Early Nineteenth-century Scotland Research Articles

Coltman, Viccy. Art and Identity in Scotland: A Cultural History from the Jacobite Rising of 1745 to Walter Scott.

Coltman, Viccy. <i>Art and Identity in Scotland: A Cultural History from the Jacobite Rising of 1745 to Walter Scott</i>.

The mind’s magic lantern: David Brewster and the scientific imagination

ABSTRACT The imagination has always been thought to operate primarily in conjunction with the sense of vision, imagined objects and scenes being conjured up before the ‘mind’s eye’. In early nineteenth-century Scotland the natural philosopher David Brewster developed a theory of the imagination that explained its operation through a reversal of the normal processes of visual perception. These ideas were rooted in the mental philosophy of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. For Brewster the mind’s eye was also the eye of the body, and images from the memory and imagination were projected onto the retina in the same manner that images were projected onto the screen in a magic lantern show. This theory underpinned his belief that imagination played an essential role in scientific discovery. Brewster believed that this process was as essential to the discoveries of science as it was to the creation of great poetry. The writings of Brewster can tell us a great deal about the connections between science and literature in the early nineteenth century, as well as showing that the philosophy of science in contemporary Britain was far from monolithic.

Physiology of the Haunted Mind: Naturalistic Theories of Apparitions in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a resurgence of interest in the supernatural in Scotland as elsewhere in the United Kingdom. A number of intellectual figures responded by proposing naturalistic explanations for supernatural phenomena, drawing on the legacy of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy. These included the geologist and antiquarian Samuel Hibbert and the phrenologist George Combe. This paper explores the interrelations between these theories, their roots in the troubled cultural politics of Scotland in the early nineteenth century, and the reaction of different protagonists in the cultural conflicts of the period to their ideas.

The Township, the Pregnant Girl and the Church: Community Dynamics, Gender and Social Control in Early Nineteenth-century Scotland

In 1814 in a small Highland township an unmarried girl, ostracised by her neighbours, gave birth. The baby died. The legal precognition permits a forensic, gendered examination of the internal dynamics of rural communities and how they responded to threats to social cohesion. In the Scottish ‘parish state’ disciplining sexual offences was a matter for church discipline. This case is situated in the early nineteenth-century Gàidhealtachd where and when church institutions were less powerful than in the post-Reformation Lowlands, the focus of most previous research. The article shows that the formal social control of kirk discipline was only part of a complex of behavioural controls, most of which were deployed within and by communities. Indeed, Scottish communities and churches were deeply entwined in terms of personnel; shared sexual prohibitions; and in the use of shaming as a primary method of social control. While there was something of a ‘female community’, this was not unconditionally supportive of all women nor was it ranged against men or patriarchal structures.

Neptunism and Transformism: Robert Jameson and other Evolutionary Theorists in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland.

This paper sheds new light on the prevalence of evolutionary ideas in Scotland in the early nineteenth century and establish what connections existed between the espousal of evolutionary theories and adherence to the directional history of the earth proposed by Abraham Gottlob Werner and his Scottish disciples. A possible connection between Wernerian geology and theories of the transmutation of species in Edinburgh in the period when Charles Darwin was a medical student in the city was suggested in an important 1991 paper by James Secord. This study aims to deepen our knowledge of this important episode in the history of evolutionary ideas and explore the relationship between these geological and evolutionary discourses. To do this it focuses on the circle of natural historians around Robert Jameson, Wernerian geologist and professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh from 1804 to 1854. From the evidence gathered here there emerges a clear confirmation that the Wernerian model of geohistory facilitated the acceptance of evolutionary explanations of the history of life in early nineteenth-century Scotland. As Edinburgh was at this time the most important center of medical education in the English-speaking world, this almost certainly influenced the reception and development of evolutionary ideas in the decades that followed.

George Combe and common sense.

This article examines the history of two fields of enquiry in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland: the rise and fall of the common sense school of philosophy and phrenology as presented in the works of George Combe. Although many previous historians have construed these histories as separate, indeed sometimes incommensurate, I propose that their paths were intertwined to a greater extent than has previously been given credit. The philosophy of common sense was a response to problems raised by Enlightenment thinkers, particularly David Hume, and spurred a theory of the mind and its mode of study. In order to succeed, or even to be considered a rival of these established understandings, phrenologists adapted their arguments for the sake of engaging in philosophical dispute. I argue that this debate contributed to the relative success of these groups: phrenology as a well-known historical subject, common sense now largely forgotten. Moreover, this history seeks to question the place of phrenology within the sciences of mind in nineteenth-century Britain.

Professionals, their Private Libraries, and Wider Reading Habits in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland

This paper studies professionals, a group particularly relevant to Scottish reading culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A variety of case studies are used, drawing on evidence such as library borrowing records, evidence of book ownership, and readers’ diaries and lists of books read. Issues explored include the private libraries that professionals built, the balance between work-related reading and their wider recreational reading interests, how professionals compared to other readers in Scotland and further afield, and change over time.

Prosecutors, Juries, Judges and Punishment in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland

Prosecutors, Juries, Judges and Punishment in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland

Whigs, Tories and Scottish Legal Reform, c.1785-1832

In early nineteenth-century Scotland the debate over political reform occurred alongside a shadow debate over legal reform. On the one side the young Whigs of the Edinburgh Review argued for the adoption of English legal practice, particularly in civil law, as the means to modernise and civilise Scotland. On the other side stood the Tory jurists who responded by defending Scotland’s more humane criminal law. Unlike in England, there was no need to repeal the numerous statutes detailing the death penalty, since Scotland had long been used to judge-made law. These debates reveal rival notions not just of legal procedure but also of Scottish identity. Both sides however, were constrained by their own agendas; the Whigs had little option but to ignore England’s ‘bloody code’, while the Tories could not push their defence of Scots Law as far as questioning the value of the Union of 1707.

"No Unsuitable Match": Defining Rank in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland

Journal Article “No Unsuitable Match”: Defining Rank in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland Get access Leah Leneman Leah Leneman University of Edinburgh, Department of Economic and Social HistoryEdinburgh EH8 9JYScotland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 33, Issue 3, Spring 2000, Pages 665–682, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2000.0028 Published: 01 March 2000

Seduction in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland

Over the centuries, and in most cultures, when an unmarried man and an unmarried woman had sex together, it was generally assumed that the man persuaded or 'seduced' the woman to this. A woman's sexual desires might be as great as a man's, but only the woman ran the risk of pregnancy. And even if a father could be held liable for the support of a child borne by a woman not his wife (as he certainly could be in eigh teenth and early nineteenth-century Scotland), that child would not normally inherit any of his goods or estate. Furthermore, society had rules whereby a married woman was considered a 'respectable' member of the community, and her children 'lawful' children, while the children of an unmarried woman were bastards and she herself was marginalised. As far as Scottish law was concerned, if a woman could prove that she had been persuaded into sexual intercourse by the man's convincing her that a marriage was thereby being consummated, she was entitled to damages for seduction.

The Napoleonic Wars, Military Scotland and Tory Highlandism in the Early Nineteenth Century

This article will explore the connections between the long war against Rev olutionary and Napoleonic France and the development of the 'cult of tartanry' in early nineteenth-century Scotland. Work on the Highland tra dition has noted the compatibility of this form of cultural patriotism with Scottish loyalty to the Union and Scottish participation in the British im perial state.1 On the other hand, the influence of the 'cult of tartanry' has been diminished by the view that it was merely cultural and never seriously nationalistic. No attempt will be made here to argue that Highlandism amounted to a coherent form of nationalism because it did not.2 But a

Leah Leneman. Alienated Affections: The Scottish Experience of Divorce and Separation, 1684-1830. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; dist. by Columbia University Press, N.Y. 1998. Pp. ix, 354. $30.00 paper. ISBN 0-7486-1031-6.

Leah Leneman. Alienated Affections: The Scottish Experience of Divorce and Separation, 1684-1830. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; dist. by Columbia University Press, N.Y. 1998. Pp. ix, 354. $30.00 paper. ISBN 0-7486-1031-6. - Volume 31 Issue 3

Schooling and Literacy in Early Nineteenth Century Scotland: Some Additional Evidence and its Implications

Schooling and Literacy in Early Nineteenth Century Scotland: Some Additional Evidence and its Implications

‘A tyrant and tormentor’: violence against wives in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland

There has recently been a tremendous new awareness of male violence against women, an awareness which spans the academic world, the services that come in contact with it, and popular initiatives. Edinburgh District Council's Zero Tolerance campaign (which arose out of a report on adolescents' knowledge about, and attitude to, domestic violence) began in 1992 and was a landmark in bringing this issue out into the open in Britain. Hundreds of articles have appeared in American medical journals in the last four or five years, and March 1995 saw the launch of a new interdisciplinary journal, entitled simply Violence Against Women. And of all the women who suffer violence, the greatest number are wives whose husbands abuse them.

Schooling and Literacy in Early Nineteenth Century Scotland: Some Additional Evidence and its Implications

Schooling and Literacy in Early Nineteenth Century Scotland: Some Additional Evidence and its Implications

Walter Geikie: the life, schooling and work of a deaf artist at the beginning of the nineteenth century

The life and works of Walter Geikie (1795-1837), a profoundly deaf Edinburgh artist elected to the Royal Scottish Academy of Painting, Drawing and Architecture, are investigated as a source of insight into the experiences of deaf people in early nineteenth-century Scotland. Accounts of Geikie's early education, his family life and contacts with the rest of Edinburgh's deaf community are discussed in light of their possible weight as evidence that sign was recognized and used as part of the schooling of deaf students at the time. The artist's life is presented as an instance of the experiences of a profoundly deaf person at a time when the expectations of society regarding the education and socialization of deaf people was in process of expansion.

Seduction in Psychoanalysis and Psychiatric History

A course of public lectures on lunacy reform in early nineteenth-century Scotland; a course of clinical lectures on nervous diseases delivered in late nineteenth-century Paris; and a self-consciously staged and self-professedly perverse performative reading of seduction scenes in psychoanalysis and fiction by a contemporary American feminist. To snatch a line from the not altogether inappropriate context of Moby Dick, this is about as diverse an ensemble of texts as any poor devil of a Sub-Sub scribbler could hope to grubworm her way through in a review. Let me elaborate briefly, beginning with the two tomes reprinted in the Tavistock Series under the equally able editorial eyes of sociologist Andrew Scull and historian Ruth Harris. Despite sharing a common lecture format, W. A. F. Browne's What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought To Be (1837) and J-M. Charcot's Clinical Lectures (originally published between 1882-85) are products of both markedly distinct psychiatric epochs and cultural milieus, and inherently unlike in terms of substance and scope of address. The work of the Scottish alienist, Browne, focuses primarily upon psychiatric practice: the construction and management of asylums in past, present, and future. Charcot's book, conversely, is comprised of a series of detailed investigations of pathological anatomy in relation to disorders such as hysteria, and focuses alternately upon

Scottish Banking before 1845: A Model for Laissez-Faire?

During the free era in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland, there were a number of restrictions affecting the evolution of the system. Scottish banking was characterized by restrictions on small-denomination and interest-bearing notes. There were also restrictions inhibiting the development of capital markets and entry into banking. Furthermore, the Bank of England operated as a shadow central bank for the Scottish system. These considerations call into question the use of the Scottish banking experience as the appropriate model for laissez-faire and as evidence against the legal restrictions theory of money and the new monetary economics. Copyright 1989 by Ohio State University Press.

Phrenology: Medium and Message

Previous articleNext article No AccessPhrenology: Medium and MessageAngus McLarenAngus McLaren Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 46, Number 1Mar., 1974 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/241166 Views: 18Total views on this site Citations: 11Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1974 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:William Sims Bainbridge Humanization: The Crash or Reboot of Social Psychology, (May 2017): 27–57.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-56502-6_2Nathalie Rosset Popular Philosophy in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 27, no.22 (Nov 2007): 150–169.https://doi.org/10.3366/jshs.2007.27.2.150Christopher G. White Minds Intensely Unsettled: Phrenology, Experience, and the American Pursuit of Spiritual Assurance, 1830–1880, Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 16, no.22 (Jun 2018): 227–261.https://doi.org/10.1525/rac.2006.16.2.227Peter Claus Languages of Citizenship in the City of London 1848–1867, The London Journal 24, no.11 (Jul 2013): 23–37.https://doi.org/10.1179/ldn.1999.24.1.23Randi L. Davenport The Mother's Mistake: Sarah Stickney Ellis and Dreams of Empire, Victorian Literature and Culture 22 (Oct 2008): 173.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150300003909Michael Shortland Courting the Cerebellum: Early Organological and Phrenological Views of Sexuality, The British Journal for the History of Science 20, no.22 (Jan 2009): 173–199.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087400023736D. Hodson, R. B. Prophet The influence of phrenological theory on the science curriculum in Victorian England‡, European Journal of Science Education 5, no.33 (Jul 2006): 263–274.https://doi.org/10.1080/0140528830050302Angus McLaren A Prehistory of the Social Sciences: Phrenology in France, Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no.11 (Jun 2009): 3–22.https://doi.org/10.1017/S001041750000966XSteven E. G. Kemper Sinhalese Astrology, South Asian Caste Systems, and the Notion of Individuality, The Journal of Asian Studies 38, no.33 (Mar 2011): 477–497.https://doi.org/10.2307/2053783T.H.E. Travers Samuel Smiles and the Origins of “Self-Help”: Reform and the New Enlightenment, Albion 9, no.22 (Jul 2014): 161–187.https://doi.org/10.2307/4048406W.H. GREENLEAF Toulmin Smith and the British Political Tradition, Public Administration 53, no.11 (Mar 1975): 25–44.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1975.tb00203.x