The Victorian Era

What Was Victorian Edinburgh Known For

Article · Cities & Entertainment · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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Victorian Edinburgh was known as the Athens of the North: the capital of Scotland, the seat of its law and its church, the centre of its medical and scientific teaching, and one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. The New Town, laid out in the eighteenth century, gave it the broad Georgian streets of the Enlightenment; the Old Town retained the medieval closes, the Royal Mile, and the castle rock; and in the Victorian period the great civic institutions of modern Scotland — the medical school, the law courts, the galleries, and the museums — were built or rebuilt on the foundations of the older city. The wider context is examined in Victorian Cities Beyond London, and the wider Scottish and English setting is described in What was Victorian Manchester like?.

The Law and the Church

Edinburgh was the capital of the Scottish legal system. The Court of Session, the supreme civil court of Scotland, sat in the Parliament House from the seventeenth century; the High Court of Justiciary, the supreme criminal court, sat in the same building; and the great Scottish lawyers of the Victorian period — Lord President Inglis, Lord Moncreiff, and Lord Advocate and Lord President Watson among them — presided over cases that shaped the law of Scotland. The New College on the Mound, the seat of the Free Church of Scotland after the Disruption of 1843, and the University of Edinburgh’s Faculty of Divinity were the principal centres of Scottish theology.

The Disruption of 1843 was the central ecclesiastical event of the period. The withdrawal of about a third of the ministers of the Church of Scotland over the question of lay patronage, led by Thomas Chalmers, divided the Scottish church for the rest of the century, and the Free Church’s new buildings — including the Free Church College on the Mound — became a permanent feature of the city.

The Medical School

Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education in the English-speaking world, and the Edinburgh Medical School, founded in 1726, was the model for medical teaching in Britain, the United States, and the British Empire. The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, on Lauriston Place, was the great teaching hospital; the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh examined the graduates; and the medical faculty of the university, with figures such as James Young Simpson (the discoverer of chloroform anaesthesia in 1847) and Joseph Lister (the pioneer of antiseptic surgery, working in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary in the 1860s and at King’s College London in the 1870s), set the international agenda of the profession.

The Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women, founded in 1886 by Sophia Jex-Blake — who had herself been one of the Edinburgh Seven, the first women to matriculate at a British university, in 1869 — was the first school to give women a complete medical education in Britain, and it helped to open the profession to women in the 1880s and 1890s.

The City and Its Buildings

Edinburgh’s population grew from about 138,000 in 1801 to about 316,000 in 1901, and the Victorian period saw the city transformed by a series of major improvement schemes. The Edinburgh Improvement Act of 1867 cleared much of the worst slum housing of the Old Town and opened up the new streets of Chambers Street and the South Bridge; a further act of 1876 extended the improvements to the Cowgate and the Grassmarket. The Forth Bridge, the great cantilever railway bridge across the Firth of Forth, was opened in 1890; it was engineered by John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, and at the time of its completion it was the longest cantilever bridge in the world.

The principal public buildings of the period included the Scott Monument (George Meikle Kemp, 1844), the Gothic spire that commemorates Sir Walter Scott in Princes Street Gardens; the Royal Scottish Academy (William Henry Playfair, 1836, extended 1870s), which housed the annual exhibition of the Royal Scottish Academy; the National Gallery of Scotland (Playfair, 1859); and the Royal Museum, the present National Museum of Scotland (Captain Francis Fowke and Robert Matheson, 1866), with its spectacular cast-iron and glass great hall. The Balmoral Hotel (then the North British Station Hotel, 1902) at the east end of Princes Street closed the view of the New Town with a great clock tower.

Population, Education, and the Book Trade

Edinburgh was a city of clerks, students, lawyers, and teachers. The University of Edinburgh was the largest in the United Kingdom by mid-century, with over 2,000 students, and a series of new schools — Fettes College (Alfred Waterhouse, 1870), George Watson’s College, the Edinburgh Academy, the Royal High School, and the many new board schools — gave the city one of the densest networks of educational provision in the country. The book trade of the city, centred on the publishers Blackwood, Chambers, Nelson, and Constable, was a second great industry after the law and the schools, and the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929) and Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (1832–1956) were read across the English-speaking world.