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Authors: Allan Massie
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painful.’ Accordingly the conclusion was that they were likely to let the moral of David’s end pass them by, while receiving stimulation from the headlong gallop of his course.
Probably however the newspaper’s fears amounted to little more than the pompous conventional platitudes in which respectability loves to garb itself. Dr Johnson provided an. answer before long. In his Life of John Gay, he wrote of The Beggar’s Opera:
`Dr Herring, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, censured it as giving encouragement not only to vice but to crimes by making a highwayman the hero, and dismissing him at last unpunished. It has even been said that after the exhibition of The Beggar’s Opera the gangs of robbers were evidently multiplied. The play … cannot be conceived, without more speculation than life requires or admits, to be productive of much evil. Highwaymen and housebreakers seldom frequent the theatre, or mingle in any elegant diversion; nor is it possible for anyone to imagine that he may rob with safety because he sees Macheath reprieved upon the stage.’
Such robust common sense is always preferable to cant, and it is equally unlikely - whatever The Scotsman’s apprehensions - that anyone turned to crime as a result of reading David Haggart’s little book. Such productions may influence the style of criminal activity by offering the criminal a model or ideal, but the roots of crime lie deeper and are more complex. They rest in character and circumstance, and in the working of one upon the other. They are always hard to identify, and any identification can only be tentative. One thing is sure however: they are inaccessible to such glib and facile explanation.
William Bennison
Or the Other Dear Charmer
Leith Walk begins, or used to begin, in some splendour, flanked by Robert Adam’s Register House on one side, and the Calton Hill on the other. Nowadays the first is deformed by the monstrous St James’ Centre and the broad street is made desolate by demolition, and ridiculous by a vulgar footbridge, which could scarcely be less pleasing to the eye, and hardly even has the excuse of function.
Yet this deformity is not out of keeping with the history of the street, which has always promised more than it achieved, and this failure tells us something of the development of the city.
The street follows the line of an earthworks hurriedly thrown up in the summer of 1650 by the Covenanting Army of David Leslie to check Cromwell’s advance after his victory at Dunbar. For the next century or more the earthworks stood, and were used as a walk or as a playground by children, while the road to Leith from Edinburgh continued to follow its age-old route from the Cowgate, skirting the east side of the Calton Hill and running down to the port along the lines of the present Easter Road. A curious late seventeenthcentury experiment of running horse-drawn buses along Leslie’s earthworks was unsuccessful, and it was not until 1774 that the decision was taken to widen and pave what became the Walk. Indeed the need to improve communications with the port was used as the common sense justification for what many considered to be the ridiculously ambitious plan to build the North Bridge over the chasm below the Old Town. ,
There was, it seemed, reason enough for improvement.
Leith was a busy and prosperous port. In 1791 there were five master shipbuilders there, employing one hundred and fifty two carpenters and building ships up to three hundred tons. Trade, principally with the Baltic, but also with the north German and Dutch ports, was busy. A noble street was justified.
And noble, Leith Walk certainly is - in conception at least. Wide and gently curving, it runs for a mile and a quarter down to the sea. It could have been one of the great streets of Europe, comparable for example to the Ramblas in Barcelona. Yet it is nothing of the sort, despite fine buildings still surviving at the Edinburgh end; and it never has
Probably however the newspaper’s fears amounted to little more than the pompous conventional platitudes in which respectability loves to garb itself. Dr Johnson provided an. answer before long. In his Life of John Gay, he wrote of The Beggar’s Opera:
`Dr Herring, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, censured it as giving encouragement not only to vice but to crimes by making a highwayman the hero, and dismissing him at last unpunished. It has even been said that after the exhibition of The Beggar’s Opera the gangs of robbers were evidently multiplied. The play … cannot be conceived, without more speculation than life requires or admits, to be productive of much evil. Highwaymen and housebreakers seldom frequent the theatre, or mingle in any elegant diversion; nor is it possible for anyone to imagine that he may rob with safety because he sees Macheath reprieved upon the stage.’
Such robust common sense is always preferable to cant, and it is equally unlikely - whatever The Scotsman’s apprehensions - that anyone turned to crime as a result of reading David Haggart’s little book. Such productions may influence the style of criminal activity by offering the criminal a model or ideal, but the roots of crime lie deeper and are more complex. They rest in character and circumstance, and in the working of one upon the other. They are always hard to identify, and any identification can only be tentative. One thing is sure however: they are inaccessible to such glib and facile explanation.
William Bennison
Or the Other Dear Charmer
Leith Walk begins, or used to begin, in some splendour, flanked by Robert Adam’s Register House on one side, and the Calton Hill on the other. Nowadays the first is deformed by the monstrous St James’ Centre and the broad street is made desolate by demolition, and ridiculous by a vulgar footbridge, which could scarcely be less pleasing to the eye, and hardly even has the excuse of function.
Yet this deformity is not out of keeping with the history of the street, which has always promised more than it achieved, and this failure tells us something of the development of the city.
The street follows the line of an earthworks hurriedly thrown up in the summer of 1650 by the Covenanting Army of David Leslie to check Cromwell’s advance after his victory at Dunbar. For the next century or more the earthworks stood, and were used as a walk or as a playground by children, while the road to Leith from Edinburgh continued to follow its age-old route from the Cowgate, skirting the east side of the Calton Hill and running down to the port along the lines of the present Easter Road. A curious late seventeenthcentury experiment of running horse-drawn buses along Leslie’s earthworks was unsuccessful, and it was not until 1774 that the decision was taken to widen and pave what became the Walk. Indeed the need to improve communications with the port was used as the common sense justification for what many considered to be the ridiculously ambitious plan to build the North Bridge over the chasm below the Old Town. ,
There was, it seemed, reason enough for improvement.
Leith was a busy and prosperous port. In 1791 there were five master shipbuilders there, employing one hundred and fifty two carpenters and building ships up to three hundred tons. Trade, principally with the Baltic, but also with the north German and Dutch ports, was busy. A noble street was justified.
And noble, Leith Walk certainly is - in conception at least. Wide and gently curving, it runs for a mile and a quarter down to the sea. It could have been one of the great streets of Europe, comparable for example to the Ramblas in Barcelona. Yet it is nothing of the sort, despite fine buildings still surviving at the Edinburgh end; and it never has
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