[A professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Lancaster, Craig utilized a cross-disciplinary perspective in such books as The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change (1973). In the following excerpt, he analyzes the social themes of eighteenth-century Scottish poetry and discusses the Edinburgh society that influenced such poets as Ramsay and Fergusson.]

[Scottish poetry] is peculiarly rich in all that has to do with social life. In the 17th and 18th centuries it is taken up almost exclusively with that, but socialness of a kind very different from, say, the equally 'social' English poetry of that time. Dryden and Pope lived amidst and wrote for an upper-middle and upper class metropolitan world of coffeehouse, town mansion, and country estate, a milieu of politicians and landowners growing rich (or bankrupt) on investments, and the artists to whom they gave commissions and hospitality. Pope especially writes as one accustomed to shine in the company of the sophisticated and important; this forms not only his subject-matter (the conditions of a genuine literary culture; 'the use of riches'), but his manner also, which turns to creative uses the poise of a conscious conversationalist. The Scottish contemporaries, Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and later, Burns, could hardly differ more. They inhabit the ordinary pubs and market places, centres of gaming, drinking, eating, small business deals, the coming and going of farmers, chapmen (pedlars), and lawyers looking for work—but not, apparently, of literary connoisseuring and the discussion of new publications which could seriously influence a central government. They write in the manner of popular wiseacres, masters of repartee, in a language little different from that of the mass of their countrymen, not in that of an educated upper crust. 18th-century Scotland is of course famous for such an 'élite': men of letters such as Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie, and (a little later) Scott, and the cultured law lords (Kames, Hailes, and later Jeffrey). But as far as these men were concerned, at least in the 18th century, the creative literature of the country—the poetry of Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns—was virtually underground, or in the backwoods. Its comedy embodied a social life beneath the dignity of the 'polite' class. Yet that stratum of social life—lived out in the howffs (pubs), street markets, and tenement stairs—was in fact shared, even in the capital city, by all classes, aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and working folk alike, to an extent unthinkable in any later age. The society was close-knit in its physical conditions of life, if not in education, property, and outlook.

Why was it, then, that the expression of Scottish socialness was carried on so exclusively by the vernacular writers? Why did the communications represented by the national poetry stay so insulated from the more refined manners and ideas which the educated classes were learning from France and England? The town of Edinburgh, in its expansion from a congested, narrow, filthy medieval settlement to a geometrically planned model city, is not only a symbol of this two-sided Scottish culture, it is the very soil in which it grew. In exploring the town and village communities of pre-19th-century Scotland, we are to a great extent examining the immediate conditions which made the literature what it was, and made it distinctive.

The line of poetry which culminates in Burns represents the last phase in Scottish history in which a distinctively native mode of expression held together through several generations. It will be as well to form a concrete sense of what that poetry was like, before going further into the social conditions behind it. This line of poetry got its nickname, 'the matter of Habby Simson', from Robert Sempill's poem of the mid-17th century, 'The Piper of Kilbarchan' (a poem which Grierson and Bullough were catholic enough to put into the Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse). This poem seems authentically popular, with no taint of arrière-pensée about the ordinary village fun. It gives the effect, though written by a landed gentleman, of sharing directly and artlessly in a village life whose high moments were signalled by music:

Such sociable music seems to have been in the bones of the people. [In The Tea-Table Miscellany (1724-37),] Allan Ramsay says affectionately of the popular song tunes: "They are, for the most part, so cheerful, that on hearing them well played or sung, we find a difficulty to keep ourselves from dancing … such as are not judges of the fine flourishes of new music imported from Italy and elsewhere, yet will listen with pleasure to tunes that they knew, and can join in the chorus." The familiar rhythms, indeed, get into the very metre of the poetry. Such snatches as this from the probably 16th-century 'Peblis to the Play',

Sum said the quene of may——wes cumit
Of peblis to the play,

move with just the beat of the foot checking and setting off again in a country dance.

Such a poem as 'The Piper of Kilbarchan' is still purely of the old village way of life, that enacted in 'Peblis to the Play' and 'Christis Kirk on the Green' (to name two of the early models for Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns). By Ramsay's time, the vernacular poet—even if he thinks of himself as popular—is no longer immersed in the country life. When Ramsay imitates 'Christis Kirk', he forces his jocosity onto us:

In contrast the poet of the 16th century (or earlier) loses himself in the momentum of the fun:

Stewin come steppand in with stendis
No renk mycht him arrest
Platfut he bobbit up with bendis
for mald he maid requeist …

Than thai come to the townis end
withouttin more delay
He befoir and scho befoir
To se quha wes maist gay.
all that luikit thame upon
leuche fast at thair array
Sum said that thai wer merkat folk
Sum said the quene of may—wes cumit
Of peblis to the play.

In this, much the better of these two festivity poems, the action is relieved from the monotonous wallowing in muck and brutal horseplay by the extraordinary vivacity of every movement, for example,

Be that the bargan was all playit
The stringis stert out of thair nokkis …

And once an extra delicacy that the fun takes on is plainly in touch with a very old vein of folk symbolism, apparently related to the strange imagery of heavenly beauty in the Border ballad 'The Wife of Usher's Well':

'Peblis to the Play' expands the motif into something like a Pan figure or god of growth, and the stanza springs like a green shoot out of the poem:

Ane young man stert in to that steid
als cant as ony colt
ane birkin hat upon his heid
with ane bow and ane bolt

Said, mirrie madinis think nocht lang
The wedder is fair and smolt
He cleikit up ane hie ruf sang
Thair fure ane man to the holt—quod he
of peblis to the play.

The suggestion that there is some arrière-pensée, or self-conscious rusticity, in this poetry has been made by the recent editor of Fergusson, Matthew P. MacDiarmid [in The Poems of Robert Fergusson (1954)]. He calls 'The Piper of Kilbarchan' "a comic play with undignified language, a species of burlesque", and regarding 'Peblis to the Play' he speaks of "burlesque" and "clownish caricature." But such poetry, in its rhythm and in the unforced flow of action, reads more like a perfectly straight celebration of unbridled community-fun in which the whole village is caught up. Allan Ramsay, who took up this poetry in the 18th century, reprinting, garbling, and imitating it, catches onto only its possibilities for pawky farce, for example he misses the running-on dance rhythm got by the bob that ends each stanza and cuts it down to one short line:

She'd gar them a' be hooly
Fou fast that day.

His people are individuals, unlike the scarcely-differentiated villagers of the old anonymous poetry. But this is not pure gain, for, as we have seen, his jocosity is put in, not the spontaneous emotion of primitive village life. As David Daiches has noted [in his "Eighteenth-Century Vernacular Poetry" (1955)], he is self-conscious, unintegrated, in his feelings about 'low life'. For one thing, he cannot but feel that the sayings of the townsfolk at play are quaint—vernacular gems or plums. Thus his proverbial phrases are visibly forced into his poetry for their own sake, rather than turned into genuine metaphor, for example:

Such phraseology—proverbs, favourite metaphors, gambling jargon—were indeed the natural idiom for Scots poetry, for they were the favourite usage of a country still accustomed to the old oral literature and vernacular habits of speech and thought. 'A round of Scots proverbs'… was a regular amusement amongst parties of ordinary folk…. The same fun was had at the tea- and dinner-tables of the middle and upper classes. There was a craze for repeating proverbs at the tea-tables of the Edinburgh gentlefolk in the 1820's—some people could quote dozens…. Ramsay, however, picks such sayings out of natural speech and exploits them for local colour. He edited a collection of proverbs which circulated very widely in the late 18th century, especially in the form of the chapbooks or pamphlets which the chapmen sold at the farmhouse door. In his Preface he even sells the country people their own speech, on the lines of a conversation course:

Ye happy herds, while your hirdsels are feeding on the flow'ry braes, you may eithly make yoursells masters of the hale ware. How usefull will it prove to you (wha have sae few opportunities of common clattering) when you forgather with your friends at kirk or market, banquet or bridal?

Although Ramsay thus belongs to an age in which an interest in Scottish culture was all too prone to turn it into (at best) folk-lore, nevertheless the vernacular, and the 'Habbie Simson' style, do supply the one mode which seems to suit his experience, in which he becomes at all interesting or vivid. Whereas in most of his other works he is blatantly aspiring to Literature, in his mock-elegies and verse epistles he is writing close to life. They give a sense of being in the thick of a social kind of life, not only in content but at those specially vivid points at which he expresses appreciation of simple convivial zest, as in "We drank, and drew, and fill'd again" or another couplet from the mock-elegy on Maggy Johnstoun, a popular pubkeeper:

Sae brawly did a pease-scon toast
Bizz i' the queff, and flie the frost …

This is a characteristic feeling of the Scots poetry in this tradition. It is rich in passages in which food and drink are revelled in as part of the fellow-feeling and brisk, busy coming-and-going of pub celebrations, often worked up into a sort of extravaganza which we would call caricature if the poet were not so wholeheartedly with the feeling he evokes. In Fergusson's 'Caller Oysters', money whirls round with the party:

When auld Saunt Giles, at aught o'clock,
Gars merchant lowns their chopies lock,
There we adjourn wi' hearty fock
To birl our bodles

Handing round the common cup is described in words which richly evoke a sort of ideal luxury:

Auld Reikie! thou'rt the canty hole,
A bield for mony caldrife soul,
Wha snugly at thine ingle loll,
Baith warm and couth;
While round they gar the bicker roll
To weet their mouth.

In Burns, the drink itself takes on a super-animated life:

Burns also, with his genius for making something poetic of the familiarity natural to the people in a small community, has striking phrases which concentrate the sense of accustomed well-being and comradeliness which are part of such life, for example his emphatic use of "stand":

At kirk or market, mill or smiddie,
Nae tawted tyke, tho' e'er sae duddie,
But he wad stand, as glad to see him,
An' stroan'd on stanes an' hillocks wi' him.

Or, again, the passage at the beginning of 'Tam o' Shanter':

… Ae market night,
Tam had got planted unco right,

Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely,
Wi' reaming swats, that drank divinely …

In the weight of "stand" and "planted", we feel that the very posture embodies the heart of the contentment, the social rightness and well-being.

This characteristic socialness is seen at its best in the habit of making poetry from the high moments in the life of the community, whether ceremonies or festivities. Fergusson does the motley town scene almost for its own sake, or for its surface ludicrousness, as in 'The Election':

Burns, however, transforms such rollickings into a satirical image of Presbyterian extremist heat and sectarianism; the rhythm and extravagance of the mode are used to hit off, farcically, the other kind of extravagance indulged in by the bigot:

We can see how much pointedness the social poetry has taken on since Ramsay's imitations of the old jocundity. A related characteristic is coining phrases which amount to a whole notation for the life of a community, for example Fergusson's "stair-head critics", Burns's "yill-caup commentators"—equivalent of 'bar-room politicians'—and Hamilton of Gilbert-field's "send them a' right sneaking hame / Be Weeping-Cross". At every point in this poetry it is the focal points and familiar symbols of a community way of life that are used for the basic idiom.

It is true that the conviviality runs also to a dismayingly silly cult, for it is really too slight to give the impulse of a whole poetry, or of a poetry sufficiently removed from light verse. In the end one's heart sinks at the everlasting 'homely' moral-swopping about drink:

A wee soup drink dis unco weel
To had the heart aboon,

or the bravado of

We must remember that at that time a pre-occupation with drink was something like inevitable in the people's poetry. Engels (writing in [The Housing Question], 1872) refers very justly to "The fact that under the existing circumstances drunkenness among the workers is a necessary product of their living conditions, just as necessary as typhus, crime, vermin, bailiff and other social ills, so necessary in fact that the average figures of those who succumb to inebriety can be calculated in advance"; and figures and comments from Scotland in the late 18th and early 19th century bear this out. The literary fact, however, is that the very copious poetry of drink is usually inferior, seemingly a reaction part defensive, part selfsurrendering to an evil social fact. I have concentrated on the feeling of pure convivial enjoyment because that is so often what is there at the most vivid points of wording in this poetry. Sometimes such feeling is self-conscious, and tries to rationalise itself. But when it is straight-forward, it is one of the poetry's most genuine emotions. It seems to represent the amazing energy and animal spirits of the common people, coming out in a poetry which helps to put us in the thick of the life they led in public.

A literature so strongly 'social' brings home to us what it meant to live in a society so thrown upon its own devices as the Scottish—in particular, so compact a capital. Living conditions in Edinburgh before the modern replanning have often been described, but more often than not for the gossip, or for the sake of 'old Edinburgh' itself, than as a way to understanding the national culture. Here the make-up of the town is to be considered in so far as it directly influenced the literature, both as a positive inspiration and as a cause of the alienation of the Scottish cultivated class from the 'typically Scottish'.

Scotsmen were used to very small, close communities, even in their main cities. Glasgow's population had gone up from 12,700 at the Union (1707) to 20,000 by mid-century, and its commercial expansion had begun. Yet carriers still built their haystacks in front of their doors, and the town herd went round every morning with his horn calling the cattle from the Trongate and the Saltmarket (where early in the century the wealthiest merchants lived) to the common meadows nearby. Edinburgh too was very compact, clustered round two parallel main streets, and it had, for a capital, unusually few communications with the rest of the country. Roads were very bad, and settlements (unlike those of England) were set far apart from each other. The first Scottish bank, the Bank of Scotland, failed in several early attempts to circulate its paper money in the provinces because so little trade came and went between the capital and the country….

Because of the way Edinburgh had grown up on a narrow ridge of volcanic rock, it had had to build perpendicularly, squeezing lofty, narrow buildings (as in Manhattan) onto the slim pier of building space available. The main streets, High Street and Cowgate, ran east and west along the ridge, and the poorer streets were tunnel-like wynds and closes piercing the ground floor of the lofty tenements or 'lands' and dropping in slopes and steps down the cliff to either side. Behind the lands—some of whose façades were well enough built and even, if inhabited by the aristocracy, carved with arms and decorations—were those courts, deep wells of dirty stonework, where nowadays old air-raid shelters stand surrounded by dustbins and the dwellers hang out their washing on gallows-like spars projecting from the upper windows. Thus Edinburgh was not quartered off between the classes until the end of the century. This Scottish town housing was until the 1780's unique in the way it mixed the classes. In England even the poor usually had separate dwellings, whereas old Edinburgh was the only important British town in which tenement dwelling had been normal time out of mind, a condition it shared at this time with other old walled towns such as Stirling, and also with Glasgow, where most of the well-known, well-off citizens lived in tenement flats. As a result, leading tradesmen squeezed their families into quarters as cramping and unhygienic as the poor had elsewhere: one eminent goldsmith lived above his shop in Parliament Square, his nursery and kitchen in a cellar…. The lands were such warrens that in places people could step from one upper window to another across the street. Early census-takers were unable to track down every family living in the maze of stairs, closes, and cellars. Yet in these buildings the wealthiest and most elegant people in the country had apartments. Sweeps or messengers and odd-job men from the Highlands lived in the cellars, aristocrats or professional people on the first floor, shopkeepers and clerks on the higher floors, and poor skilled workmen in the attics.

So conditioned by this small community were the towns-folk that their social life, even that of the cultivated, was very close. As late as the '90's, the first planned extension to the old High Street nucleus, Brown and Argyle Squares, south of the Castle ridge, formed "a little world of their own, and had their own Assembly-rooms, and society of an excellent quality, in some degree apart from the rest of Edinburgh". Brown Square, indeed, was occupied by the set who produced the Mirror, Scotland's Spectator. Henry Mackenzie, William Craig (later a judge), Lord Woodhouselee, the 'great' Dundas (when an advocate), Islay Campbell, and Jeannie Elliot of Minto, author of 'The Flooers o' the Forest'. A man could live and die on that south side of the town without seeing the New Town to the north, beyond the pit of the Nor' Loch which became Princes Street Gardens after drainage. Adam Ferguson the historian's house at Sciennes, a couple of miles from the Town Cross, was called by the other literati 'Kamchatka'; and lawyers were alarmed that the move to the New Town would lose them their clientèle.

Primitive conditions would by their nature throw people together. [In the Gentleman's Magazine of 1766], an Englishman observed of the narrow main street: "So great a crowd of people are nowhere else confined in so small a space, which makes their streets as much crowded every day as others are at a fair". There was no piped water until the '70's. Water was drawn from five public wells, which must thus have been great gathering points for the working-class. The gregarious habit was so strong that the modern Exchange, begun in 1754, was for some time little frequented because "the merchants always chuse standing in the open street, exposed to all kinds of weather". Although their stance, the Cross, was removed from the Canongate (the eastward extension of the High Street) in 1765, the lawyer-historian of Edinburgh, Hugo Arnot, writing in [his History of Edinburg in] 1779, observed that "Public proclamations continue to be made there. There also company daily resort, from one to 3 o'clock, for news, business, or meeting their acquaintances, nobody frequenting the exchange". Before the Bank of Scotland was founded, even important business would be done in little back shops or pubs and hardly any elsewhere. In Glasgow this was so widespread that the Council had to rule that town funds would not be liable for expenses incurred in this way.

This hugger-mugger living affected the vernacular poetry through the kind of popular culture—the network of institutions, habits of mind and behaviour, styles of expression—engendered by the compact town. The celebrations and gatherings which so fascinated the poets were bound to be enacted in the very midst of the city. Funerals and processions were elaborate shows; and the Company of Archers, in gorgeous costume, and (till the Union) Parliament paraded through the High Street. Leith Races, celebrated in Fergusson's poem of that name, was "a species of carnival to the citizens of Edinburgh". Every morning one town officer walked down to Leith with the 'City Purse' on a pole richly decked with flags and streamers, accompanied by the City Guard in full uniform and their drummer. Quacks and mountebanks put up stages in the High Street itself to sell remedies with comic patter; acrobats performed there; and quakers preached at the Cross to large audiences. The Edinburgh of Ramsay and Fergusson recalls, not contemporary London, but the London of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.

The arts, too, were carried on amidst the people's daily life. For example, Fergusson himself had fun seeing how many sheets of ballads he could sell in two hours in the High Street, plying as a street singer. Before the Musical Society was formed, gentlemen met weekly in a pub whose proprietor was a great lover of music, and a good singer of Scots songs, and played Handel and Corelli. In the great hall of Parliament House which was used as a common promenade, there were bookstalls against one wall, just as there were jewellers' booths against one wall of St Giles's Cathedral. The better bookshops were, like the coffee-houses of Dryden's and Addison's London, the centres of literary society. James Donaldson's shop was the resort of the wits of Edinburgh during the time of Boswell. The leading bookseller in the '70's and '80's, William Creech, made his shop a 'lounge' and held literary breakfasts at his house. Its situation near the Parliament House was convenient as so many of the literary men were lawyers…. Also, the comparative poverty of the place tended to keep amusements popular and informal. Theatre after theatre failed, out of all proportion to the population, because trade around the mid-century brought in so little that [as Arnot notes] even "ordinary gentle-women, or the wives and daughters of shopkeepers or mechanics" were reluctant to go to the theatre unless they heard that it was packing for some performance; and their menfolk preferred the pubs.

Such conditions affected literature quite directly. Scots town literature of this period is, like English, highly social, but in a way very different from Spectator prose or Augustan poetry—products of a metropolitan fashionable society which, as F. R. Leavis puts it [in his Revaluation (1936)], "thought of poetry in general as of something that ought to be social… as belonging to the province of manners." Not a hint of 'correct' behaviour, of the cultivated manner and clever wit that belong to it, or indeed of a conscious code of any kind appears in the Scots work of that time. Its impulse, as has been suggested, comes directly out of the mêlée of common life; and this life was so formed that the bourgeoisie and ruling-class were not aloof from popular amusements any more than from the popular haunts. Ramsay's vernacular 'elegies' were modelled on cheap broad-side-verse, yet at least one of them was handed round in manuscript among the gentry who were fellow-members of the Easy Club. Fergusson speaks familiarly of the various kinds of sociable group, the popular debating and drinking clubs, as an essential part of his town:

Fergusson was himself the 'Precentor'—seemingly the recognised wit, singer, reciter—of the Cape Club, whose members included smiths and barbers as well as advocates and middle-class men of letters. In his 'The Daft-Days' drinking is evoked in rough vernacular—"While round they gar the bicker roll". Yet Lord Kames records that in any company, as late as 1730, one common cup was used by everybody for the whole evening, and it was thought fussy when people began to wish for separate glasses. Likewise Ramsay writes as a poor workman in 'Maggy Johnstoun':

When in our pouch we found some clinks,
And took a turn o'er Bruntsfield Links.

In fact the habitués of Maggy Johnstoun's howff included a judge (Lord Cullen) and a "well-employed advocate". In contrast the English clubs of the period were the preserve of the upper classes, whether literary or political, and the aristocracy were beginning to split off into their own exclusive societies with their own premises.

It is never easy precisely to define how such social conditions—so broad, so mixed, so varying in their effect on individuals—impinge on literature, or the writers of literature. But it is not uncommon for lines of force and limitations in the society to set broad limits which literature will be at least likely to keep to. We cannot account for all there is to Metaphysical poetry simply by referring to the make-up of the Court and country-house circles in which so much of it was written. Yet consider its kind of satirical wit, its mingled courtliness and indecency, the sophistication which is so conscious of itself, the close co-presence (in poems like Donne's 'Sunne Rising' and 'Canonization') of an intimate personal passion and a busy, mercenary, place-seeking Court milieu, felt as surrounding almost oppressively the personal life. These features show plainly enough the marks of the Stuart court, with its community of cultured nobility and arranged marriages, diplomats who were also scholars and poets, and officials living on perquisites. The style of the courtly poets—Wyatt, Raleigh, Donne, Carew, Herbert of Cherbury, Ben Jonson, Wotton—is both dignified and idiomatic, combining "the candour and naturalness of conversation among equals with the grace of a courtly society". When they are wittily amorous, they often (notably Carew) give the effect of vying with their fellows in the tradition of the elaborate compliment so ready to turn into indecency. Here again we see the marks of the reading-public or social set in which the poets functioned: gentlemen writing for gentlemen, circulating their work in manuscript, and certainly not exposing it for public sale.

The richer the literature, the less straightforward is the problem of making out the process whereby social forces had their conditioning effects. At the very least, however, a precise knowledge of history can forbid those covertly idealising speculations or assumptions about past communities to which modern critics often succumb. John Speirs, for example, has argued [in The Scots Literary Tradition (1940)] that Fergusson's poetry is "fundamentally rustic": the "town community … was still distinctly rural in character and speech", its legal side superficial. According to Mr Speirs the rural affiliations come out in a poem such as 'The Rising of the Session':

… The wylie writers, rich as Croesus,
Hurl frae the town in hackney chaises,
For country cheer …

This by itself, however, might be no more rustic fundamentally than London professional men holidaying on their dairy farms in Sussex. [In Peter's Letters to His Kinsfolk (1819)], Lockhart describes how the judges and advocates prepared for their summer week-ends in the country at farm or villa, wearing gorgeous informal clothes in court on Saturday, their horses lined up in parade in the Parliament Close. It is hard to see how such habits connect with the hurly-burly of common folk which gave Fergusson his impulse, especially as many farming lawyers of those days were of the new 'improving', scientific type. Lord Auchinleck, Boswell's father, was an early cultivator of root crops in the south-west. Cockburn of Ormiston, father of the great farming pioneer and a Lord Justice Clerk of Scotland, gave his tenants long leases enabling them to drain and hedge their ground. Sir James Montgomery, a Lord Advocate, was an improver of crops and livestock and sponsored a Bill to alter the law of entail in favour of improvers. Lord Kames, author of the Elements of Criticism, experimented in every branch of farming, especially root vegetables, green crops, sown grass, summer fallowing, and drainage, and wrote an expert book on these subjects. An East Lothian advocate, Michael Menzies, invented a threshing machine. Such legal landowners hardly belonged to the ancient country round Mr Speirs apparently has in mind. One judge, Lord Hermand, is described by Cockburn as spending whole days on his farm hoeing in his old clothes, but he was famous for his eccentrically broad and old-fashioned ways. What we know of community life in the 17th and 18th centuries amounts to a strong presumption that the Edinburgh town community was, by itself, the natural basis for poetry such as Ramsay and Fergusson's. Certainly it is striking that their comedy should be so akin to the country-living Burns's. But that is surely because in Scotland at that time even the central cities were villagey in their smallness, their closeness, and their informal, rough-and-ready social habits.

We must also remember that old Edinburgh was in many ways a nasty warren, and so close-packed that none could get away from it. The sociable wells and stairheads made inevitably for filth. Workmen and lords alike had heaps of slops and excrement on the landings outside their flats; and shopkeepers sometimes had to cut a passage from shop door to street through piles of garbage. Much of the most brutal life of the place was out there in the main streets. One of the marts, the Grassmarket, is succinctly called by Pennant (who toured in 1767) the place "where cattle are sold, and criminals executed" [William Cobbett, Rural Rides (1853)]; and there are descriptions of the crowds buying and selling farm produce at one end of the Market while they watched the gallows being put up at the other. Yet in spite of the "inconvenience, and exceeding nastiness" of the market places, new ones were not begun till 1774 [Arnot]. At the end of the 17th century (fifteen years before Ramsay started to write), specimens were provided for the early anatomy classes from "unclaimed bodies of persons dying in the streets" [Robert Chambers, Domestic Annals of Scotland (1861)]. In 1700 floggings were carried out at several points on the High Street; in 1709 there were beheadings at the great gathering-place, the Cross; and petty offenders stood in the jougs and pillory at the Tron. Cock-fighting on the streets had to be prohibited by the Town Council to stop the disturbances it caused. Although so much of the social life centred in the pubs, their "equivocal character" made it unwise for women of "delicacy and propriety" to go into them [Arnot]. Scotland still suffers from the lack of a natural, integrated social life (in comparison with, for example, France and England) because there are so few pubs where women are welcomed on equal terms with the men.

Scott had good reason to know the miserable side of Old Town life—his parents lost four sons and two daughters in seven years, probably because the College Wynd at the foot of the Canongate, where they had their house, was so insanitary. Hence, perhaps, the actuality of his description, in Provincial Antiquities, of the wear and tear of that old close life. "Each inhabitable space was crowded like the under deck of a ship. Sickness had no nook of quiet, affliction no retreat for solitary indulgence." He emphasises the darkness of the interiors; the bother and labour for the porters who had to carry all water up many flights of stairs; and the lack of space for furniture in the cramped rooms.

The buoyant energy which tided people through such a life is felt in the non-stop flow of action and the caricaturing idiom, hearty and familiar, of the vernacular poetry. But we must equally note the wear and tear, the loss and curtailment of life, and the brutal attitudes to one another inevitable in such conditions. Much of the action in poems such as Ramsay's 'Christis Kirk', Fergusson's 'The King's Birth-Day in Edinburgh' or 'Hallow Fair', is horse-play, gross and dirty, and the poet's attitude is to revel in the discomfiture of the butt who falls down in the gutter or gets a swipe from a dead cat. Such is the counterpart of a life in which the festivities at Leith Races ended in a "promiscuous free fight" all up and down Leith Walk as the crowds returned to Edinburgh on the last evening of race week [James Grant, Old and New Edinburgh (1882)]. The real destructiveness and brutality of such a life is, of course, lost sight of in Fergusson's or the old anonymous poets' kind of rollicking comedy.

Such conditions were bound to cause a recoil. For one thing, the bourgeois men of letters—the spokesmen of the 'polite' culture which grew up as the century wore on—themselves lived on top of the dirt and confusion. Grant, the historian of Edinburgh, remarks that "within the narrow compass of this wynd [the College Wynd, Scott's birthplace] … were representatives of nearly every order of society, sufficient for a whole series of his Waverly novels". This also meant that there was a filthy byre at the foot of the street (not far from the University), and a well-known town idiot, Daft Bailie Duff, died in a "little den" there, in 1788. Yet late in the century the Cowgate, for example, was still reckoned an aristocratic locality. Henry Mackenzie, connected with the landed upper-class, was born in a wynd off the Cowgate, and later lived with his wife and family in a land at the junction of the Cowgate and the Grassmarket. Hume wrote his History of England in a land in the Canongate before moving to James's Court in the Lawnmarket (the continuation of the High Street towards the Castle), where Boswell also lived. William Robertson, the historian and leader of the Moderate clergy, lived in the Principal's house in the College, near the foot of the Canongate. His house was stormed by mobs rioting against the 1779 Bill to repeal the Catholic Penal Laws, his library was burned, and he had to take refuge in the Castle. Yet well on in the century the Canongate was still the fashionable quarter for "the better aristocracy of letters and science", including Adam Smith, Lord Kames, Lord Hailes, Cullen, Dugald Stewart, Lord Monboddo, and Sir John Dalrymple [The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club (1925)].

Such conditions were bound to force them out. When the English poet Rogers visited Edinburgh in 1789, Adam Smith told him that the Old Town "deserved little notice"—it had a bad name for filth, and he himself wanted to move to George Square (another of the model extensions to the south). Hugh Blair, the Moderate minister and fashionable writer on rhetoric, moved from the Lawnmarket to Argyle Square; Robertson moved to Grange (a near-rural district where the law lords built their villas, between Edinburgh and the Pentland Hills), for his health, not long before he died; and Hume died in the house he had built himself in St Andrew Square, then the most fashionable quarter of the New Town. St David's Street, still the name of the connection between the Square and Princes Street, is supposed to have got its name from a jibe chalked by a town humorist on the notorious atheist's front door.

The literati thus participated in a general change. The town was becoming conscious of its obligations as a capital. By the 1780's hotels were being built to replace [what Arnot calls] the "noisy, dirty, and incommodious" pubs in which travellers of all ranks had lodged like waggoners or carriers. Tradesmen's daughters "blushed to be seen in a market" [William Creech, Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces (1815)]. A new ideal of civic dignity came to the fore. [Arnot writes that] the Exchange was founded to fill the want of "public buildings necessary for accommodating those societies which assemble in populous cities, to direct the business of the country, and provide for its general welfare". "Proper accommodation" was wanted for the Musical Society, it being "for the interest of the town to give countenance for such polite amusements as might encourage strangers of rank to reside in the city" [Book of the Old Edinburgh Club]. The final outcome was a clean split in the said city, for the New Town was not a plan for Edinburgh as a whole. The ruling-class simply moved out into their "brilliant aristocratic quarter" on the other side of the Nor' Loch (so grand that some at first feared it would be impracticably expensive) and left the Old Town to become, in the 19th century, a crammed slum of 80,000 people, living in quarters meant for nearer 30,000 [Chambers]. At precisely the same period Edinburgh ceased to have its own literature. Scott, living in the New Town, looked out to the whole of the country for his subject-matter; and the Edinburgh of his novels is either historical, intelligently so, as in The Heart of Midlothian, or indulged in for its bygone charm, as in The Chronicles of the Canongate. Ramsay and Fergusson had written out of the thick of Edinburgh. After the removal of the cultivated class from the Old Town, contemporary 'socialness' entirely ceases to figure in Scots literature. In this case the affiliations of literature and social change were decisive.