The Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief characteristic, and, from a
picturesque point of view, the liver-wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the
most common forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the whole by
adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything worth judging,
whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city, must be judged
upon its merits as a whole. The Old Town depends for much of its effect
on the new quarters that lie around it, on the sufficiency of its
situation, and on the hills that back it up. If you were to set it
somewhere else by itself, it would look remarkably like Stirling in a
bolder and loftier edition. The point is to see this embellished
Stirling planted in the midst of a large, active, and fantastic modern
city; for there the two re-act in a picturesque sense, and the one is the
making of the other.
The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter,
protected, in some subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs which
fortify it to the west. On the one side of it and the other the new
towns of the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader, and more
gentle hill-tops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle over-tops the whole
city and keeps an open view to sea and land. It dominates for miles on
every side; and people on the decks of ships, or ploughing in quiet
country places over in Fife, can see the banner on the Castle
battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town blowing abroad over the
subjacent country. A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose,
from this distant aspect that she got her nickname of _Auld Reekie_.
Perhaps it was given her by people who had never crossed her doors: day
after day, from their various rustic Pisgahs, they had seen the pile of
building on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain; so
it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the same
field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all
expressed in these two words.
[Picture: Cowfeeder Row and Head of West Port]
Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is properly smoked; and
though it is well washed with rain all the year round, it has a grim and
sooty aspect among its younger suburbs. It grew, under the law that
regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious situations, not in
extent, but in height and density. Public buildings were forced,
wherever there was room for them, into the midst of thoroughfares;
thorough—fares were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after
story, neighbour mounting upon neighbour’s shoulder, as in some Black
Hole of Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in
a vertical direction. The tallest of these _lands_, as they are locally
termed, have long since been burnt out; but to this day it is not
uncommon to see eight or ten windows at a flight; and the cliff of
building which hangs imminent over Waverley Bridge would still put many
natural precipices to shame. The cellars are already high above the
gazer’s head, planted on the steep hill-side; as for the garret, all the
furniture may be in the pawn-shop, but it commands a famous prospect to
the Highland hills. The poor man may roost up there in the centre of
Edinburgh, and yet have a peep of the green country from his window; he
shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with their
broad squares and gardens; he shall have nothing overhead but a few
spires, the stone top-gallants of the city; and perhaps the wind may
reach him with a rustic pureness, and bring a smack of the sea or of
flowering lilacs in the spring.
It is almost the correct literary sentiment to deplore the revolutionary
improvements of Mr. Chambers and his following. It is easy to be a
conservator of the discomforts of others; indeed, it is only our good
qualities we find it irksome to conserve. Assuredly, in driving streets
through the black labyrinth, a few curious old corners have been swept
away, and some associations turned out of house and home. But what
slices of sunlight, what breaths of clean air, have been let in! And
what a picturesque world remains untouched! You go under dark arches,
and down dark stairs and alleys. The way is so narrow that you can lay a
hand on either wall; so steep that, in greasy winter weather, the
pavement is almost as treacherous as ice. Washing dangles above washing
from the windows; the houses bulge outwards upon flimsy brackets; you see
a bit of sculpture in a dark corner; at the top of all, a gable and a few
crowsteps are printed on the sky. Here, you come into a court where the
children are at play and the grown people sit upon their doorsteps, and
perhaps a church spire shows itself above the roofs. Here, in the
narrowest of the entry, you find a great old mansion still erect, with
some insignia of its former state—some scutcheon, some holy or courageous
motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary points out where famous and
well-born people had their lodging; and as you look up, out pops the head
of a slatternly woman from the countess’s window. The Bedouins camp
within Pharaoh’s palace walls, and the old war-ship is given over to the
rats. We are already a far way from the days when powdered heads were
plentiful in these alleys, with jolly, port-wine faces underneath. Even
in the chief thoroughfares Irish washings flutter at the windows, and the
pavements are encumbered with loiterers.
[Picture: Old Bow-Head, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh]
These loiterers are a true character of the scene. Some shrewd Scotch
workmen may have paused on their way to a job, debating Church affairs
and politics with their tools upon their arm. But the most part are of a
different order—skulking jail-birds; unkempt, bare-foot children;
big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped flannel
petticoat and short tartan shawl; among these, a few surpervising
constables and a dismal sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from
higher ranks in society, with some mark of better days upon them, like a
brand. In a place no larger than Edinburgh, and where the traffic is
mostly centred in five or six chief streets, the same face comes often
under the notice of an idle stroller. In fact, from this point of view,
Edinburgh is not so much a small city as the largest of small towns. It
is scarce possible to avoid observing your neighbours; and I never yet
heard of any one who tried. It has been my fortune, in this anonymous
accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward travellers for
some stages on the road to ruin. One man must have been upwards of sixty
before I first observed him, and he made then a decent, personable figure
in broad-cloth of the best. For three years he kept falling—grease
coming and buttons going from the square-skirted coat, the face puffing
and pimpling, the shoulders growing bowed, the hair falling scant and
grey upon his head; and the last that ever I saw of him, he was standing
at the mouth of an entry with several men in moleskin, three parts drunk,
and his old black raiment daubed with mud. I fancy that I still can hear
him laugh. There was something heart-breaking in this gradual declension
at so advanced an age; you would have thought a man of sixty out of the
reach of these calamities; you would have thought that he was niched by
that time into a safe place in life, whence he could pass quietly and
honourably into the grave.
One of the earliest marks of these _dégringolades_ is, that the victim
begins to disappear from the New Town thoroughfares, and takes to the
High Street, like a wounded animal to the woods. And such an one is the
type of the quarter. It also has fallen socially. A scutcheon over the
door somewhat jars in sentiment where there is a washing at every window.
The old man, when I saw him last, wore the coat in which he had played
the gentleman three years before; and that was just what gave him so
pre-eminent an air of wretchedness.
[Picture: High Street] It is true that the over-population was at least
as dense in the epoch of lords and ladies, and that now-a-days some
customs which made Edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortunately
pretermitted. But an aggregation of comfort is not distasteful like an
aggregation of the reverse. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and
divines and lawyers, may have been crowded into these houses in the
past—perhaps the more the merrier. The glasses clink around the china
punch-bowl, some one touches the virginals, there are peacocks’ feathers
on the chimney, and the tapers burn clear and pale in the red firelight.
That is not an ugly picture in itself, nor will it become ugly upon
repetition. All the better if the like were going on in every second
room; the _land_ would only look the more inviting. Times are changed.
In one house, perhaps, two-score families herd together; and, perhaps,
not one of them is wholly out of the reach of want. The great hotel is
given over to discomfort from the foundation to the chimney-tops;
everywhere a pinching, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of
sluttishness and dirt. In the first room there is a birth, in another a
death, in a third a sordid drinking-bout, and the detective and the
Bible-reader cross upon the stairs. High words are audible from dwelling
to dwelling, and children have a strange experience from the first; only
a robust soul, you would think, could grow up in such conditions without
hurt. And even if God tempers His dispensations to the young, and all
the ill does not arise that our apprehensions may forecast, the sight of
such a way of living is disquieting to people who are more happily
circumstanced. Social inequality is nowhere more ostentatious than at
Edinburgh. I have mentioned already how, to the stroller along Princes
Street, the High Street callously exhibits its back garrets. It is true,
there is a garden between. And although nothing could be more glaring by
way of contrast, sometimes the opposition is more immediate; sometimes
the thing lies in a nutshell, and there is not so much as a blade of
grass between the rich and poor. To look over the South Bridge and see
the Cowgate below full of crying hawkers, is to view one rank of society
from another in the twinkling of an eye.
One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was a-bed but the
policeman, and stopped by hazard before a tall _land_. The moon touched
upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on the upper windows; there was no
light anywhere in the great bulk of building; but as I stood there it
seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from the
interior; doubtless there were many clocks ticking, and people snoring on
their backs. And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within made itself
faintly audible in my ears, family after family contributing its quota to
the general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to its timepieces,
like a great disordered heart. Perhaps it was little more than a fancy
altogether, but it was strangely impressive at the time, and gave me an
imaginative measure of the disproportion between the quantity of living
flesh and the trifling walls that separated and contained it.
There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every circumstance of terror
and reality, in the fall of the _land_ in the High Street. The building
had grown rotten to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed up
so that the scavenger’s barrow could not pass; cracks and reverberations
sounded through the house at night; the inhabitants of the huge old human
bee-hive discussed their peril when they encountered on the stair; some
had even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and returned to them
again in a fit of economy or self-respect; when, in the black hours of a
Sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a hideous uproar
and tumbled story upon story to the ground. The physical shock was felt
far and near; and the moral shock travelled with the morning milkmaid
into all the suburbs. The church-bells never sounded more dismally over
Edinburgh than that grey forenoon. Death had made a brave harvest, and,
like Samson, by pulling down one roof, destroyed many a home. None who
saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable; here it was plastered,
there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle still stood on the
hob, high overhead; and there a cheap picture of the Queen was pasted
over the chimney. So, by this disaster, you had a glimpse into the life
of thirty families, all suddenly cut off from the revolving years. The
_land_ had fallen; and with the _land_ how much! Far in the country,
people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun looked through between
the chimneys in an unwonted place. And all over the world, in London, in
Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could exclaim
with truth: ‘The house that I was born in fell last night!’