Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster

by William W. Starr

  I had one more detour to make before arriving in Edinburgh. And while Falkirk was the scene of yet another important Scottish battle—for American Civil War buffs, Scotland is sort of like driving through Virginia—it was the techno-marvel of the Falkirk Wheel I wanted to check out. Falkirk is about halfway between Edinburgh and Stirling and hosted not just one but two notable clashes between warring sides. And if you guessed that William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charlie would be involved—at separate times, of course—then you win a free haggis dinner, my treat. The first conflict occurred in 1298 when Wallace, having previously defeated the army of King Edward at nearby Stirling Bridge, lost the rematch. The second took place in 1746 when the Young Pretender’s army, in retreat from its failed incursion into England, scored an upset victory over the pursuing English. It would be almost their last victory. The finally tally for Falkirk, then: English 1, Scots 1. Not much to celebrate, really.

  The more recent history at Falkirk is much more cheerful. The focal point is the Falkirk Wheel, an absolutely amazing, chin-dropping rotating boat lift that links the uneven waters of the Forth and Clyde canals, thereby opening shipping between the east and west coasts of Scotland. For years before boats had to negotiate their way through a very slow series of eleven locks, a process which could take an entire day to complete. Now the Falkirk Wheel, the key to the multimillion dollar Millennium Link project, scoops boats in two giant buckets the 115 feet between the two canals. I can’t explain how this thing works, but I read that the concrete and steel lift is so incredibly efficient that the energy it consumes raising six hundred tons of water in one lift is equal to that used in eight toasters. It was very, very cool to climb into one of the passenger boats and be raised to the top canal, float around a bit, and then be lowered 115 feet back down to where I started from.

  I had no idea what Bozzy and Johnson or Wallace or Prince Charlie would have thought, or indeed how they might possibly have conceived of such a thing. If it might have been imagined as something from another world to them, it seemed scarcely less to me.

  21

  Edinburgh

  On August 18, 1773, Samuel Johnson wrote in his Journey, “we left Edinburgh, a city too well known to admit description.” Without Boswell—who thankfully wrote thousands of words on their time in Edinburgh—that is almost all we would know of the three days and four nights the two men spent in that ancient capital. And what a pity that would have been, for their time in Edinburgh—at what one writer called “the peak of its celebrated period of high thinking and high stinking”—produced a wealth of entertainment and enlightenment about both men as well as about the city and its inhabitants and their customs.

  Edinburgh marked the site of their departure for the journey into the Highlands and Islands, and it would be the city that they returned to at journey’s end. It was where Boswell was living with his family, and so we are given a wonderful glimpse into his home life as well as into his circle of acquaintances. In spite of his declaration that Edinburgh was too well known to be described, Johnson had never been there before—had never been out of England, in fact—and had never spoken with many of the people he would meet.

  Boswell had carefully and thoughtfully orchestrated a series of engagements for Johnson, hoping that the great man would not find the company beneath him in any way. Boswell’s plan was to introduce him and showcase him to a curious and mostly respectful Edinburgh society and to ensure that on their trip he would be greeted by as many notable figures as possible. To achieve those ends Boswell wheedled and begged favors from a number of dignitaries, asking them to ensure that Johnson enjoyed intellectual companionship and attention. The trip was the culmination of many years of planning and anticipation for Boswell, and, to a lesser extent, Johnson. It would thrust the two together intimately over a period of some three months and help to define the relationship so brilliantly delineated years later in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. But that was in the future at this time. How did they get to this point?

  Boswell met Johnson for the first time on May 16, 1763, in a London bookshop. Things didn’t go smoothly for Boswell initially, but he pursued Johnson’s interest vigorously, and the older man eventually succumbed to Boswell’s undeniable charm, his close attention, and his incessant flow of ideas. During the decade of the 1760s Boswell and Johnson spoke on several occasions of the possibility of traveling to Scotland, where Boswell was born and was living. In 1771 Boswell wrote a specific proposal from Edinburgh: “I gave him an account of my comfortable life as a married man, and a lawyer in practice at the Scotch bar; invited him to Scotland, and promised to attend him to the Highlands, and Hebrides.” Johnson, whose formidable intellectual curiosity could never permit him to abandon such ideas, wrote back optimistically: “Whether we climb the Highlands or are tost among the Hebrides … I hope the time will come when we may try our powers both with cliffs and waters.”

  The time did come, of course, and Johnson—then about to turn sixty-four—departed London on August 6 for the journey through northern England to Edinburgh to meet Boswell. His trip has been closely charted, almost by the mile. He rode in a post chaise and had company all the way. He was of mostly good humor on the trip through Lincolnshire, Stilton, Doncaster, York, Newcastle, Belford, and into the Scottish Lowlands. Johnson didn’t complain much, though physically he would seem no comfortable match for such a journey, much less the one awaiting him. He was fat and slovenly and had breathing problems. His overall health was poor, and the physical impression he left—tall, stooped, a way-too-large nose, an illfitting wig, the markings of smallpox and scrofula on his face—could and did frighten small children. He seldom changed shirts, and on matters of hygiene, well, let’s just say his hygiene left much to be desired (which would make him a perfect fit for the “stinking” part of Edinburgh). His temperament could be irritable, and he was often self-absorbed when he wasn’t outright suffering depression. His movements were hardly graceful. Still, his eloquent expression and strong, searching mind harnessed to a sincere faith and belief in good manners endowed him with a tolerance beyond what could be expected. He arrived in Edinburgh after a nine-day journey in better spirits than most of us under similar circumstances.

  In his Journal a profoundly excited Boswell—after a brilliant description of Johnson’s person and personality, which everyone should read—chronicled the launch of their remarkable journey together: “On Saturday the fourteenth of August, 1773, late in the evening, I received a note from him that he was arrived at Boyd’s Inn, at the head of the Canongate. I went to him directly. He embraced me cordially, and I exulted in the thought that I now had him actually in Caledonia.”

  It must have been a memorable moment for Bozzy. For more than a decade he had awaited this scene, scarcely daring to imagine it. And suddenly there was Johnson before him. It took only a moment for the greeting and to hear of Johnson’s first experience with the sanitary problems besetting Edinburgh at this period. William Scott, who had ridden part of the way with Johnson, told Boswell in an aside that when the pair arrived in the city a little earlier they ordered lemonade at the inn. Johnson wanted his drink sweeter and then watched, appalled, as the waiter used his greasy fingers to lift a lump of sugar and drop it into his glass. Johnson was furious; he threw the lemonade out the window and almost struck the waiter. We already know, of course, that he reacted with considerable more calmness when the same thing happened to him a week later in Montrose. You may be cheered to know that the inn in Edinburgh where this nastiness occurred was demolished in 1868; a plaque now exists commemorating the spot where Boswell and Johnson had their encounter. Edinburgh today, of course, is much cleaner and considerably more expensive, at least for Americans, thanks to the decline of the dollar. A glass of lemonade in 2007 cost the equivalent of nearly six dollars, though I could add additional sugar with my own fingers.

  Johnson’s unforgettable first words to Boswell were, “I smell you in the dark.” No kidding. Now Edinburgh wasn’t all that
different from other cities in the seventeenth century, and things had gotten better, but the testimony from everyone about that time is that it stank. And as the two men walked most agreeably arm in arm up the narrow Royal Mile to James’s Court, where Boswell lived, they encountered the capital’s “evening effluvia,” as Boswell put it. Johnson may have been appalled, although he knew well the smells of London. And remember, this was a man who slopped food over himself while dining and was hardly a model of personal hygiene. No one, not even Boswell, ever recorded Johnson taking a bath. The good doctor did not have an orange with him, like the one he carried in London’s streets to press against his nose to minimize the smells in that city. “A zealous Scotsman would have wished Mr. Johnson to be without one of his senses upon this occasion,” Bozzy noted.

  Fifty years before Johnson arrived Daniel Defoe visited Edinburgh and wondered if its citizens “delighted in Stench and Nastiness.” He concluded that the city “stinks intolerably” and mentioned specifically the habit of residents tossing out their kitchen and toilet wastes onto the streets, no matter who might be walking by. Moray McLaren summarized the disgusting practice most vividly: “The ‘slops’ of each of the many-storied households were hurled out into the street at night time to dribble away down the hill if they were liquid, to await the later arrival of the scavengers if they were solid. And by ‘slops,’ it should be remembered, were not only the dregs of the kitchen but all the contents of the chamber-pot. When the warning bell for the nightly deluge and cascade sounded over the city, men in even the deepest taverns in the most secluded clubs would light brown-paper spills to fumigate the atmosphere against the all-pervading, the penetrating fetor.” In Johnson’s words, “Many a full-flowing perriwig moistened into flaccidity.” The streets were so smelly and filthy that women in long dresses would seek a ride over the shortest of distances to avoid ruining their clothing. Public facilities were never cleaned. A fetid air hung over the overcrowded city day and night.

  Boswell said the worst excesses of the practice had been curbed by the time Johnson arrived (which leaves a scary impression, doesn’t it?). But in 1774, one year after Johnson’s visit, another correspondent observed that little had changed, and that “many an elegant suit of clothes has been spoiled.” As I walked up the Royal Mile in the wake of Boswell and Johnson, and particularly as I neared James’s Court, the street narrowed to just about the width of a footpath, and multistory buildings—more than a few of eighteenth-century origin or even earlier—reached high on both sides. It would have been difficult for anyone to dump waste out the window and not hit me or anyone else strolling by. I mention this not as a warning to future visitors to Edinburgh, but only as an observation that while our sanitary practices have changed—mercifully—the physical circumstances that contributed to the “Stench and Nastiness” are still pretty evident. Curiously I saw a fruit stand nearby selling oranges; I wondered if anyone remembered how they were used a couple of centuries ago.

  Perhaps the reason why Edinburgh was such a fascinating and contradictory city at the time of Boswell and Johnson has to do with the breathtaking (literally and figuratively) combination of stinking and thinking. This was the Enlightenment, the Golden Age for Edinburgh’s intellectual life. David Hume, Adam Smith, Sir George Mackenzie, the poet Robert Fergusson, Lord Monboddo (wackiness and all), Sir Robert Forbes, and others were known throughout the western world and admired for their learning and scholarship in the fields of science, education, economics, religion, and literature. Matthew Bramble, the outwardly misanthropic central character of Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, declared with awe in one of his letters home that “Edinburgh is a hot-bed of genius!” Walter Scott had been born in Edinburgh two years before Boswell and Johnson’s trip; Robert Burns would find his fame there in a few years. The city’s schools were acclaimed; students came from around the world for their education. Edinburgh was the commercial, educational, political, and cultural hub for Scotland.

  Further, it boasted a dramatic setting, one of the most spectacular of any city, and a compelling history. Perched high atop a series of extinct volcanoes and rocky crags, seemingly higher than it is because the surrounding land is flat, Edinburgh is memorably striking to the eye. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who was born in the city in 1850, wrote a sterling appraisal of Edinburgh: “No situation could be more commanding for the head of a kingdom; none better chosen for noble prospects.” Its past dates from the eleventh century and it was designated soon after as a “royal burgh,” confirming its permanent association with the Scottish crown and government. The city played important roles in the wars between the Scots and the English, beginning with defeat of the Scots at the Battle of Flodden in the Lowlands in 1513, a calamity that led to the sacking of the city. The Treaty of 1707 changed Edinburgh’s perception of itself; henceforth it would be seeking to define its role in a Great Britain whose capital would be London. In 1997 the Scottish people voted overwhelmingly to reestablish their own parliament in Edinburgh to deal with a domestic agenda, and there have been growing calls since for a vote on Scottish independence from England.

  But I have gotten ahead of myself, and far ahead of Boswell and Johnson, holding their noses and walking up the Royal Mile to Boswell’s home for the night. When told he would meet Boswell’s wife, Johnson said he would change into a clean shirt, an admission of great meaning given the general state of cleanliness. “Tis needless,” Boswell said. “Either don’t see her tonight, or don’t put on a clean shirt.” Johnson replied, “I’ll do both.”

  When they arrived at Boswell’s apartments, his wife Margaret—Boswell’s cousin, two years older, whom he had married in 1769—had anticipated Johnson’s preferences and had tea ready. Johnson was delighted at the hospitality, “and as no man could be more polite when he chose to be, his address to her was most courteous and engaging, and his conversation soon charmed her into a forgetfulness of his external appearance.” The delighted if not ecstatic Boswell said “I’m glad to see you under my roof,” and Johnson replied, “And ’tis a very noble roof.” To Mrs. Thrale later, he expanded on that, writing, “Boswell has very handsome and spacious rooms; level with the ground on one side of the house, and on the other four stories high.”

  James’s Court—which was not, by the way, named for Boswell—is still there, at least the same high enclave that housed Boswell’s accommodations. It fronts a small, modestly attractive square off the street with a tree in the center and a tiny fountain off to one side. The square is reached through a narrow, arched, stone-covered passageway connected to a building above it. Boswell’s building was rebuilt after a fire in the mid-nineteenth century that damaged the exterior but left many of the apartments intact. Unfortunately Boswell’s was not one of those. The apartments are all occupied now, so there was no admittance for me. Sadly and regrettably there is nothing to mark Boswell’s presence so long ago nor the brilliant conversation and entertainment that occurred on one of Edinburgh’s most memorable historical occasions.

  Curiously there was nothing about him a few steps away at the Writers Museum, created to honor the life and work of three Scottish writers: Scott, Burns, and Stevenson. The museum acknowledged the existence of a dozen or so other Scottish writers, but its small store had no mention of Boswell and no copies of his books. I was stunned. I asked the attendant why the museum ignored Boswell and was told, “I really don’t know. I’m sure he’ll be added soon.” I suggested that his museum was so much claptrap without Boswell and left. He appeared unconcerned, but I again found moral indignation—or high dudgeon, if you prefer—to be extremely satisfying.

  Bozzy and Johnson stayed up until 2 A.M. chatting before they grew weary and went to bed. “My wife had insisted that, to show all respect to the sage, she would give up our own bedchamber to him and take a worse. This I cannot but gratefully mention, as one of a thousand obligations which I owe her, since the great obligation of her being pleased to accept me as her husband.” He didn’t mention, or
was not aware, that when Johnson retreated to his room he discovered he could make the candles burn more brightly for reading by turning them upside down. The result was the dropping of fairly copious amounts of grease on Mrs. Boswell’s carpet, a matter she did not appreciate. Yet Margaret Boswell could have been no more a gracious host and proud wife for Boswell during this time. She kept her complaints to herself; or, perhaps more realistically, she lacked the opportunity to preserve her thoughts in print as did her husband.

  The period of Johnson’s visit must have been a difficult time for her, for she was aware of Boswell’s escapades with whores and associated most of that activity with his time spent in London, the time he was with Johnson. She was, however, a practical woman who intended good for Bozzy. When he confessed his first marital infidelity to her, she forgave him and insisted that his surgeon treat him for possible sexual diseases. Johnson later wrote of her that she was “in a proper degree, inferior to her husband; she cannot rival him, nor can he ever be ashamed of her.” Her affections for Boswell waxed and waned over the next few years; his behavior severely tested her, and she often became angry, which served only to provoke Boswell all the more. Margaret Boswell and Johnson, however, eventually enjoyed something of a rapprochement, the good doctor having become aware of her connecting him to her husband’s dalliances. Margaret Boswell’s health began a long decline in the 1780s; as death approached, Boswell sought to be near her, “awed by her courage and fortitude and overwhelmed with remorse and a sense of tragic injustice,” wrote his biographer Peter Martin. She died in 1789; Boswell was a widower for the last six years of his life, fearing that his guilt would haunt him to the grave.