Based on an astonishingly wide range of sources - local newspapers and journals, published accounts of travels to Scotland, diaries, letters, reminiscences etc., as well as more modern texts - it covers the social and literary history of the city from around 1760 until 1832, the year in which Sir Walter Scott died.
Mary Cosh’s use of contemporary material, both well-known and obscure, presents an enormously valuable picture of how Edinburgh and its inhabitants were seen at the time by visitors, and also shows how notable local figures saw their own city. The opinions of people such as William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Robert Southey, Thomas Carlyle, Francis Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Thomas de Quincey, Walter Scott, David Hume, Thomas Carlyle and Percy Bysshe Shelley are all represented. No part of Edinburgh’s rich social and cultural life is ignored, from education, the Church, literature, music, art and the theatre to fascinating details of the lifestyles of both the rich and the poor - their diet, dress, pastimes and pleasures, manners and etiquette.
The development of Edinburgh into one of the great intellectual centres of Europe is also paralleled in the story of the growth of the city, as architects such as James Craig and Robert Adam reflected the confidence of a new age in the wide and imposing throroughfares of the New Town, a far cry from the dank and overcrowded closes of medieval Edinburgh.
’What a wonderful City Edinburgh is! - What alternation of Height and Depth! So enormously stretched-up are the Houses! . . . I cannot express what I felt - such a section of a wasp’s nest, striking you with a sort of bastard Sublimity from the enormity and infinity of its littleness - the infinity swelling out the mind, the enormity striking it with wonder . . .’
- Dorothy Wordsworth
’It is odd if you ever sit down to dinner in a company of a dozen, without having to count three or four quarto makers in the circle. Poets are plentiful as blackberries . . . And as for travellers - good Jehovah! There have appeared at least 20 different lucubrations in the way concerning Paris alone within these last 18 months.’
- John Gibson Lockhart to James Christie, 29 Nov. 1815
Mary Cosh was born in Bristol and studied at St Anne's College, Oxford, and later at Birkbeck College under Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, and under Professor Michael Kitson at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has published a number of books, fiction and non-fiction, including co-authorship with the late Ian Lindsay of the much acclaimed Inveraray and the Dukes of Argyll, and has contributed to publications including The Times and Country Life. She lives in Islington.
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