The relationship between Romanticism and the environment is best characterized by a focus on the beauty of nature and the rejection of the industrialization that had transformed human habitations into crowded, polluted cities. That notion of cities being dangerous and unsanitary, with bad air, cramped living conditions, and a constant need for vigilance is a sentiment that has transcended the era of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats and is still regularly (perhaps correctly, to some level, considering the climate crisis) repeated by news, cinema, and indeed literature. Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), for instance, focuses on a group of heroin users living in Edinburgh in the 1980s and is one of the most infamous Scottish urban novels, having attained cult-classic status. Likewise, before I arrived in Glasgow, I was warned of its dangerous reputation.
During the Romantic era, however, urban spaces in Scotland meant something different than they did for their Romantic contemporaries in England. John Gay’s poem “Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London” (1716) demonstrates that London had, as a result of early industrialization, already acquired a reputation for peril and uncleanliness, even prior to the Romantic movement. The poem advises its readers on what to avoid in the city of industry, such as “cloud[s] of ashes” (Line 38) from dust-men that would dirty one’s coat, and how to best navigate the risky streets that contain “smutty dangers” (Line 36) like pickpockets. This sentiment of the city as a dirty place was further heightened by the works of Romantic authors, who glorified natural landscapes and the sublime, one key example being the works of William Wordsworth. One of his most popular poems “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798), exalts “meadows and the woods/And mountains; and of all that we behold/From this green earth” as restorative forces that prompt elevated thoughts that one would not experience without taking in the sublime. However, Scottish Romanticists had a different relationship with urban spaces; rather than deeming them contrary to Romantic ideals, they were instead a part of them just as natural spaces were. “The Daft-days” (1772), one of Scottish poet Robert Fergusson’s best known works, provides an early example of this. Focusing on the days between Christmas and the New Year in Edinburgh, the city is a place of warmth and comfort. The poem refers to Edinburgh as “Auld Reekie,” a nickname referring to the foul odor it possessed prior to modern plumbing, and yet in the same stanza praises Edinburgh for being “snugly” “warmth, and couth.” Out in nature, in pastoral landscapes, in the late days of December, there’s only barren trees and horrible cold. But in Edinburgh, in the urban space, there’s warmth, there’s drink, there’s joy and mirth in Highland reels and food enough for every person at the table.
The reason for this may be that, as Murray Pittock notes in his book The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism, in the early nineteenth-century Edinburgh rose to prominence as a Romantic capital of the world. According to Pittock, this was due to “an indigenous boom in literary production” that “made the city a rival to London and Paris” (72). Thus, says Pittock, while London may have still been the British Empire’s commercial and political capital, Edinburgh, became its aesthetic one. Whether this was the reason the Scottish Romantics embraced urban spaces, or if it was perhaps that industrialization did not reach Scotland on the same scale as England until later in time, Scotland’s Romantic movement set itself apart from that of its English contemporaries and uniquely included the city as part of its Romantic ideal.
[Katarina Dulude, she/they]
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