The Scottish Enlightenment and the Politics of Provincial Culture: The Perth Literary and Antiquarian Society, ca. 1784-1790

Perth was clearly one of Scotland's most important provincial centers during the reign of George III. The fifth-largest burgh in the country, it doubled in size between 1766 and 1801 to achieve a population of almost 15,000 as it became the dynamic focus of accelerating economic, social, and cultural change—making this beyond doubt the most dramatic and sustained period of growth and development that Perth, long situated at a key communications hub in the Central Lowlands, had yet experienced. ¹ Indeed, with agricultural improvement and commercialization continuing apace and Scottish industrialization just getting underway, it cannot be surprising that the second half of the eighteenth century should have seen important changes. For as Perthshire's historic county town, Perth's fate was closely linked to the progress of agrarian production, trade, and manufacturing across the region. These processes necessarily profited the professionals and merchants who had traditionally dominated the burgh's internal affairs and who were now increasing rapidly in both number and diversity. But across Perth's extensive rural hinterland, spreading for many miles up Strathearn to the west, along Strathmore in the northeast and beside both banks of the estuarine Tay to the southeast, the growing wealth and widening aspirations of the district's landowning classes also tended further to accentuate the town's role as the natural focus for their recreational, associational, and retail activities. ²

Accordingly, concerted attempts can be seen in the years after around 1760 to improve not only the economic opportunities but also, more broadly, the quality of life of the various groups throughout the region for whom Perth was the preferred place of residence or resort. ³ Smeaton's magnificent bridge across the Tay, vital to the town's ability to exploit its natural position as a transport center, was raised in 1771. Thomas Anderson, a leading burgess and linen manufacturer, oversaw the acquisition of land beside the North Inch for further civic development. His son-in-law Thomas Hay Marshall, later provost (i.e., mayor) of the burgh, created Atholl Crescent, a particularly elegant residential development. Marshall also made provision for a new Masonic lodge at the same site, as well as supplying the plot in Rose Terrace on which the burgh council erected new buildings for Perth Academy, the school founded as recently as 1760 in order to meet the educational needs of a growing and increasingly commercially-minded local community. In 1772 there had even emerged the short-lived Perth Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, published by Robert Morison, postmaster and bookseller in the town—a not wholly successful attempt to exploit the quickening cultural and literary appetites of the district's swelling population. Evidently, then, the last decades of the century yielded much evidence of both an extension and a qualitative enhancement of Perth's civic infrastructure in a manner broadly consistent with urban developments found elsewhere—not only across contemporary Scotland but also throughout the rest of mid-Georgian Britain.

Two special considerations, however, are perhaps likely to render the Perth Literary and Antiquarian Society, founded in 1784, of particular interest to the historian of British provincial culture. First, whilst recent research on the Scottish Enlightenment has rightly emphasized the pivotal role of Edinburgh, and although valuable perspectives have also been offered for Glasgow and Aberdeen, we currently know next-to-nothing about urban intellectual life elsewhere in late-eighteenth-century Scotland. ⁴ This fact alone would probably justify overdue investigation of the institutionalization of learned culture in Perth during what was this most expansive of phases; ⁵ but the Perth Society has a second and rather more intriguing significance, for its formation will turn out to be closely linked to the emergence of the better known Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, a controversial body founded just four years...