Crowded with Genius: Edinburgh, 1745-1789

By James Buchan

In the early eighteenth century, Edinburgh was a filthy backwater town synonymous with poverty and disease. Yet by century's end, it had become the marvel of modern Europe, home to the finest minds of the day and their breathtaking innovations in architecture, politics, science, the arts, and economics—all of which continue to echo loudly today.

Adam Smith penned The Wealth of Nations. James Boswell produced The Life of Samuel Johnson. Alongside them, pioneers such as David Hume, Robert Burns, James Hutton, and Sir Walter Scott transformed the way we understand our perceptions and feelings, sickness and health, relations between the sexes, the natural world, and the purpose of existence.

In Crowded with Genius, James Buchan beautifully reconstructs the intimate geographic scale and boundless intellectual milieu of Enlightenment Edinburgh. With the scholarship of a historian and the elegance of a novelist, he tells the story of the triumph of this unlikely town and the men whose vision brought it into being.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061870606

James Buchan

James Buchan is a novelist and critic. He is the author of The Persian Bride, a New York Times Notable Book, as well as Frozen Desire, an examination of money that received the Duff Cooper Prize. He has also won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. Buchan is a contributor to the New York Times Book Review and the New York Observer, and a former foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. He lives in Norfolk, England.

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Reviews for Crowded with Genius

[jbd1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very useful overview of the multi-faceted Scottish Enlightenment and the changes it wrought on Edinburgh. I read it in preparation for my first visit to the city, where I'm looking forward to exploring some of the sites covered in Buchan's book.

[karenduff · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was an interesting read, but the one thing I am curious about is when did George Heriot's, George Watson's and the Merchant Maiden Hospital(The Mary Erskine School) stop being schools for indigent or fatherless children and become private schools?