SOURCE: Rosie, George. “Hugh Miller: A Biography.” In Hugh Miller: Outrage and Order, pp. 13-87. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1981.

[In the following excerpt, Rosie discusses Miller's editorship of the Witness.]

STURM UND DRANG

The first issue of Hugh Miller's Witness made its appearance on the streets of Edinburgh on 15 January 1840 (under a slogan coined by John Knox: “I am in the place where I am demanded of conscience to speak the truth, and therefore the truth I speak, impugn it whoso list”). From the outset Miller made it plain he meant business. “We enter upon our labours at a period emphatically momentous,” he wrote in his first, very wordy, editorial, “at the commencement, it is probable, of one of the most important eras, never forgotten by a country, which influences for ages the conditions and character of the people, and from which the events of their future history take colour and form.” Miller went on to contrast the luke-warm, limp-wristed policies of the “moderates” inside the Church of Scotland, with the energy of the “evangelicals”. “Here, then, on a distinction as obvious as it is important we take our stand. The cause of the unchanged party in the Church is that of the Church itself;—it is that of the people of Scotland, and the people know it …”

While the first issue of The Witness (like many issues thereafter) was dominated by Church affairs, Miller found space for much else. He carried reports,—on the opening of the provincial parliament in Upper Canada, fresh riots in Valencia, the draft constitution for the state of Hanover, more honours for the Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg, the “cruel diseases” that were ravaging the Turkish fleet, the health of the Princess of Denmark, the build-up of “certain armaments” in Russia, and the fact that the authorities in Constantinople had introduced the guillotine to the intense curiosity of Turkish execution enthusiasts (and the apparent indifference of the condemned men).

The first issue was also liberally peppered with advertisements for, among other things, church meetings, religious tracts, useful books, temperance medals, and Mr Thalberg's “Third and Farewell Concert” to take place at the Assembly Halls and which was due to be strummed on “Erard's New Patent Grand Piano Forte brought from London expressly for the occasion”. In addition, there were less edifying items for sale such as old whiskey, sherry from the butt, the newest style in “dress vests”, straw-hat pressing machines, penny-postage letter-weighters, plus “an automatic singing bird, Chinese juggler, and a transparent clock with the invisible movement” (the last three items available from the Royal Bazaar at 19 Princes Street).

Interestingly, the first issue of The Witness also carried an advertisement for the Scottish Standard, a pro-Patronage newspaper which was launched on the same day as Hugh Miller's Witness. The publishers confidently expected that the Scottish Standard would satisfy “long cherished expectations felt and acknowledged by all classes and parties in the country; for it is a fact, lamented over on the one side, and boasted on the other, that the Conservative Newspapers, both in number and circulation fall greatly behind those which advocate the Destructive principle …” The Scottish Standard, their owners promised, would be devoted to “the support of the British Constitution in Church and State”. This proved to be a very creaky platform in the Edinburgh of 1840; within a year the Scottish Standard had flopped, and Miller was able to report with some relish that it had been “converted into a cravat for the Edinburgh Evening Post”.

In fact, Miller took to the knockabout world of periodical journalism like a duck to water. For months he produced The Witness almost single-handed (sometimes with the help of his wife Lydia, who joined him in April 1840) working deep into the night, churning out reams of copy to fill the papers gaping maw. That first year he wrote a dazzling range and variety of articles from fiercely polemic pieces on Church politics (some of them enormously long) to crisp political commentary on the Navy estimates, capital punishment, the Edinburgh savings banks, the copyright bill, and the Queen's marriage. He also cooked up long, discursive pieces on, for example, China and the Chinese, and reviewed books such as Darwin's masterpiece The Voyage of the Beagle. (Miller waxed lyrical over Darwin's ability to combine “high literary abilities and fine taste to many extensive acquirements as a man of science”.)

Miller seldom hesitated to weigh in on foreign affairs. He was appalled at the oppression and torture of Jews in Rhodes and Damascus, claimed that it was the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Damascus that was whipping up the anti-semitism, and looked forward to the day when the Jews would give up their benighted religion and become good Christians (i.e. Presbyterians). He was equally appalled at the behaviour of the British mercenaries in Spain who had “burnt villages, and cut throats, and shot and stabbed a great many human creatures who never did them any harm, and who, but for their exertion as man-slayers, would have still been alive …” There was nothing, Miller pronounced, “very fine in the idea of a man-butcher hired to destroy life at the rate of 1s per day”.

But for a man who was so patently and sincerely agitated by injustice and the miserable conditions of working people, Miller kept some of his deepest bile for political radicals like the Socialists and the Chartists. Socialist pamphlets he found “detestably obscene” and “horribly blasphemous” while the participants of a Chartist rally on Glasgow Green were “dirty, squalid and depressed … entirely broken men”. So far as Miller was concerned the Chartist movement was a dangerous fraud, and he was convinced that “the worst friends of the people are those who drive their claims too far. Popular license is but despotism in its first stage—a great truth confirmed by the history of almost every European country.” As for one man one vote: “Universal suffrage in the present state of public morals would ruin the country,” he cried, “the masses are not fit for it.”¹

The Witness was an odd, but vigorous mix of radicalism, church infighting, philosophical comment, foreign news, decent reporting, book reviews, and small ads. And it worked! Miller's editorial recipe proved highly successful (to the delight of the evangelical party in the Church of Scotland). In 1841—having seen off the conservative Scottish Standard—Miller was boasting that the circulation of The Witness was climbing fast and had now reached “third place in point of circulation among the long-established newspapers in Edinburgh”. By the beginning of 1842, The Witness circulation (which had started at 700) was heading towards 2,000, making it second only to The Scotsman (which then had a circulation of 2,577). Nine other Edinburgh papers (Courant, Advertiser, Journal, Chronicle, Mercury, Post, Observer, Pilot and Messenger) were all selling well below The Witness. “With such a circulation,” he announced to the traders and merchants of Edinburgh, “Advertisers must see that by employing our columns they are promoting their own interests.”

But the main thrust of The Witness was to champion the evangelical party in the long confrontation between the British state and the Church of Scotland over who should appoint parish ministers. By 1843 the argument was coming to a head, and Chalmers and the evangelicals had decided that they could no longer put up with the high-handed arrogance of the British establishment (or for that matter, with the hand-wringing feebleness of the “moderates” in the Church of Scotland). In the weeks before the General Assembly of the Church, due to be held on 18 May 1843, they let it be known that they planned to “disrupt” the Church by walking out, and setting up their own “Free” Church of Scotland. It was a momentous occasion for Scottish religious and political life, and the question buzzing round Edinburgh was how many ministers would throw up their livelihoods to follow Chalmers and the evangelicals? The establishment and the moderates were completely convinced it would be a mere handful. Others were not so sure.

When the day came Hugh Miller was there with his notebook, waiting in the gallery of the Church of St Andrew & St George in George Street, Edinburgh. The atmosphere was electric, and there was a huge crowd of people outside, pressing against the church doors in a struggle to get in. After the procession of dignitaries had descended from the High Church of St Giles the moderator, the Rev Dr Welsh started off with a “deeply impressive prayer” which the back of the Church could not hear because of the noise from outside. Welsh then read out a formal statement which had been signed by 120 ministers and 74 church elders stating that a great, and intolerable infringement of the Church's constitution had been perpetrated, and that men of principle could stand for it no longer. He threw the document down on the table, and with Chalmers beside him, led the procession of four hundred or so ministers and elders out of the building and out of the establishment.

With the great men gone, Miller observed, “There suddenly glided into the front rows a small party of men who no-one knew, obscure, mediocre, blighted-looking men” who reminded Miller of the “thin and blasted corn of Pharoah's vision, and, like them too, seemed typical of a time of famine and destitution”. In disgust, Miller left the Assembly to the “moderates” and followed the procession of determined evangelicals down the hill to the ramshackle Tanfield Hall in Canonmills, where they held the first General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland. It was no empty gesture. About one-third of the Church's ministers walked out at the Disruption, cutting themselves off from state funds, their wages, their homes, their security, and risking their families in hard times in a poor country.

The years between 1840 and 1844 were hard going for Miller. The fledgling paper had to be nursed then coaxed to success, there were battles to be fought and campaigns to be won. It was, from all accounts, an exhausting business, and Miller never shook off the silicosis which he contracted working as a stone-mason in the quarries and building sites of Easter Ross and the Black Isle. But his idea of a holiday seems to have been to take off with his notepad to gather material for a book (with which he would then fill his free time). In the summer of 1844 Miller abandoned The Witness for a few weeks to cruise around the “small isles” (i.e. the Inner Hebrides) with his old friend John Swanson, then Free Church minister for the small isles. Swanson was one of the hundreds of Church of Scotland ministers who threw up their livings and homes at the Disruption. In his case he found himself with a widely scattered, but extremely pious flock, but with no permanent church building, and a Laird who refused to give him a site to build on. The Free Church had resorted to spending some of their scarce cash on a small yacht (called Betsey) in which Swanson and a crew of one sailed from island to island, tending his charges. Pleasant enough for much of the summer, perhaps, but a nasty, and sometimes near-lethal business in the Hebridean autumn and winter, when the westerly gales made the reef-strewn coast a nightmare. (The Betsey came close to being lost twice; once when Hugh Miller was on board).

In the middle of July 1844 Miller met up with Swanson at Tobermory on Mull, and for the next few weeks sailed the bound of Swanson's parish, flitting between Mull, Eigg, Skye, Rum and Pabba. And not in luxury; the cabin he and Swanson shared he describes as “the size of a common bed and just lofty enough under the beams to permit a man of 5ft 11ins to stand erect in his night cap”. Miller was particularly fascinated by the beautiful and distinctly weird island of Eigg, situated between the southeast of Skye and the mainland at Ardnamurchan. Eigg was the island where Swanson had been the parish minister, and where, till the Disruption, he had expected to end his days. Miller was impressed by his friend's fluency in Gaelic (a language he had to learn the hard way), his oratory, and the loyalty he inspired among the population of the island. Although all that Swanson could offer the people was a dingy, peat-roofed cabin for a church, his services were invariably packed to the doors and beyond. Swanson seems to have had the characteristic zeal of the best of the evangelicals, and confirmed Miller's view that “Presbyterianism without the animating life is a poor shrunken thing. Without the vitality of evangelism it is nothing.”

Miller was so intrigued by the geology, history, and people of Eigg (whom he describes as “an active, middle-sized race, with well-developed heads, acute intellects and singularly warm feelings”) that he returned to the little island with Swanson the following year (1845). In his short book The Cruise of the Betsey Miller gives some insight into the poverty of much of the Inner Hebrides. The two men had dropped in to visit one of Swanson's parishioners, an old woman who had been bed-ridden for ten years, and Miller was outraged by what he found. “Scarce ever before had I seen so miserable a hovel,” he wrote. “It was hardly larger than the cabin of the Betsey, and a thousand times less comfortable … The low chinky door opened direct into the one wretched apartment of the hovel, which we found lighted chiefly by holes in the roof … Within a foot of the bedridden woman's head there was a hole in the turf-wall, which was, we saw, usually stuffed with a bundle of rags … The little hole in the wall had formed the poor creature's only communication with the face of the external world for ten weary years.”

Miller noticed that, on leaving, Swanson had slipped the woman a few coins. “I learned that not during the ten years in which she had been bed-ridden had she received a single farthing from the proprietor, nor, indeed, had any of the poor of the island, and that the parish had no session funds. I saw her husband a few days after,—an old, worn-out man, with famine written legibly in his hollow cheek and eye, and on the shrivelled frame, that seemed lost in his tattered dress; and he reiterated the same sad story. They had no means of living, he said, save through the charity of their poor neighbours, who had so little to spare; for the parish or the proprietor had never given them anything. He had once, he added, two fine boys, both sailors, who had helped them; but the one had perished in a storm off the Mull of Cantyre [Kintyre], and the other had died of fever when on a West India voyage; and though their poor girl was very dutiful, and staid in their crazy hut to take care of them in their helpless old age, what other could she do in a place like Eigg than just share with them their sufferings?”

The wretchedness of the rural poor, the living and working conditions of farm labourers, fisherman, Highland crofters, was something which haunted Miller. Some of his finest, most powerful essays are on the subject; Peasant Properties, The Cottages of Our Hinds, The Bothy System, The Highlands, the Scotch Poor Law, Pauper Labour, The Felons of the Country, and the superb Sutherland As It Was And Is; Or How A Country May Be Ruined. There was something about their mute suffering, their patience and silence that moved Miller more deeply than the squalor of the Edinburgh and Glasgow working class, who were turbulent, vocal, and often downright dangerous.

In the autumn of that same year (1845) Miller took eight weeks off from The Witness to wander in England, the “sister kingdom” which he had never visited. His account of his journey, called First Impressions of England and Its People, is one of the most interesting and least known of nineteenth century travel books. Despite choosing an autumn which was “ungenial and lowering” and a progress bedevilled by “indifferent health and consequent languor” Miller's account of England and the English is perceptive, lively, and studded with passages of power and insight. Putting up at mainly second class railway hotels, coaching inns and lodgings, Miller wandered down over the border to Newcastle, Durham, York, Manchester, Wolverhampton, Dudley, Stourbridge, Droitwitch, Birmingham, Stratford, Olney, London, Harrow, Liverpool, and then back to Edinburgh via Glasgow.

Inevitably perhaps, the constant theme in First Impressions is a comparison between the Scots and the English, from which the Scots come rather badly. One Sunday evening in Manchester, he watched the day-trippers spill off the train and noted, “There was not much actual drunkenness among the crowd … not a tithe of what I would have witnessed on a similar occasion in my own country.” He put this down to the very different Sabbath habits of the two nations. “With the humble Englishman trained to no regular habit of church-going, Sabbath is a pudding-day, a clean-shirt day, a day for lolling on the green opposite the sun … or, if in the neighbourhood of a railway, for taking a short trip to some country inn, famous for its cakes and ale; but to the humble Scot become English in his Sabbath views, the day is, in the most cases, a time of sheer recklessness and dissipation.”

He was also much taken by English women, finding that “The English type of face and person seems particularly well adapted to the female countenance and figure; and the proportion of pretty women to the population—women with clear, fair complexions, well-turned arms, soft features and fine busts—seems very great.”

But as a shrewd observer of rural people, he thought that the country English were distinctly less intellectual and curious than their Scottish equivalents. He had no hesitation “in affirming that their minds lie much more profoundly asleep than those of the common people of Scotland. We have no class north of the Tweed that corresponds with the class of ruddy, round-faced, vacant English, so abundant in the rural districts.” The ordinary Scot, he felt, was “a naturally more inquisitive, more curious being, than the common Englishman; he asks many more questions, and accumulates much larger hoards of fact”.

But what the ordinary Englishman lacked in curiosity and intellectual drive, Miller found he more than made up with stubborn independence. They possessed, he thought, “much of that natural independence which the Scotchman wants; and village Hampdens—men quite ready to do battle on behalf of their civil rights with the lord of the manor as the Scot with a foreign enemy—are comparatively common characters”. The paradox was that the English possessed a much greater intellectual “range” than the Scots. “There is an order of the English mind to which Scotland has not attained,” he felt, “our first men stand in the second rank, not a foot's breadth behind the foremost of England's second rank men; but there is a front rank of British intellect in which there stands no Scotchman … Scotland has produced no Shakespeare; Burns and Sir Walter Scott united would fall short of the stature of the giant of Avon. Of Milton we have not even a representative.”

Like most Scots, Miller relished the range and diversity of England (and of the four days he spent in London, two were devoted to wandering about the British Museum in a state of ecstasy). But he was fearful for the English establishment, and particularly for the powerful Church of England, which he thought was being eaten away from within by the “white ants” of “Puseyism”, the Anglo-Catholic, High-Church revival, being led by the Oxford Movement (whose best propagandist was Edward Bouvier Pusey). The High-Church medievalists were taking over the upper reaches of English society, Miller concluded, “with whose Conservative leanings the servile politics of Puseyism agreed well … Schools had been erected in which the rising generation might at once be shown the excellence, and taught the trick of implicit submission to authority …” This disabling reactionary ecclesiasticism, he thought, would lead the Church of England into “antagonism to the tendencies of the age” and render the institution irrelevant, and in danger of withering away.

Back in Scotland, some of the larger egos in the Free Church were becoming increasingly irritated by Hugh Miller, particularly at his racy turn of phrase, his capacity of aggravation and trouble, his scant respect for many Free Church dignitaries, and his determination to run The Witness his own way. One such enemy was the Rev Dr Robert Candlish (who had recommended Miller for the job in the first place) who now felt that there was a positive lack of “taste or tact” in the way Hugh Miller was handling important and delicate matters, and that it was time The Witness was merged with one or two other Free Church newspapers, and tightly run by a proper editorial board instead of the vague committee who took an overview of Miller's work.

Falling foul of an accomplished church politician like Robert Candlish was no joke. Miller knew that everything he had worked for was under threat, and he moved swiftly. In January 1847 he had printed, very quietly, a pamphlet marked “Strictly Private and Confidential” which he circulated to the entire editorial committee of The Witness. Miller's memorandum (for that's what it was) is a beautiful piece of pre-emptive bureaucracy. He quoted from letters which Candlish had thought were private, accused him of being out of touch with the Free Church members outside Edinburgh, rubbished the notion of running The Witness via a committee of professional churchmen, and pointed out that the main reason the paper seemed to be flagging was that he was obliged to print so many long and boring articles on Church affairs (such as “Dr Candlish's speech on education”) and that many of those were inserted at the last minute by bumbling meddlers. He ended with a flourish: “My faults have no doubt been many; but they have not been faults of principle; nor have they lost me the confidence of that portion of the people of Scotland to which I belong and which I represent. And possessing their confidence, I do not now feel myself justified in retiring from my post.”

The handiest memo-shuffler in IBM could have done no better. Candlish was crushed. And when he tried to back away, and suggested that all his communications to Miller and to other Free Church brass should be “superseded, set aside, buried and held as non-existent”, Miller would have none of it. He refused to let Candlish off the hook. He was in a foul temper at the way Candlish had tried to undermine his position by “private” letters to the Committee, then had complained when Miller laid his hands on a few. “The man who has let his neighbour understand, in strict secrecy, that he intends bleeding him for his benefit by sending a ball through him in the evening, has no reason to complain that his neighbour betrays his confidence by blabbing to the police,” Miller wrote.

The speed with which Miller had moved to outflank Candlish convinced Thomas Chalmers for one that the idea of the committee running the day-to-day affairs of The Witness was a nonsense. He promptly convened a special meeting, delivered a fierce pro-Miller harangue, and then settled the matter by asking the sheepish churchmen, “which of you could direct Hugh Miller?” Having seen the way Miller disposed of Candlish none of them offered to try, the whole idea was dropped, and Miller's position was never challenged again. But Candlish's attempted coup did leave a sour taste in Miller's mouth, and thereafter he never quite trusted the divines of the Free Church in the same way. But it is entirely likely that the whole business did The Witness nothing but good; Miller lost some of his preoccupation with Free Church affairs, cut back on the coverage, and replaced it with general features, literature, and more popular science.

The obverse of Hugh Miller's enthusiasm for the Free Church of Scotland was a naked anti-Catholicism which flared up from time to time and did him no credit. While Miller never came near the mindless ranting of many of his compatriots (some of whom despaired of the soft line on Catholics Miller took in The Witness, and started their own anti-Catholic sheet called The Rock), a few of Miller's leaders and articles on Catholics and Catholicism were downright vicious. In September 1850, for example, he ran a long piece on The Cowgate Flock, the immigrant Irish who were flooding into Edinburgh's Cowgate in the 1840s. “They eschew cleanliness for that is a Protestant virtue,” Miller wrote caustically. “They hate to be seen in unpatched garments because these are often the accompaniments of a mind defiled with deadly heresy. Rather than toil themselves, they not infrequently prefer living on the labour of others, especially Protestants.”

He did identify the root differences between Protestantism and the Roman church. “Her name is mystery,” he wrote of the Catholic Church, “and the power which she wields is not moral but mystical. The change she effects on those on whom she acts is not a moral or a spiritual reformation, but a mystic transformation …” But transformation or no, he thought, Catholicism was bad news. “The experience of the ages has demonstrated that wherever Popery comes, there too come beggary and wretchedness;—there the intellect is paralysed, genius droops, industry is smitten, learning takes flight, commerce decays, every source of wealth and natural greatness dries up, and nothing is left but a universal wreck.”

But Miller was even more contemptuous of Catholicism in the Anglo-Catholic form reviving under the Oxford Movement of the aggressive Edward Pusey. To Miller “Puseyism” represented everything that he loathed and despised in religious life. He saw it as an abomination, neither Protestant nor properly Catholic, but a shadowy, obscure, elusive thing, dangerous because it was fast becoming the religion of the politically-powerful English upper classes, and probably a stalking horse for the Roman church. Miller filled many columns of The Witness with attacks on Puseyism, but was at his most scathing after encountering it at first hand on his trip through England. He was repelled by a High-Church Cathedral service in York Minster. “The coldly-read or fantastically-chanted prayers, common-placed by the twice-a-day repetition of the centuries—the mechanical responses—the correct inanity of the choristers who had not even the life of music in them—the total want of lay attendance … all conspired to show that the Cathedral service of the English Church does not represent a living devotion, but a devotion that perished centuries ago.”

In lying down with the dead, Miller thought, the Church of England were putting themselves in some peril and “in dressing out their clerical brethren in the cerements of Popery and setting them a-walking, could hardly have foreseen that many of them were to become the actual ghosts which they had decked them to simulate”. What particularly incensed Miller about the High-Church revival in England was its incessant, and sometimes effective, hostility to science. He shared the alarm expressed by Charles Lyell that the classes in chemistry and botany, astronomy, geology and mineralogy at Oxford University could hardly raise half a dozen students, when fifteen years previously they had been heavily over-subscribed. “The medieval miasma, originated in the bogs and fens of Oxford, has been blown aslant over the face of the country,” he wrote bitterly, “and not only religious but scientific truth is to experience, it would seem, the influence of its poisonous blights and rotting mildew”.

By the late 1840s Hugh Miller was one of Edinburgh's literary lions, and like most of the species, was greatly stalked by polite society. The Duke of Argyll, for example, was a keen science buff, and continually invited Miller to Inverary Castle to discuss Higher Things (an invitation that Miller politely declined). Socially, Miller seems to have been both genuinely shy and something of a showman. Why else would a respectable Edinburgh intellectual and churchman dress himself up in a tweed plaid (as Miller invariably did) and pound the streets of the Capital like an upland shepherd? Why else would he spend happy hours posing as a stonemason for the calotype photographs of his friends David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson? He enjoyed giving little drawing-room lectures on fossils and geology to the ladies of Edinburgh, or creating a frisson of dread in them with his tales of North Highland ghosts, or hard times in the Black Isle. He took huge delight in challenging his (mainly bookish) friends to wrestling, jumping over burns, or putting heavy stones, knowing full well that he would win. According to David Masson, another of Miller's simple-minded conceits was to entice his friends to try on his broad-brimmed hat, then falling about laughing as it slipped down over their noses. A large head, it was generally thought, was a mark of superiority.

There was, however, a darker side to Miller's success as a literary man and celebrity as a newspaper editor. He quickly became convinced that the enemies he made through his pugnacious articles and leaders in The Witness were a physical threat, and were likely to set some of Edinburgh's foot-pads or cut-purses on him. This seems very unlikely, but Miller took the notion seriously. By the early 1840s he had taken to carrying a loaded handgun around with him. One evening Miller walked past two of his friends in the Meadows of Edinburgh without recognising them. As a joke one of them shouted after him, “There goes that rascally editor of The Witness”, and was horrified to find himself looking down the barrel of a cocked revolver. An embarrassed Hugh Miller later explained to his friends that he expected to be attacked any day, and the revolver was his defence.

Note

1. In the course of his editorship, Miller regularly showed flashes of a latent Scottish nationalism, which ran counterpoint to his British patriotism. Reporting on the instigation of an early proto-nationalist movement called The Scottish Association, he wrote that “it is one thing to acquiesce in the Union (of 1707) and quite another to acquiesce in the treatment which Scotland almost ever since that event, has been receiving at the hands of the English. And the present is a most favourable time for the country to take its stand against further aggression.” But Miller warned that it would not be easy as “it is one of the inevitable effects of treatment such as that to which Scotland has been subjected by the English, to produce disunion and diversity of opinion in the injured country”. And on another instance he made the point that “It has been the tendency of English misgovernment and aggression to render us a divided people.”