How the Scots Invented the Modern World (26 page)

Francis Hutcheson first noticed him sitting in on his lectures in the 1730s. Although Robert Foulis was not a regular student, Hutcheson was so impressed with this “singular worthy soul,” as he called him, that he offered to hire Foulis as his classroom tutor. Foulis was working class, the son of a maltman and apprenticed to become a barber. However, his thirst for learning had driven him into Hutcheson’s classroom as well as that of professor of mathematics Robert Simson. Foulis became devoted to Hutcheson’s vision of education as a means of teaching human beings to be free and good. But because he had no university degree (although he read Greek and Latin fluently, as did his younger brother Andrew), a career in teaching was closed to him. The next best thing, he decided, was to open a bookshop, as a kind of import-export business in enlightened ideas and culture.

Like Allan Ramsay before him, Foulis used his bookshop as a vehicle for branching out into other cultural projects. He soon turned from just selling books to printing them. In 1741 he and his brother became the official “university printers,” and since they both knew Latin and Greek, their editions of ancient classical texts were far more accurate than those of any other Scottish or even English publisher. The Foulis brothers’ meticulous attention to detail even extended down to designing new and clearer typefaces for Roman and Greek letters, with the help of the university’s type founder, Alexander Wilson. Their edition of Homer’s
Iliad
in 1756 defined the state of the art, and won a medal from the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging Arts, Sciences, Manufactures, and Agriculture—a rare tribute to a Glaswegian from a rival sister city.

The award, like the edition itself, went to the heart of what Foulis saw as his personal mission: to make the “practical” arts such as printing, engraving, and stencilmaking as important and significant to polite society as the “fine” arts, such as painting, sculpture, and music. It was to pursue this that in 1753 Foulis established his School for the Art of Design, with the help of Glassford and Ingram. The University of Glasgow gave its imprimatur to the school, making it an official appendage of the university, like Foulis’s press and bookshop. Adam Smith helped him find rooms for classes and faculty, and Britain’s first academic school for design was launched.

Foulis hoped that his classes in sculpture, drawing, and printmaking would become as essential to the curriculum as philosophy, mathematics, or theology. “It is to be wished,” he said, “that all Universities were also academies, in order that artists should never be without learning, nor learned men without a taste for those arts, that in all enlightened ages, have been deemed liberal and polite.” He deliberately set up his printmaking classes to appeal to local linen and cotton manufacturers, as a place to devise new patterns and designs for their cloths.

In Foulis’s mind, the practical was inseparable from the theoretical. There was no sense of the artist or the intellectual pursuing a “higher” or more spiritual goal than the craftsman or businessman. Everyone, the artist and the artisan, the philosopher and the mechanic, the scholar and the manufacturer, was engaged in the same project: creating a polite, humane, enlightened culture. This intermingling of the practical and the intellectual was in fact a keynote of the Glasgow Enlightenment. It explains why engineer James Watt, who helped build Scotland’s first dry dock at Port Glasgow in 1762, was just as highly regarded by university professors such as Adam Smith and Joseph Black as he was by Glasgow’s merchants, and why type maker Alexander Wilson could also be named Professor of Practical Astronomy in 1760.

After its promising start, Foulis’s academy faltered. “The fine arts do not ripen quickly,” he wrote to anatomy professor William Hunter, “especially in a cold climate.” The academy was forced to close its doors in 1775, and Foulis had to sell the pictures he had accumulated in the academy’s art gallery to cover his debts. His brother Andrew died at the same time. Depressed and financially ruined, Robert Foulis caught pneumonia and passed away in November 1776.

His great dream had failed. But Foulis had put into play a basic principle of his teacher Francis Hutcheson’s view of art in relation to life. This was that God had made human virtue beautiful as well as useful, and that physical beauty, or “uniformity amidst variety,” was, like the arts, essential to human happiness. It is the spirit of Scottish neoclassicism, and would carry over in the works of two other Scots— Edinburgh men this time, not Glaswegians—Robert and James Adam.

In any case, Glasgow’s breakthrough was complete. The Foulis Press had spawned a host of imitators and offshoots. The number of books printed in Glasgow increased by 500 percent. By the 1770s the city could boast of fourteen booksellers, as well as three engravers, four architects, two marble cutters, an imported-carpet warehouse, two coach builders, fourteen saddlers, three fine jewelers, and twenty-three different cabinetmakers—not to mention twenty-six hairdressers and thirteen barbers. Service industries and consumer goods, or what the more old-fashioned still called luxuries, were now a fixed part of the Glasgow scene, as newly acquired wealth poured into desirable new channels like a river into a multitude of streams and tributaries. “Whenever capital predominates,” Adam Smith noted, “industry prevails, which increases the real wealth and revenue of all its inhabitants.” This “trickle down” economics turned overseas tobacco money into local jobs, just as the smart tobacco dynasties diversified their investments into the wine and sugar trade, marine insurance, linen and cotton textiles, and iron foundries. Mercantile Glasgow laid the foundations for industrial Glasgow in the nineteenth century. Even after the tobacco trade declined, the city’s capitalist base turned out to be self-perpetuating. Once started, economic growth was hard to shut down.

Economic growth proved to be the engine of change in other ways, as well. When the Glasgow Town Council decided to demolish the city’s old West Port in 1749, it opened up croft land west of Glasgow to development and purchase. Many leading tobacco lords bought parcels for their mansions, with gardens opening onto the new streets laid out north to south: Virginia Street, Havannah Street, Jamaica Street, Queen Street, Dunlop Street (named after the merchant family), Buchanan Street (ditto). The Buchanans themselves had built their residence, Virginia House, slightly east of these later residential developments, with an arrow-straight drive leading to the front door. The tide of urbanization soon swept on past them, however, dotting the vicinity with houses and shops, and their long drive became Virginia Street instead.

In 1740, 17,000 people lived in Glasgow. In 1780 the population had swelled to over 42,000. Developers had laid out thirteen new streets and squares in the new western district of Glasgow, in hopes of attracting merchants and other homebuilders to an affluent urban lifestyle very different from that of the crowded old inner city. Streets were wide (twenty-three meters across in the case of Jamaica Street), with flagstone sidewalks on either side, and urban planners banned unpleasant or noisome businesses, such as skinning or tanning factories, and tallow and soap works. Surveyor James Barrie laid out an entire residential suburb on the Ramshorn and Meadowflat Crofts, by extending Miller, Queen, and Buchanan Streets northward. Back Cow Loan, the rural dirt track Prince Charlie had used to enter Glasgow in December of 1745, became Ingram Street, in honor of tobacco merchant and financier Alexander Ingram.

As with Foulis’s academy of the arts, not everything went according to plan. Construction took time, lots sat empty for long periods, and conditions in the crowded old city remained a nuisance. But a new middle-class urban community was taking physical, as well as economic, shape. Its institutional emblem was Glasgow’s Chamber of Commerce, the first in Britain, formed on New Year’s Day, 1783, with a hefty round of rum toasts. Its more obvious and visible emblem was Barrie’s George Square, laid out in his Meadowflats development between Queen and Frederick Streets. Unfortunately, by the time building actually began at Meadowflats in 1787, Glasgow had been upstaged by another, even more successful design for the new urban lifestyle: Edinburgh’s New Town.

“Look at those fields,” George Drummond said to a young friend who was standing beside him at a window looking north of Edinburgh Castle. It was 1763. Drummond, the belated hero of the city’s failed resistance against the Jacobites, was approaching the end of his fourth consecutive, and last, term as Lord Provost. He was seventy-five and the most revered figure in Edinburgh. Certainly no one laughed at the commander of the Lawnmarket volunteers now.

Drummond was staring out across the North Loch, at the empty area beyond that residents knew by the charming name of Barefoot’s Park. He pointed and turned to his guest.

“You, Mr. Somerville,” he said, “are a young man and may probably live, though I will not, to see all these fields covered with houses, forming a splendid and magnificent city.” Drummond explained how this could be done, by draining the North Loch and building a causeway linking it to the old town. “I have never lost sight of this object since the year 1725,” he confessed, “when I was first elected provost.” Now Drummond’s dream was about to come true.

Everyone recognized that as modern cities went, Edinburgh left much to be desired. It was “that most picturesque (at a distance) and nastiest (when near) of all capital cities,” according to the poet Thomas Gray. Clustered at the foot of Edinburgh Castle, the city earned its nickname “Auld Reekie” from the forest of chimneys belching smoke from fires that burned coal at the rate of five hundred tons a day, choking residents and visitors alike. Its central avenue, the so-called Royal Mile, was a dark, narrow canyon of rickety buildings, some stacked ten or even twelve stories high, thronging with people, vehicles, animals, and refuse.

To visualize what Edinburgh was like in 1763, one has to imagine a network of shadowy, twisting streets, each branching out into a bewildering labyrinth of wynds (or through alleys) and dead-end courts and closes, all lined with blackened, narrow-faced houses and tenements. The typical tenement saw several families jammed together on each floor, all sharing a common stairway—the servants and lower classes occupying the lowest and highest stories, and the upper and middle class—including nobles and supreme court justices like Kames and Auchinleck—ensconced in the middle. Daniel Defoe said, “I believe that in no city in the world so many people have so little room.” Sanitation was nonexistent. Pigs, sheep, and the occasional cow wandered the pavement. A familiar figure in the neighborhood was the “Wha’ wants me?” man, who carried a portable toilet (with small, discreet black curtain) for the use of passersby. For residents, a cry of “Gardy loo!” (from the French:
“Prenez garde à l’eau!”
) from an overhead window was the only warning before a chamber pot was emptied on the heads of anyone in the street or courtyard.

When Defoe visited, Edinburgh still had a population of less than thirty thousand. By 1755 it had grown to almost sixty thousand, all crowded into the same tight, medieval urban space. To relieve the congestion, citizens had constructed some new buildings and carried out renovations of others. After a disastrous fire, Parliament House had been extensively rebuilt. The Royal Infirmary had gone up in 1727, and the Edinburgh Exchange in 1753 (both involved architects from the Adam family). There was even an attempt to create a couple of model residential developments, one at James’s Court in the late 1720s and the other at George Court. One of the first homeowners there was Sir Walter Scott’s father. But the truth was that there was simply no room for any extensive building in the confines of the old city, which was also, thanks to overcrowding, a natural breeding ground for disease and epidemics.

Now, in the flush of confidence following the defeat of the Forty-five, the Edinburgh Town Council, under Drummond’s prodding, decided to do something about the congestion. It proposed buying up enough land north of the city to permit the construction of what would eventually be an entirely new city, to be called the New Town. Its goal was “to enlarge and improve this city, to adorn it with public buildings,” to celebrate Edinburgh’s growth of “husbandry, manufacturers, general commerce, and the increase of useful people.” The proposal concluded with this stirring exhortation to loyal Scotsmen:

What greater object can be presented to their view, that of enlarging, beautifying, and improving the capital of their native country? What can redound more to their honour? What prove more beneficial to SCOTLAND and by consequence to UNITED BRITAIN?

With this in view, in March 1766 the city fathers sponsored a competition for developing the one hundred or so acres of land above the North Loch as a single residential area. Architects and builders could submit whatever kinds of plans they wished. The only requirements were that there had to be room for two churches, and that each house had to be a maximum height of three stories totaling forty-eight feet from basement to wall-head, to give the New Town an even skyline.

Three months later the award went to a twenty-one-year-old mason named James Craig. The choice seems odd. He was certainly no rising star as an architect; his only other claim to fame, then or later, was that he was the nephew of poet James Thomson. Yet personal connections—the standard “it’s not what you do, but whom you know”—seem to have played no part in the decision.

Craig’s plan was simple, almost mechanically so. It consisted of a gridiron of three principal longitudinal avenues intersected by a series of north-south streets, with two large open squares at either end. Its real virtue, however, was that Craig had grasped at once the political agenda behind the New Town proposal. It showed in his choice of street names—George Street, Hanover Street, Princes Street (after the Prince of Wales and his brother the Duke of York) and Queen Street—and the names he gave to the two open squares: St. Georges Square, after the patron saint of England, and St. Andrews Square, after the patron saint of his native Scotland. Two east-west streets were named after the national flower of each kingdom, Rose Street and Thistle Street. Craig capped it all by laying out the streets and avenues in the shape of a Union Jack (the town council finally decided that was going too far and modified the design into its present shape).