Robert Chambers - The Edinburgh Collection: Traditions of Edinburgh , Peters Letters to his Kinfolk, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes

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This ebook edition published in 2014 by The Palimpsest eClassics Collection

Traditions of Edinburgh by Robert Chambers first published in 1824

Peters Letters to his Kinfolk by John Gibson Lockhart first published in 1819

Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson first published in 1878

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Mobi: 978-1-910486-19-1

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There was something lofty and august about the Parliament Close, which we shall scarcely see revived in any modern part of the town; so dark and majestic were the buildings all round, and so finely did the whole harmonise with the ancient cathedral which formed one of its sides!

Robert Chambers (18021871) and his brother William were the founders of both Chamberss Edinburgh Journal and the publishing company W & R Chambers Publishers. The brothers were born in Peebles in the early 1800s and after an unsuccessful operation to remove a sixth toe on both feet, Robert was left partially lame so preferred to remain indoors and study than be outside with the other children, William and Robert moved to Edinburgh with their family in 1813 and in 1818 Robert started his own business running a bookstall. A short time later, William and Robert combined their businesses into W & R Chambers Publishers and started a magazine which Robert wrote and William printed. Robert also wrote a number of books including Traditions of Edinburgh, Walks in Edinburgh and Life of Sir Walter Scott, which were published by W & R Chambers. Robert Chambers ran the publishers until 1860 when William took over the major running of the company. Robert ran the London office but on the death of his wife and daughter returned to Edinburgh where he lived until his death in 1871.

E dinburgh was, at the beginning of George III.s reign, a picturesque, odorous, inconvenient, old-fashioned town, of about seventy thousand inhabitants. It had no court, no factories, no commerce; but there was a nest of lawyers in it, attending upon the Court of Session; and a considerable number of the Scotch gentry one of whom then passed as rich with a thousand a year gave it the benefit of their presence during the winter. Thus the town had lived for some ages, during which political discontent and division had kept the country poor. A stranger approaching the city, seeing it piled close and massy, deep and high a series of towers, rising from a palace on the plain to a castle in the air would have thought it a truly romantic place; and the impression would not have subsided much on a near inspection, when he would have found himself admitted by a fortified gate through an ancient wall, still kept in repair. Even on entering the one old street of which the city chiefly consisted, he would have seen much to admire houses of substantial architecture and lofty proportions, mingled with more lowly, but also more arresting wooden fabrics; a huge and irregular, but venerable Gothic church, surmounted by an aerial crown of masonry; finally, an esplanade towards the Castle, from which he could have looked abroad upon half a score of counties, upon firth and fell, yea, even to the blue Grampians. Everywhere he would have seen symptoms of denseness of population; the open street a universal market; a pell-mell of people everywhere. The eye would have been, upon the whole, gratified, whatever might be the effect of the clangor strepitusque upon the ear, or whatever might have been the private meditations of the nose. It would have only been on coming to close quarters, or to quarters at all, that our stranger would have begun to think of serious drawbacks from the first impression. For an inn, he would have had the White Horse, in a close in the Canongate; or the White Hart, a house which now appears like a carriers inn, in the Grassmarket. Or, had he betaken himself to a private lodging, which he would have probably done under the conduct of a ragged varlet, speaking more of his native Gaelic than English, he would have had to ascend four or five stories of a common stair, into the narrow chambers of some Mrs Balgray or Luckie Fergusson, where a closet-bed in the sitting-room would have been displayed as the most comfortable place in the world; and he would have had, for amusement, a choice between an extensive view of house-tops from the window and the study of a series of prints of the four seasons, a sampler, and a portrait of the Marquis of Granby, upon the wall.

Fortified Gate, Nether Bow Port, from Canongate.

House-tops.

On being introduced into society, our stranger might have discovered cause for content with his lodging on finding how poorly off were the first people with respect to domestic accommodations. I can imagine him going to tea at Mr Bruce of Kennets, in Forresters Wynd a country gentleman and a lawyer (not long after raised to the bench), yet happy to live with his wife and children in a house of fifteen pounds of rent, in a region of profound darkness and mystery, now no more. Had he got into familiar terms with the worthy lady of the mansion, he might have ascertained that they had just three rooms and a kitchen; one room, my ladys that is, the kind of parlour he was sitting in; another, a consulting-room for the gentleman; the third, a bedroom. The children, with their maid, had beds laid down for them at night in their fathers room; the house-maid slept under the kitchen dresser; and the one man-servant was turned at night out of the house. Had our friend chanced to get amongst tradespeople, he might have found Mr Kerr, the eminent goldsmith in the Parliament Square, stowing his mnage into a couple of small rooms above his booth-like shop, plastered against the wall of St Giless Church; the nursery and kitchen, however, being placed in a cellar under the level of the street, where the children are said to have rotted off like sheep.

But indeed everything was on a homely and narrow scale. The College where Munro, Cullen, and Black were already making themselves great names was to be approached through a mean alley, the College Wynd. The churches were chiefly clustered under one roof; the jail was a narrow building, half-filling up the breadth of the street; the public offices, for the most part, obscure places in lanes and dark entries. The men of learning and wit, united with a proportion of men of rank, met as the