SCOTLAND HISTORY

The Town Below the Ground: Edinburgh's Legendary Underground City by Jan-Andrew Henderson

Synopsis
The story of The Town Below the Ground is one of the most disturbing in the annals of Scottish history. For almost 250 years, Edinburgh was surrounded by a giant defensive wall and, unable to expand its boundaries, it became the most densely populated city in Europe. When buildings could go no higher, people were forced to construct new edifices over the existing structures. An underground slum developed, where subterranean dwellers lived in darkness and abject poverty, ignored by chroniclers of the time. Edinburgh's population eventually came to believe that the city-out of sight and out of mind since its abandonment in the mid-19th century-had never been there at all. This is the first book to fully chronicle Edinburgh's Town Below the Ground: its history and structure; its inhabitants and the lives they led; the story of its rediscovery; the parts that still remain; and the tales that made it legendary.

Edinburgh: A Cultural and Literary History by Donald Campbell

Synopsis
Home to one of the world's great arts festivals, the capital of Scotland is a city of contrasting moods and atmospheres. Rising from the volcanic ridge that runs from the Castle Rock to Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh is a combination of living history and vibrant modernity. The historic fastness of the Castle presides over the classical sweep of the New Town, the eccentric charm of the Old, the affluent haughtiness of the West End, and the whimsical respectability of the Southside. Gothic, Georgian and Modernist rub shoulders in this eclectic city, while literature, the visual arts, music, and drama have all flourished through the ages.

Edinburgh: The Golden Age by Mary Cosh

Notorious Murders, Black Lanterns, and Moveable Goods: Transformation of Edinburgh's Underworld in the Early Nineteenth Century by Deborah A. Symonds

Synopsis
1828: The year when William Burke, and Willian Hare, and their wives murdered nearly a score of Edinburgh's poor and sold their bodies offers us many more examples of entrepreneurial criminals in Edinburgh's Old Town. Young thieves ransacked a warehouse for tea, women pretending to be prostitutes lifted gentlemen's watches, and the fine linens disappeared from washerwomen's houses. What Symonds reveals here is a shadow economy where the most numerous of all criminals, thieves, practice their trade not out of poverty and misery, but because it is their trade. Symonds argues that the trade thievery, far from being either static, or a symptom of misery and sign of revolt, was a very lively economic sector, the freest market of all, and one that shifted and shadowed the larger legitimate economy. The community of laborers and Petty fiddles, especially of visitors like drovers, might be tolerated, if done cleverly, but murder and theft, especially from local business, was more unsettling. But the entrepreneurial spirit was never more alive, or perhaps more valued, because it could easily substitute for capital in the shadow economy.