The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [23]
Edinburgh’s architects, meanwhile, were building the New Town. The city that Defoe had visited in the 1720s was, by even the most optimistic standards, disgusting. Overcrowding, disease and squalor had given Auld Reekie its name and reputation; Glasgow, by comparison, was the finest, sweetest city in all the Empire. The lack of housing and the density of people meant that people took shelter where they could find it. Each of the tottering Old Town tenements housed a cross-section of every class and occupation from Lords to barrow boys. The Proposals for Carrying on Certain Public Works in the City of Edinburgh were drawn up by the Convention of Royal Burghs in 1752 and construction work began soon after. The Nor’ Loch below the Mound was drained and landscaped, the Lang Dykes became Princes Street and the slow geometry of the Georgian New Town began to unfold. Work had not been finished before the middle classes bolted from their squalid quarterings near the Castle to the new city.
The division between the old town and the new was the most eloquent illustration of the divisions in Edinburgh’s character. It had always seemed the most strong-minded of all Scots cities, but under the surface the contradictions became more obvious. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it managed to sustain several wildly contradictory faiths: anti-Englishness and fervent Britishness; improvement and nostalgia; depression and vivacity. It never did, as it sometimes liked to believe, exist in cosmopolitan isolation. During this period it feared the invasion of the French, the Papists or the Wild Highlanders even more than it feared the loss of its identity to England. The terror of anarchy produced a contrariness in the city’s character, at once devout and cruel, reasoned and unreasonable.
Both the Smiths and the Stevensons had come to Edinburgh from elsewhere, but ended up adopting the habits and thoughts of the city as their own. By the turn of the century, they had become perfect exemplars of New Town life. Baxter’s Place had become a useful port of call for clients who had heard of Thomas and Robert’s growing reputation for ironmongery, lamp-making and general engineering projects. Within the house itself, life became segregated; while the men discussed work, the women gossiped over acquaintances and fussed over the children. The link between the two families had been reinforced by Robert’s wedding in 1797 to Thomas’s eldest daughter, Jean (one of the two surviving children born to his first wife). ‘The marriage of a man of 27 and a girl of 20 who have lived for twelve years as brother and sister, is difficult to conceive,’ Louis later commented drily. But Thomas much approved of the union, regarding it as another healthy symptom of the closeness of both families. Outsiders, however, regarded Thomas’s status as Robert’s stepfather, boss, father-in-law and mentor as dangerously intimate.
Something of the strangeness of this arrangement comes over in Robert’s letters, which mention in the same breath his half sister Betsey, aged six (Thomas’s daughter by his marriage to Robert’s mother) and his wife, Jean, Thomas’s daughter from his previous marriage. In a letter of 1807 sent to Robert while he was aboard the lighthouse yacht, Thomas signs himself ‘your ever affectionate father’, and mentions that ‘we are all well: Your wife, your mother and myself dined and drunk tea with Mr Gray yesterday.’ In letters and diaries, Robert would refer to Mary Anne, Thomas’s daughter from his second marriage, as ‘my dear sister’, and later regarded the offspring of the Smith children not as unrelated acquaintances, but as cousins. As Thomas grew older, Robert slipped naturally into position as head of the family, presiding over both Thomas’s children and, increasingly, his own. Robert’s