victorian era. I need to dig in deeper but by 1865, Old Town was a slum so  awful that the inhabitants seldom saw the light of day and the citizens of New Town scarcely knew of their existence. But the Scots, being of egalitarian and well-ordered nature, decided the slums had to go. They passed an “improvement” act that resulted in the Victorian buildings that can be seen today. And lo and behold, even then, they realized that new developments needed cheap new housing or they just created more slums.

And this is where I want to start my research.

I’m finding it exceedingly difficult to unearth the details of that slum renovation, but I’ve only just begun my search. I left most of my library behind when we moved to our coastal cottage, so I’m at the mercy of libraries and internet. Right now, I’m simply browsing through Wikipedia, hunting resources, tracing them to Google Books, and cutting snippets for my file. Once upon a time, I would have had to go to the library, check out rafts of books, peruse their bibliographies, order interlibrary loans (that drove my impoverished library insane), then physically copy pages of ancient tomes for my files. I still have file folders of research in my cabinets. Computer files are so much more portable!

The truly frustrating part of doing research by internet is that so many references are obscure publications not online or costing small fortunes just to look at. The internet has vast resources even the library can’t duplicate, but one must be a member of the right organization to enter their domain. But I shall persevere!

Anyone have any recommendations on great books about Old Town Edinburgh? Do you ever do research the internet way?

 

Comments

[Shannon Arthur]

I'm considering going to Edinburgh over Memorial Day weekend if the trains aren't doing too much construction work and the hotels aren't prohibitively expensive to see the Charles II exhibition again. If I go, I'd be happy to poke around used bookstores, even though that would be painful to avoid buying things I really cannot afford.

[Lillian Marek]

The internet is a wonderful resource in many ways—there are all those digitized out-of-print books for a start. One of my problems is that when searching the internet I often come across an interesting bit of information that I don't need at the moment. Down the road a year or two, I do need it, but I can't remember where I found it. Did I save it, just in case? If I did save it, where did I put it?

At least when I'm taking notes on a book, with pen and paper, I still have the notebook a year later and I know the source of the information!

But none of that can match the joy of actually visiting a place, looking around you with half-closed eyes to imagine how it looked two hundred years ago. Bliss.

[Patricia Rice]

Oh, I hope you get to go! But I don't want to torment you by sending you into bookstores. I have a list of URLS offline that I need to start working through, if I can just find the time. But if you should ever happen to see a nice one that I might order... drop me a note!

[Patricia Rice]

Organization is very definitely not my forte, but in digging into this book, I figured out how to do screen shots of pages I might need! I'm quite excited. Now, if only I can remember how to do it again and find them when I need them...

[Sue McCormick]

About Edinburgh — it was one of the highlights on our often mentioned tour; but I don't remember it. I had a terrible allergy attack and went back to the hotel and slept through the day! I did get a few glimpses before I gave up, so I know it's a fascinating town.

About organization. I am going through a total reorganization of my laptop storage. One to five folders plus one to five items at a time, but do that little bit once a day. PLUS doing the same weeding out of my email accounts.

It is slow going, but I'm getting there. If I don't have a quick answer of what to do with this information, I shove it into a "holding" folder and come back to it later.

I KNOW they say don't do this. But until I know what to do with the information, putting it in a catch-all is safer than deleting it. Better to clear out my alloted daily amount than lose time over agonizing over unknowns.

[Mary Jo Putney]

Books are wonderful for research, but it's hard to beat visiting a place to get a feel for it!

[Patricia Rice]

oh, I'm so so sorry about the allergy attack! That's just a weeping shame.

and good luck on the organization. It doesn't help that I have entirely too many devices and they turn ugly on me if I move things around too much. ;)

[Patricia Rice]

if only we had more time to spend!

[Mary M.]

Lillian, a great way to keep track of all those ideas and factoids is with an app like Evernote, which syncs on iOS, Android, and Windows devices. It's like having a pigeon-hole desk, but better since you can search through all your notes by entering some clue to whatever jogged your memory—a place name, object, book title, etc. And file organization is "have it your way." Very flexible. You can search keywords easily, so you don't even have to remember what folder you stashed the note in. I highly recommend it for research, travel arrangements, book lists, recipes, tips on any topic—in other words, your life!

[Louise Pieper]

If you can, get your hands on a copy of Lost Edinburgh by Hamish Coghill. It's an excellent resource which covers the loss of buildings, wynds and closes as well as the social, political and economic reasons. Etchings illustrate some of the Victorian changes.
If you haven't already discovered it, have a look at the National Library of Scotland's amazing online map collection (Edinburgh city: https://maps.nls.uk/towns/#edinburgh-city) which has almost a year by year update of changes for the Victorian era. They also have a lot of digitised historical material including gazetteer guides to Scotland which might include useful material.

[Lillian Marek]

Thanks, Mary. I'll have to look into that.

[Patricia Rice]

Oh, that sounds perfect, Louise! I do have the maps link, thank you. Amazing amounts of material there. I just need to carve out some time to work through all this!

[Marianne McA]

That made me remember a book we have called Edinburgh, painted by John Fulleylove, described by Rosaline Masson, which was published in 1904. But leafing through it, I don't think it's the kind of thing you're after.

It does however contain priceless tales like this: "It so happened that one morning two very young women in the window immediately above that of Lord Coalstoun, were killing time by the somewhat cruel sport of swinging a kitten, suspended by a cord secured round it, up and down out of their window. As the kitten came down, the learned judge popped out his head. In a moment the maidens above saw it, and drew the kitten rapidly up, - but the judges wig came with it, firmly fixed in the little angry claws. Imagine the mirth tempered by dread at the upper window!"

It's all rather discursive like that, so I don't think it would be very helpful, though there are a few references to books that she gleaned stories from, and that might be useful. I'm happy to send it to you if you'd like it - I think we only kept it because it was given to someone as a wedding present, and it seemed heartless to dispose of it.

[Patricia Rice]

Swinging a kitten, aiieeeee! But laughing at the wig story, thanks. Its not what I need to figure out what was being renovated in Victorian times but the stories sound entertaining! Whats the title?

[Marianne McA]

Just 'Edinburgh' - those must have been simpler times. Actually, I just looked to see if Project Gutenberg has a copy, seeing it's out of copyright, but I can't load the site. Turns out, however, that if you search Rosaline Masson Amazon.co.uk is selling a kindle edition for £1.89, for all fans of dangling kittens. (How long must the rope have been, though? To reach to a lower window? And why?)

[Patricia Rice]

Thank you! Lets hope they were smuggling the kitten to an invalid on another floor. ;)