Scotland the Brief

Part 2: Imperial Partner
12 Ploughmen Poets: Cities of Intellect

The Statistical Accounts showed a country of high literacy: Sinclair found it impossible to organise a similar enterprise in Eng. This was reinforced in every small town by a library and later a newspaper, and many literary and historical clubs and societies. Edinburgh and Glasgow went further and became major centres of publishing, while out of Dundee in particular came a weekly press of wide circulation, in part written by its readers.

Scotland was a land of poets in the late middle ages: enough for the reformers of 1560 to appeal to the ordinary folk with their Gude and Godlie Ballads. Thereafter the Kirks hostility to theatre and dance clamped down on this, and talent would mainly be found on the cavalier side: the Castalian Band of poets around James VI and during the Civil War the Marquess of Montrose and the extraordinary Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. On the other hand the Covenanters had legends of persecution and resistance which looked like a proto-Western, and John Bunyans Pilgrims Progress (1676) soon found itself on every cottars shelf.

Early in the eighteenth century Allan Ramsay, an Edinburgh printer, collected folk songs and wrote a Jacobite drama, The Gentle Shepherd, which villagers staged for over a century. The next episode was remarkable. In 1761 a literary laird, James MacPherson, claimed to have detected old Gaelic manuscripts amounting to an epic on a Virgilian scale. Ossian was a phenomenon of the Lord of the Rings sort and, many argued, about as genuine. On the other hand it influenced a whole generation of early romantics, notably Goethe, Napoleon and (most influential in the long term) the German Johann Gottfried Herder, who made a fateful link between language, culture and nationality. MacPherson died a rich man; so too did Henry Mackenzie, the author of the tear-jerking Man of Feeling (1771). Both have vanished without trace, but the sympathy they set out to conjure up was taken seriously, notably by Adam Smith, who had started off his career as a lecturer on literature. Much more positive was to come. Robert Fergusson, a young Edinburgh lawyer, revived Dunbar s bawdy, affectionate treatment of the capital in the 1770s, and in 1786 came Poems, chiefly in the Ayrshire Dialect by an unknown young farmer, Robert Burns.

Burns was first a success, then a cult. Perhaps only now are the Scots coming to terms with his genius as a poet of the love and patriotism he knew, and the equality and democracy that he foresaw. The son of an unsuccessful small farmer, he was exceptionally well educated. His reading was that of an enlightened citizen Adam Smith, David Hume and James Thompson and his politics were radical, sympathising with the American and French revolutions: Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,/ An honest mans the noblest work of God. His enjoyment of love idealistic and erotic was unqualified. Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!/ Ae farewell, and then forever!/ Never met or never parted We had ne'er been broken-hearted. As George Orwell noted in far-different times, this is poetry that pierces the heart.

Burns met, at Professor Adam Fergusons house in Edinburgh, a polite and knowledgeable boy with a limp. This was the young Walter Scott, born in Edinburgh to a lawyers family but brought up in the Borders, with its strong oral culture and the recent memory of invasion by English and Jacobites. Scott's first reputation was as a narrative poet, then after 1814 as a novelist, on the strength of the impact of Waverley, the story of a young and ingenuous Englishman, caught up in the 1745 rebellion and torn between the two sides. The Author of Waverley remained officially anonymous for another score of books, the best of them imagining Scotland 's progress from medieval militarism to post-Union 'civilisation' (a Scots coinage). He was a Tory and had Jacobite emotions, but was otherwise an improving businessman gas company and railway director brought down by his speculations in publishing and his grandiose Border mansion-museum, Abbotsford.

Two other talents were the 'Ettrick Shepherd' James Hogg, illiterate until his teens, then the writer of brilliant parodies and satires, and the dark and disturbing Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1822) and John Galt, who transformed the dry facts of the Statistical Accounts into a witty panorama of a society moving from old agriculture to new industry. Galt shows that what happened in Scotland was almost outdone by the way her literary men and some women, too projected the country worldwide. Look, too, at the paintings of the time and this was, in the 1720s a quite new culture in Scotland and see the subtlety of the enlightenment in Raeburn's portraits, and the energetic lives of the Scottish folk in David Wilkie's social dramas. Adam Smith's 'sympathy' underwrote the popular enlightenment of the 19 th century adult education, medical reform, civic universities, cheap publishing. Some Englishmen mocked; more took advantage of it and muscled in.

By the end of the nineteenth century nearly half the Scottish population lived in the four main cities of Glasgow (900,000), Edinburgh (400,000), Aberdeen (154,000) and Dundee (160,000). About 75% lived in towns, while country areas, whose population had risen quite steeply until the 1870s, fell with the downturn in the agricultural economy after cheap grain and meat could be imported.

Scientific intellect had been important for the Scots from John Napier of Merchiston on. In the 17 th century it led the ambitious to careers in the army or to attend universities like Dutch Leyden. Back home there were the Edinburgh clubs and publishers and increasingly art dealers such as the Foulis brothers of Glasgow, who created a taste for the classical among the citys middle classes. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, modelled on that of Condorcet and Diderot in Paris, began in Edinburgh in 1769. Like it, the great reviews the Edinburgh, Blackwood's, Fraser's specialised in condensing information and analysis for a businesslike age.

Edinburgh was 'made over' after 1769 with the building of the symmetrical new town, which confronted the teeming slums of the old town, on its ridge from the Castle to Holyrood Palace. The theatre of learning, law, finance, publishing, it was a paradox, one of its greatest writers, R L Stevenson found, genteel and vicious. Put more crudely 'fur coat an' nae knickers': perhaps because it only built a sewage works in the 1960s. The regional intellect in Aberdeen was influenced by the agri-capitalism of Buchan supplying grain to the Speyside distilleries and pioneering the breeding of beef cattle and the dealings of the herring fishery, the common sense philosophy of Thomas Reid and plentiful bursaries which meant Buchan loons and queans taught throughout the country in the new Board Schools of 1871. Dundee on the Tay first rose with the coarse linen industry, then with whaling. These fused in the astonishing rise of the jute industry, which literally packaged Britain's dominance as an international trader, and led to vast fortunes on one side, and on the other radical politics and a resilient mass-circulation press.

But Glasgow was altogether different in scale. Why? It already had a cathedral and university centre in the Middle Ages, sited at the lowest fording point on the Clyde. In the late 17 th century it rose on the Atlantic trade, establishing a deep-water harbour near Greenock which became Port Glasgow. It was from here, and from ports as far south as Whitehaven in Cumbria (with a lot of smuggling thrown in), that the city flourished on the tobacco trade. By 1776 the city was booming, and linen was coming up. The Clyde was deepened, a canal from Clyde to Forth projected and partly built, and the town planned on an American-style gridiron pattern. It was well-placed to take advantage of the next boom, in cotton, which marked the 1780s, and made Clyde cotton second only to that of Lancashire; more significantly, it triggered advances in engineering and financial institutions. The Monklands ironfield completed the takeoff. By 1851 Glasgow's population was 345,000, Trebling again by 1911. Culturally the place was as avant-garde as Paris, Vienna and Barcelona, the work of three great Exhibitions in 1888, 1900 and 1911, and artistic and architectural boldness from 'the Glasgow boys', J J Burnett and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The downside was that this was achieved at the expense of living standards. High immigration (about 20% of Glaswegians in 1900 were Irish-born) and employment accompanied tiny, congested and insanitary houses 75% of the city's people in 1900 lived in two rooms or less.