Changing of the Guard: Governance, Policing, Masculinity, and Class in the Porteous Affair and Walter Scott's Heart of Midlothian

Abstract

John Porteous, Captain of the Edinburgh City Guards, would be immortalized in the Porteous Riots of Edinburgh, 1736, in which he was murdered. These disturbances received renewed attention through Walter Scott's presentation of the events in his novel The Heart of Midlothian (1818). In contrast to eighteenth-century portrayals of the case, Scott's portrayal was significant in bringing to prominence a paradigm in which working-class men could contribute to civic management through policing, so long as they embraced long-held notions of masculine control held by both the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban elite.