The Scottish Enlightenment and the Readers of Late Georgian Lancaster: ‘Light in the North’

Abstract

THE RELATIONSHIP between the Scottish Enlightenment and English provincial society has never been adequately gauged. A persuasive study by Anand Chitnis in 1986 first explored, as its title suggests, the connections between The Scottish Enlightenment and Early Victorian English Society. This revealed many physicians and other graduates whose nineteenth-century careers south of the Border reflected the achievements of Scotland's famous universities over the previous century nicely illustrating the impact of Dugald Stewart, Sir William Hamilton, Edinburgh's medical educators, and the Edinburgh Review. But Chitnis concentrated exclusively upon a cohort of professionals who had themselves been taught in Scotland (many of them, indeed, were native Scots); and he focused also upon a period substantially later than the 'high' Scottish Enlightenment of the later eighteenth century. In effect, his study incorporated a substantial time-lag and a special focus whose value was that it served to confirm what had always been suspected about the profound impact of 'the Scotch philosophy' on Western institutional development by the 1820s and 1830s. But the consequence of this approach, as well as of other recent research, is that it is probably true to say that we presently know rather more about the influence of Scottish Enlightenment literature on early American political culture and on the nineteenth-century American colleges even perhaps on Aujklarung Germany than about its contemporary success with late Georgian provincial English readers. 1