Edinburgh Character of the cityScotland, United Kingdom Gaelic Dun Eideann

Although Edinburgh absorbed surrounding villages and the Firth of Forth ports between 1856 and 1920, its aesthetic and political heart still lies in its small historic core, comprising the Old Town and the New Town. The Old Town, built up in the Middle Ages when the fear of attack was constant, huddles high on the Castle Rock overlooking the surrounding plain. The New Town, in contrast, spreads out in a magnificent succession of streets, crescents, and terraces. The medieval Old Town and the Neoclassical New Town were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995.

“This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop-scene in a theatre,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, the 19th-century Scottish novelist, essayist, and poet who was born in the New Town, “but a city in the world of reality.” The contrasts that make Edinburgh unique also make it typically Scottish, for, despite its reserved exterior, it is also a city capable of great warmth and even gaiety. Historically, its citizens have also been capable of great passion, especially in matters royal or religious. In 1561, for example, a mob spurred by the fiery Protestant preacher John Knox tried to break into the private chapel in the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–67), newly returned from France, was attending a Roman Catholic mass. In 1637 a riot in the cathedral of St. Giles in protest against a new service book provoked a Scottish revolt against Charles I and precipitated the War of the Three Kingdoms, which engulfed the whole of Britain in the 1640s and ended in Charles’s execution (see Bishops’ Wars; English Civil Wars). In 1736 the burgh nearly lost its royal charter following the lynching of John Porteous, captain of the city guard. The Porteous riots and lynching were a type of violent gesture common to the history of most old cities. Yet, even in this moment of deranged passion, the city manifested its complex character: needing a hanging rope, the mob descended on a shop and bought one.

A city long renowned for a somewhat inflexible respectability—when West Princes Street Gardens were turned over to the general public in 1876, smoking was forbidden—Edinburgh concurrently maintained a fascinating netherworld of ribaldry and drunkenness. A poet, jurist, or novelist of sufficient distinction might succeed in inhabiting both worlds. One who clearly did was William Brodie, a member of respectable society—deacon of the Incorporation of Wrights and Masons and a town councillor—who by night was the mastermind behind a gang of burglars. Brodie was convicted and hanged in 1788 for his crimes, and his double life is reputed to have been part of the inspiration for Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Brodie’s Close, a public house on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, is named after him. Such “Edinburgh characters” abounded during the flourishing Neoclassical period of the 18th and 19th centuries known as the Augustan Age, when the city’s authors, critics, publishers, teachers, physicians, and scientists formed an intellectual elite of world influence. With the subsequent relapse of the city into a more provincial role, such noted eccentrics became virtually extinct.