The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is set in London. As the skeptical scoff so beloved of the Scot has it: "Aye right." (The next time you meet one, ask him or her to say it—you'll be amazed by how much irony can be loaded into those two words.) The place names may be London ones, but where did that weather come from? "It was a wild, cold, seasonable night of March, with a pale moon… . The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face." As anyone will recognize who has struggled across the acres of Charlotte Square of an evening against a winter wind chilled by the North Sea, this is Edinburgh. Robert Louis Stevenson, with his congenital ill-health, had particular cause to remember the climate of Scotland's capital, his birthplace, with detestation.

G.K. Chesterton argued that the origins of the book owe more to Edinburgh than they do to London. The social dichotomy of the setting reflects Stevenson's Edinburgh: the smart quarters where Dr. Jekyll lives are like Edinburgh's 18th-century New Town, with its classical façades and geometric grid inhabited by the prosperous middle classes; while Mr. Hyde's lodgings are among the poor and indigent, like the medieval Old Town perched above—straggling down the Royal Mile from the Castle on top of its volcanic rock—which by Stevenson's time had been left to the poverty-stricken.

The Manichaean personality of Jekyll/Hyde—respectable by day, viciously stalking the streets by night—is based on an Edinburgh figure, Deacon William Brodie, who was a cabinetmaker and town-council member by day but a burglar by night. (Brodie was hanged in 1788 after he was recognized during a robbery.) Similarly, Jekyll's dissecting theater draws its sinister nature from tales of 18th-century Edinburgh's "Resurrection men," who supplied the city's anatomy professors with cadavers freshly dug up or straight from the gallows. So hungry for specimens was the eminent Dr. Robert Knox that two of his lackeys—Irish laborers Burke and Hare—infamously turned to murder.

James Buchan's Crowded with Genius brilliantly evokes this dualism. Buchan's is the latest of a flurry of recent publications on the Scottish Enlightenment, beginning with Arthur Herman's How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It (2001) and including, among others, Mary Cosh's Edinburgh: The Golden Age (2002). For much of the last 200 years, Edinburgh has been overshadowed by Glasgow, its rival at the other end of the Forth-Clyde valley which divides Scotland geographically. The recent vogue for Edinburgh has been inspired in part by the reconstitution in the city of the Scottish Parliament in July 1999.

The country is looking forward again and therefore looking back to its past—especially to its cultural Golden Age, which Edinburgh can lay fair claim to have led. It was also a period in which country and city could claim to have led the modern world. Or even made it: the British edition of Buchan's book was modestly subtitled "How Edinburgh Changed the World." At the beginning of the 18th century, Scotland had entered into a union of parliaments with England to form the united kingdom of Great Britain. The resulting subordination to English interests fueled the Jacobite rebellions and the capture in 1745 of Edinburgh by Charles Edward Stuart, "Bonnie Prince Charlie." Thereafter the city's intellectual élite set out to out-English the English. By 1762 Voltaire was caustically noting "today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening." "Edinburgh is a hot-bed of genius," Smollett has a character enthuse in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), and for Benjamin Franklin his first visit to the city in 1759 was "the densest happiness."

Buchan is a novelist and financial journalist specializing in the Middle East. He is also the grandson of the Christian statesman and novelist John Buchan. As might be expected with such a pedigree, Buchan is an enthralling storyteller, and his book has a rich galaxy of characters. The low-life Burke and Hare and Deacon Brodie are here, as are the literati who dominate the history. There are engrossing set-piece descriptions of the literary fraud of the century, the publication by James Macpherson of the poems of Ossian; Henry Mackenzie's leadership of the literary cult of sentimentality; and of the genuine talents, the poets Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns.

The book opens with a panorama of the Old Town, hemmed in by its site until, in Buchan's marvelous phrase, it "made a sort of antique Manhattan"; a later chapter describes the draining of the pestilential North Loch below the Castle Rock, giving access to the raised ground beyond on which the modern architectural glories of the New Town would arise. George Drummond, the Lord Provost who implemented the vision, emerges as possibly the most unsung hero in the book. There are others. The achievements of the Edinburgh medical school, where Dr. Jekyll's progenitors "labored, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge," are also described, as are those of James Hutton, the father of geology, who turned away from deductive reasoning based on Genesis.

But the real heroes of Buchan's book are the Scottish historians and pioneers of the social sciences who felt that the proper study of Mankind is Man, and who were to influence Kant, Hegel, and Marx: David Hume, Sir James Steuart, Adam Fergusson, Henry Home (Lord Kames), John Millar, and, stealing in from Glasgow, Adam Smith. There are some curious absences. The portraits of Sir Henry Raeburn, which left such a vivid visual record of the Scottish Enlightenment and the individualism of which challenged overly generalist views of "human nature," are present in the illustrations, but Raeburn is only mentioned in passing in the text. William Robertson, the principal of Edinburgh University who, among other works, published a history of America in 1777, receives a cursory discussion. Despite the impressive reading in the primary sources, there is the occasional forgivable mistake. Thomas Boston of Ettrick is confused at one point with his son, also Thomas Boston and a founder of the secessionist Relief Church.

Buchan claims that only when the politics of the Jacobites and the "theocratic fantasies" of the radical Presbyterian Whigs had been defeated, could the city progress. He begins with a justly notorious event which in recent historiography has become a symbol of the benighted state of Scottish religion: the execution for blasphemy in 1697 of Thomas Aikenhead, an 18-year-old Edinburgh divinity student. Traditional Presbyterianism, in Buchan's account, was "rigid," "gloomy," "grim," "somber." Dominant in the Church of Scotland from the 1750s, however, were the Moderates who accepted (and indeed enforced) the British government's imposition of patronage, which gave the ruling classes control and denied congregations their right to choose a minister. Generally, like Hugh Blair, the leading Edinburgh preacher, the Moderates also followed Francis Hutcheson, the Glasgow professor of moral philosophy, and stressed the beauty of virtue in their sermons, seeking Aristotle's ethical middle way—one of the possible derivations of the party name. Buchan quotes the evangelical John Witherspoon, the minister of Beith, Ayrshire (before his emigration to America), satirizing their preachers in his Ecclesiastical Characteristics (1753): "1. His subjects must be confined to social duties. 2. He must recommend them only from rational considerations … 3. His authorities must be drawn from heathen writers … 4. He must be very unacceptable to the common people." Buchan follows the conflict between the "High-Flyers," or evangelicals, and the Moderates through a series of disputes: over patronage in 1752, the production of a play, the Douglas, by John Home, the minister of Athelstaneford, in 1754; and the attempt to excommunicate David Hume in 1756.

No reader of Books & Culture, I would imagine, would want to defend 18th-century Scottish evangelicals in everything. Despite willing on their triumph, neither does Buchan unreservedly approve of the Moderates. Over patronage he shows them acting high-handedly, particularly in their treatment of the principled evangelical Thomas Gillespie. If the orthodox, those whom Burns rhymed with John Knox, were suppressing free enquiry through their attempt to push out Hume, what are we to make of Hume's own refusal to jump? Buchan suggests that Hume's failure to live out the logical consequences of his skepticism was strategic withdrawal, cowardliness, or just laziness.

Was the choice between enlightenment and tenebrous orthodoxy, as Buchan appears to suggest? He himself notes that stereotypes do not fit the case of Alexander Webster, the evangelical minister of the Tolbooth and a man who could drink anybody under the table. It was he who brought Whitefield to Edinburgh, where the English evangelist preached to large crowds with success; but Webster was also responsible for suggesting the idea of the New Town to George Drummond. Modern historians have seen one of the roots of the Scottish Enlightenment in Calvinism, its cerebral religiosity stimulating broader rational questioning, as had happened in Viscount Stair's codifying of Scottish law in the 17th century. Buchan perceptively notes the Enlightenment influence on Bonnie Prince Charlie wanting to make the Scots "a free and happy people." But Witherspoon's ideal in education when at Princeton was to convince students "that you wish to see them happy, and desire to impose no restraints but such as their real advantage … render indispensable." And, of course, he was famously the clerical signatory to that classic Enlightenment text, the Declaration of Independence, and the disseminator in America of that bugbear of the evangelicals satirized by Burns, Common Sense philosophy. Enlightenment thought also penetrated Scottish evangelicalism.

A story is told of the Moderate leader William Robertson preaching a sermon one Sabbath forenoon in the collegiate charge of Greyfriars Church in which he stated that if Virtue came to earth, everyone would fall down and worship it. In the afternoon his colleague, the evangelical William Erskine (Sir Walter Scott's father's minister), preached that Virtue had been incarnate in the person of the Son of God, but far from worshiping, men had crucified him. Buchan finds the sanguine confidence of Enlightenment deism misplaced: "It is that optimism that mankind today, as he surveys the ruins of his own making, cannot share," he wryly notes. Augustinianism and postmodern pessimism agree that Mr. Hyde has outlived the Enlightenment.

Neil Dickson teaches English in Kilmarnock Academy, Scotland. His most recent book is Brethren in Scotland 1838-2000: A Social Study of an Evangelical Movement (Paternoster Press).

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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