W. T. Fyfe’s Edinburgh Under Sir Walter Scott paints a portrait of the Scottish capital during the lifetime of its most celebrated literary son. The book evokes the society, institutions, and intellectual life of Edinburgh in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the era when the city earned its reputation as the “Athens of the North.”
Fyfe describes the writers, lawyers, professors, and notable characters who filled the city, as well as its university, clubs, and famous streets. Scott serves as the central figure around whom the picture is composed, but the wider culture of the age is the true subject. For readers interested in Scottish history, the Enlightenment city, and the world of Walter Scott, it offers an engaging and atmospheric study.