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By Root 749 0

of the most radical periods in Scottish history – the Age of Improvement. By the 1820s, Scotland had become one of the great empire-building nations. While England provided the ideology for colonialism, the Scots, in their thousands, provided the skills and manpower to make it work. The Enlightenment had laid the essential foundations, allowing men of modest background to rise to prominence. Improvement merely provided the practical application to the rational theories. The early Victorians believed, as no other generation has before or since, that life, work and society could all be shaped to fit a particular politics. To tame the savage Highlander, they brought not just education but physical change as well: new houses, industry, roads and villages. To improve the Lowlands they planted trees, built more roads, brought in railways and steam. Factories were set up and filled with bewildered peasantry while agriculture moved away from old practices into new mechanistic ways of working. The universities expanded and began new scientific subjects; engineering, helped along by the pioneers, suddenly became fashionable.

Much of the impetus behind Improvement was benign and, considering the rigid thinking of only a century before, remarkably meritocratic. But in some places it brought its unfortunate consequences; such as emigration and the destruction of much of Highland society. The movement of the cleared Highlanders to the big Lowland cities also brought an unwanted burden to those industries trying to soak up the sudden influx of people. Robert’s attitude to the Clearances was ambiguous; although he supported many of the theories of improvement, he had seen the emigrant boats himself and they had upset him deeply. He was one of the few Lowland men of his generation who had travelled widely in the Highlands and understood it on a level that most of his Edinburgh contemporaries could not. Instead of seeing the Highlanders as misguided savages who needed to be transformed, at best, into replicas of Lowland men, Robert was shrewd enough to take most men on their own merits. Unusually, he respected Highland Gaelic culture and found many of the old practices sensible, not backward. He had worked with Highlanders over the years, appointed them as keepers, hired them as builders and foremen, and felt a much greater affinity with them than with many of his southern countrymen.

Robert nevertheless agreed with much of Improvement’s stern doctrine. He believed in modern farming, benevolent landlordism and, with reservations, in bringing the Highlands closer to the Lowlands. He was also evangelical about education and industry; in Robert’s opinion, there was no such thing as too much learning or too much work. He was, and always remained, a benevolent conservative. As his son David later pointed out, Robert ‘had no taint of bigotry or party feeling’, and was too canny to follow one political ideology to the exclusion of all others. His attitude to Scotland’s landed grandees, who still ruled de facto over much of the country, was ambivalent. He liked and respected many of the old noble families, and was enough of a snob to flaunt their acquaintance, but found it almost puzzling that they did not, like him, believe in a meritocratic society.

The side of Improvement that least appealed to him was its effect on his country’s image. This was the age of great Scottish myths, of the king in fictionalised kilt, of Walter Scott and Highland Societies. The real leaps made through agriculture, industry, roads and riches might have been useful, but they didn’t quite catch the imagination as well as George IV in pink tights. And so, once the Stuart threat had been chased out of Scotland, the middle classes came back, cautiously at first, but then in increasing numbers. The English, and indeed many Lowlanders, found the notion of well-managed wildness satisfying, particularly when it was within a few hours’ carriage ride and could be viewed from the comfort of a civilised castle. As industrialisation smoked the rest of the country into sameness,