How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  “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 true25), 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 ed
itors 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.

  II

  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.

  But in other areas, Pitt had failed. His attempt to reform the electoral system had gone down to defeat; so had abolition of the slave trade. Despite the Act of Union with Ireland in 1801, legal emancipation for Roman Catholics seemed a long way off. The coming of war with France had forced Pitt to throw off his reformist clothes, and his crackdown on radical elements with the suspension of habeas corpus and the so-called Gagging Acts had an air of hysteria, even desperation, about them. Although Nelson’s victory over the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805 meant Britain was safe from invasion, the nation, and its political class, were at deadlock.

  The temper of the times, and of the ruling Tories, was epitomized by the legacy of Edmund Burke. His impassioned defense of the English tradition of constitutional liberty, and his suggestion that 1688 was the only revolution England ever needed, had been turned into a justification for inertia. Any further changes, it was argued, would precipitate disaster, as they had in France, and a collapse of law and order. Parliament’s role was to keep the lid on the simmering pot of popular discontent, and if it occasionally boiled over, then the lid had to be pushed down harder.

  Jeffrey, Horner, and Brougham were working to change the direction and terms of the national political conversation. They had started it in the pages of the Edinburgh Review; now they looked to Parliament itself. Horner was already contemplating taking a seat in Parliament when Henry Brougham arrived in London. He joined the Whigs’ exclusive social club, Brook’s, and then attended his first dinner party at Holland House, in the heart of fashionable London.

  It was a glittering palace of London intellectual and artistic life, the center of Whig politics, and the hub of London’s “Scottish connection.” Lord Byron was poking fun, but also telling the truth, when he wrote:

  Blest be the banquets spread at Holland House,

  Where Scotchmen feed, and critics carouse.

  The leading intellectual lights at Holland House were all Scotsmen. James Mackintosh was one. Another was John Millar, the brilliant and popular University of Glasgow professor, whose Historical View of the English Government had been dedicated to the former leader of the Whigs, Charles James Fox.

  Millar first introduced the notion of class conflict into the understanding of modern history. He was also one of the first scholars to discuss the history of women and the history of sex as part of the larger story of civilization, or “the rise of opulence and refinement.” Millar argued that the advent of commercial society brought sweeping changes in the lives of those who were otherwise excluded from a significant social role in prior stages of civilization. Women, children, servants, peasants, and the laboring class, even slaves (Millar cited Kames’s 1774 decision freeing the Jamaican Joseph Knight), all benefited from commercial society’s expansion of opportunity and the breakdown of the age-old patterns of rigid patriarchal authority.

  As a society becomes economically more active and affluent, Millar explained, “the lower people, in general, become thereby more independent in their circumstances.” They “begin to exert those sentiments of liberty which are natural to the mind of man.” But here Millar warned of a looming collision, as the people rise up to demand their liberty and the rulers try desperately to hang on to their old position and power. The result must inevitably be revolution. It had happened in Britain once before, Millar argued, during the English Civil War. It had happened again in France, in 1789.

  The people will not, indeed cannot, give up their struggle. Responsibility for avoiding revolution, then, belongs to the rulers and ruling class. And it was in order to avoid Millar’s dire prediction from coming true that Brougham wanted to turn the Whig Party into the self-conscious champions of reform.

  Even for someone of Brougham’s ego and abilities, it was a daunting undertaking. Since their earliest beginnings the Whigs had been dominated by great landed English families, and their efforts to raise the fortunes of merchants, shopkeepers, and “the lower classes” always had an offhand air of noblesse oblige. Brougham set out to broaden their base and elevate their sense of purpose, first by reaching out to leading radical elements, then by orchestrating a steady public-relations campaign, to make his own progressive views appear as the official Whig view, and vice versa.

  The battle began with Brougham making speeches, publishing articles in the Edinburgh Review (he wrote more than fifty-eight in the magazine’s first five years), and using his private legal practice to generate publicity for the cause. His very first speech in Parliament, even before becoming an MP, was as spokesman for Manchester and Liverpool merchants protesting new trade restrictions. The Whigs, not the Tories, now emerged as the champions of free trade. In court, he successfully defended against libel charges the author of a piece condemning flogging in the British army, pointing out that distinguished British officers had condemned the practice in print, in far stronger language. As a result, the Whigs “owned” the issue of army reform.

  When Brougham finally entered Parliament in 1810, the year his teacher Dugald Stewart retired, he proved unstoppable, despite his testy tempe
r and overbearing manner. He rose to the front rank of Whig orators, and forced the party into the lists as the champions of “the people” and the enemies of “privilege.” He acted as defense counsel to Queen Caroline in the trial for her divorce from the king, skillfully turning her into a symbolic victim of heartless tyranny and a heroine to ordinary people around the country. He made speeches and wrote a string of articles on slavery, preparing the nation not only for ending the slave trade (which the Whigs finally forced through in 1807), but for its final complete abolition.

  But the real battle still loomed on the horizon: parliamentary reform.

  Although the English political system had been expanded and elaborated after two revolutions and a century of empire, it had not modified its basic principles since the days of Henry VIII. It was still dominated by the personal patronage of powerful aristocrats, who not only sat in the House of Lords, but could virtually name their friends and relatives to the House of Commons, through their control of county seats and local constitutencies, or “boroughs.” There was no rhyme or reason for deciding who could vote, or where: although the numbers of voters had grown substantially over the eighteenth century, they still represented a tiny minority of adult male Englishmen and Welshmen, barely one in eight—and an even tinier minority of Scotsmen, scarcely one in twenty.

  Even more seriously, it remained fixed in a feudal, premercantile mindset. The big agricultural counties, and their landlords, dominated Parliament. Britain’s urban population found itself virtually frozen out, especially the new industrial cities. One of Brougham’s followers, Thomas Macaulay, pointed out that northern London, “a city superior in size and in population to the capitals of many kingdoms,” was totally unrepresented. “It is needless to speak of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, with no representation,” he added, “or of Edinburgh or Glasgow, with a mock representation.” This was not government by property, as its defenders claimed, but government “by certain detached portions and fragments of property . . . on no rational principle whatever.” The issue was, Macaulay concluded, “not whether the constitution was better formerly, but whether we can make it better now.”