How the Scots Invented the Modern World (42 page)

The bad harvests compounded the crisis. Magistrates in Berkshire organized a system of “outdoor relief” or welfare payments for the destitute based on the price of bread, and in October 1795 London broke into violent demonstrations against the opening of Parliament and against the King, Pitt, and the war against France. Two years later things had become so bad, with more suspensions of habeas corpus, a mutiny at the naval base at Spithead, and legislation banning gatherings of more than fifty persons, that opposition Whigs walked out of Parliament in protest.

It was during this crisis that Dugald Stewart introduced his first course on political economy. He was determined to chart a new direction for Britain, just as a coterie of his former students—Francis Horner, Francis Jeffrey, Henry Cockburn, Henry Brougham, and a transplanted Englishman, Sydney Smith—were determined to turn the Whig Party from political pariahs and has-beens into standard-bearers for change.

The group was a volatile mix of youthful spirits, powerful intellects, and burgeoning egos. What drew them together was their commitment to Stewart’s vision of political progress. Smith was a minister, a gifted writer, and a genuine wit. Horner, “grave, studious, honourable, kind,” was studying to be a lawyer, since Edinburgh was a lawyer’s town, although he had tremendous gifts as a mathematician (at twenty he translated Euler’s standard work on algebra into English and composed a short biography of the German mathematician, both of which were published) and scientist. Horner regularly rose two hours before breakfast to do his chemical experiments, and spent his time away from the law books at lectures on anatomy and physiology.

Francis Jeffrey was also a lawyer, and, although not yet thirty, one of Scotland’s best. The house he bought at Craigcrook, three miles from Edinburgh, was the hub of its robust intellectual society. It still stands, a crenellated Renaissance castle remodeled by Jeffrey’s friend William Playfair, where at three o’clock every afternoon writers, artists, painters, lawyers, and university faculty would gather for dinner. At Jeffrey’s table, “the talk [was] always good, but never ambitious, and those listening never in disrepute.” In fact, Edinburgh’s social pace was as relentless as ever, a habit left over from the days when everyone lived next door to one another in the Old Town. Long afterwards, Henry Cockburn calculated that in the first thirty years of his marriage, he and his wife never spent more than one night a month at home alone. Friends, men and women, met night after night at dinner and supper parties, with sumptuous supplies of food, drink, and intellectual discussion.

“It was,” Cockburn admitted, “a discussing age.” None of the great intellectual breakthroughs of those years would have been possible without the incessant give-and-take of after-dinner table talk, with flashing wits, sharp ripostes, bursting laughter, glittering candles, and glowing, ruby-red glasses of sherry and port. As in old Edinburgh, drink opened the doors for free intellectual exchange. The demands of patriotism and a war against France replaced claret with sherry and port (making John Home’s earlier dire prediction come true
²⁵
), and among the lesser orders, whisky was making a steady progress. This was the final unexpected consequence of Union; the massive increase of taxes on all alcoholic beverages meant that illegal distilling was the only alternative. In 1708, only 50,000 gallons of whisky were produced in all of Scotland; by 1783 the Highlands alone were putting out nearly 700,000, and the Lowlands more than a million. Robert Burns worked briefly in that loneliest of all jobs, whisky excise agent. He gained his keen appreciation of the Scottish countryside while scanning the hills and crags for that telltale smudge of smoke on the horizon, marking an illegal still.

The
Scots Magazine
in those years noted that Scotland is “the most drunken nation on the face of the earth”—worse even, it confessed shamefacedly, than the Irish. The dinner parties of the smart and respectable flowed with alcohol. Courtesy demanded that after dinner the host offer a toast to each guest in turn, with a respectful nod and flourish of the hand, intoning “your health” or some suitable sentiment with each glass. Then each guest did the same thing, first to the host then each of the other guests. This meant, as Henry Cockburn noted, that “when there were ten people, there were ninety healths drunk.” Henry Brougham remembered being one of a group drunkenly roaming the streets afterwards, wrenching brass knockers off doors and stealing street signs before the Edinburgh night watch could catch them. At one party at Craigcrook, a visiting Englishman (the English were not exactly famous for their sobriety) watched with astonishment as, after innumerable healths and toasts, one of Jeffrey’s guests, an eminent fellow lawyer, “put his wineglass in his pocket and saying, ‘We have sat long enough’ threw up the window and leapt through it to the grass plot and, being followed by the rest, they drank champagne and played at leap-frog.”

Yet on intellectual matters, and especially politics, these hardy carousers were deadly serious. It was at one of these soirées that Sydney Smith casually suggested to Jeffrey reviving the old
Edinburgh Review,
which had gone defunct in 1757. The idea caught fire: here was a chance to turn a rather routine literary chore, reviewing books, into a powerful vehicle for enlightened liberal opinion, not just on politics but on a whole range of topics, including literature, philosophy, and science. Smith, Jeffrey, and Horner took on the job of writing the essays and reviews for the first issue, to appear that following June of 1802; but the first issue of the new
Edinburgh Review
did not actually appear until October. The reason was that another person had pushed his way onto the project, someone they did not entirely trust, but whom they realized they could not do without: Henry Brougham.

Brougham was the youngest of the group, only twenty-four, but he was in some ways already the most intellectually accomplished. He was an Edinburgh man by birth; his mother was a niece of William Robertson.
²⁶
He represented Dugald Stewart’s intellectual ideal more than any other of Stewart’s students. Horner called him “an uncommon genius, of a composite order,” determined to master every branch of human knowledge; with a mind that could bring mathematical precision to each, and a gift for brilliant prose as well. Like the rest, he was trained as a lawyer. But he also read papers on mathematics to the Royal Society in London (the youngest man ever to do so), founded the Edinburgh Society of Physics in 1796, and then, together with Horner, the Edinburgh Chemical Society. When he joined the Edinburgh Review, he was finishing a two-volume masterwork on colonial policy, which James Mackintosh pronounced the most enlightened work on how to run the British Empire since the
Wealth of Nations.
Like the rest of the group, he knew all the classical authors and major figures in English literature, almost by heart. He was also a devoted Whig.

Jeffrey and Smith realized Brougham would give enormous assets to the new review, and he was certainly eager to join. The problem was his personality. Overbearing, vain, sarcastic, temperamental, at times almost emotionally unstable: with his dark, piercing eyes, long, pointed nose, and rapid-fire delivery in a slight but unmistakable Scottish burr, Brougham was a dangerous man to cross, at a dinner party, in a court-room, or in the pages of a literary journal. He was, in short, insufferable; but he could not be denied. He wrote nearly one hundred pages of prose for the
Review
’s opening issue, with six different articles: three on “Travel,” one on the sugar colonies, one on optics, and one on geology. Thereafter, although Jeffrey served as principal editor, it was Brougham more than anyone else who gave the
Edinburgh Review
its characteristic tone—and its controversial success.

The impact of that first issue was, as Henry Cockburn described it, “electrical. And instead of expiring as many had wished, in their first effort, the force of the shock was increased in each subsequent discharge.” Everyone in Scotland and England recognized that the
Edinburgh Review
represented “an entire and instant change of everything that the public had been accustomed to in that sort of composition.” It was the first literary journal to appeal to a broad but educated and serious reading public, not just scholars and literati, but informed citizens, lawyers, doctors, government officials, and, of course, politicians. Its goal was not simply to entertain, or even to educate; it sought to keep readers up to date on the latest state of progress in every important field of human endeavor, and addressed its readers as partners in a single great undertaking, the progress of modern society.

The editors also realized an important secret in publishing, that information is made more memorable when it is tinged with bias. The
Edinburgh Review
’s motto was, “The judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted.” The magazine became famous for its likes and dislikes, although “hatreds” might be a better word—in politics, of course, as the unashamed voice of reform Whigs, but also in literature. It lambasted the Lake Poets and savaged the rising star of the Romantic movement and fellow Scot, Lord Byron, who replied with his satiric poem
English
Bards and Scotch Reviewers.
The editors swung verbal punches at the radical leader William Cobbett (who dismissed them as “shameless Scotch hirelings”) and the Tory poet Robert Southey. Years later, John Stuart Mill’s wife, Harriet Martineau, upbraided Sydney Smith for the savagery of their book reviews. “We
were
savage,” came the reply, “I remember how Brougham and I sat trying one night how we could exasperate our cruelty to the utmost.”

Yet the cruelty was part of what drew the large audience. Although it riled some of those who were political allies, such as the radical Whig reformer Samuel Romilly, who complained, “the Editors seem to value themselves principally upon their severity,” it made even their enemies read the
Review.
At the end of 1803, after a year of publication, Smith wrote to Jeffrey from London, “it is the universal opinion of all the cleverest men I have met with here, that our Review is uncommonly well done, and it is perhaps the first in Europe.”

For more than a century, and even after it changed editors in 1827, the
Edinburgh Review
was the most politically influential, the most intellectually exciting, and the wittiest reading matter in the English-speaking world. As Walter Scott said, “No genteel family can pretend to be without it.” It inspired a host of imitators, including
Blackwood’s
Journal
and the
Quarterly Review
(both also published in Edinburgh),
The
Westminster Review, The North American Review,
and
The Atlantic Monthly.
From college rooms in Aberdeen and Oxford to legal chambers in London and Bombay, and government offices in Ottawa and Melbourne, the arrival four times a year of the new issue of the
Edinburgh Review,
with its blue and yellow cover, was a major event.

What was the key to its success and impact? Part of it was due to its publisher, Andrew Constable, who insisted that the editors pay their reviewers generously. This meant that Jeffrey, and later McVeigh Napier, could hire the best writers in Britain. Their stable of authors included Sir Walter Scott, William Makepeace Thackeray, William Hazlitt, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Macaulay, G. H. Lewes, Nassau Senior, and Sir James Stephen. Also, despite their clear political bias, the editors always made it clear that literary quality, and intellectual integrity, came first. They made readers feel that the
Edinburgh Review
was, despite its name, a
British
publication, with a British sense of national culture. And publishing a piece in the
Edinburgh Review
made an aspiring author part of an elite; to be known as “an Edinburgh Reviewer” made people stop and stare at dinner parties or literary gatherings—although sometimes it made other people stand up and walk out.

Above all, the
Edinburgh Review,
for all its political wrangling and literary raillery, communicated a sense of high national purpose. The editors had one mission: to create what Dugald Stewart had said was indispensable to a modern nation, an “enlightened public opinion.” They wanted to take the mantle of reform away from working-class radicals such as Cobbett and ideological extremists such as the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham and place it on the shoulders of Britain’s middle class. Jeffrey saw the middle class as the heart of the nation, and the cutting edge of progress. “The example of the middle classes descends by degrees to the ranks immediately below them,” he wrote in 1803, “and the general prevalence of just and liberal sentiments . . . are thus spread by contagion through every order of society. . . .”

The contagion of progress: the
Edinburgh Review
aspired to be its carrier. Yet when Jeffrey wrote that sentence, its staff was already breaking up. Smith had returned to England. James Mackintosh was in India. Francis Horner, having passed the bar, decided to move his practice to London. After his bibulous farewell dinner in 1803, the group of friends staggered from Fortune’s Hotel to Manderson’s chemist shop, where they twisted off its enormous bronze serpent sign, which Brougham carried home as a souvenir. A few months later Brougham himself was heading to London, as well. The scene of battle was shifting, from Edinburgh to the corridors of power in Westminster.

On January 21, 1806, Brougham and Horner sat together in the gallery of the House of Commons, watching Prime Minister William Pitt fend off the latest Whig challenge to his long-standing primacy. Two days later Pitt was dead. Although he had been the leader of their enemies, the Tories, the
Edinburgh Review
editors owed him a grudging respect. Pitt had fought hard to bring Britain back after the depths of decline, following the nadir of the 1780s and the American Revolution—fighting often against his own party. He had turned to Adam Smith to revivify British commerce under the banner of Free Trade. He had even praised the
Wealth of Nations
as “the best solution of every question connected with the history of commerce and with the system of political economy,” six years before Stewart made the book liberal Holy Writ.