John Hill Burton was born in the northern Scottish city of Aberdeen on 22 August 1809 and would spend most of his first twenty years there. It was an urban environment commencing a period of ...‘perpetual redevelopment’. Expansion and change in the cityscape were initially focused on the central area, in which he spent his boyhood and youth. Burton’s family were never so close to poverty as many of their neighbours huddled in the dilapidated quarters, which would gradually be swept away as the century advanced. Much of the old burgh would have gone by the time, decades
Introduction Beveridge, Craig
Recovering Scottish History,
02/2022
Book Chapter
John Hill Burton (1809–81) was one of the great intellectual figures of Jnineteenth-century Scotland. Originally an advocate by profession who served as secretary (then manager) of the Scottish Prison ...Board from 1854 to 1877, he distinguished himself as an author and a scholar in a wide variety of fields. He wrote on political economy both in the leading periodicals of the age and in book form, engaging with the great social and economic issues arising from the rapid industrialisation of the mid-century. He published a pioneering study of the life and correspondence of David Hume (1846) and played
For over fifty years there has been controversy over Scottish national identity in the nineteenth century. Unsurprisingly this has often involved interpretations and reinterpretations of the Scots’ ...attitude to their past. In his relatively recent general history The Scottish Nation, the country’s most prominent modern historian sought a balanced view. T. M. Devine recognised that some social developments appeared to support the judgement, which he associated with G. E. Davie and Tom Nairn, that the Liberal hegemony of 1832–1914 was ‘one of profound crisis in Scottish nationhood’. The benefits of Union and Empire were worth ‘the heavy cost
Utilitarian History Beveridge, Craig
Recovering Scottish History,
02/2022
Book Chapter
In certain sections of his History, Burton adopts a noticeably more sober, sceptical and didactic tone than in others. His scepticism, expressed in relation to the use of sources by previous Scottish ...historians and antiquarians, as well as to historiographic ‘partiality’ and to ‘conjectural’ approaches, is complemented in periodic, confident endorsements of empiricism and inductive reasoning. At the same time, he is critical of works in which he believes such thinking has overreached itself and begun to rear up an ‘artificial’ or mechanistic historical positivism. In what – for one steeped in radical and reformist movements through
Burton and his reputation may have faded from sight over the years but it was considerable in his own time and for decades later. When he passed through London a year after the appearance of his fi ...nal volumes in 1870, the journal of the Athenaeum, which had elected him a member ‘without application or ballot’, respectfully reported that Dr Hill Burton was passing through town on his way from the continent, having been gathering materials for ‘a revised edition of his well-known “History of Scotland”’. The role of Historiographer Royal for Scotland to which he was
History and Heritage Beveridge, Craig
Recovering Scottish History,
02/2022
Book Chapter
The present study set out with a combined purpose of reappraising the achievements of John Hill Burton and of revising current perceptions of Scottish historical consciousness as the nineteenth ...century advanced. Central to both of these aims has been a detailed reexamination of Burton’s multi-volume History of Scotland and of the highly positive reception it was accorded. In a single volume seeking to address both reappraisals it has not been possible to provide a full intellectual biography or as much detail on his life as might be desirable. It is to be hoped that sufficient indication has been given to
Burton entered the second half of the nineteenth century ‘spinning’, on a number of counts.
Early in the previous year he had used the term in a letter to a close friend conveying his reaction to ...events in France, where a revolutionary movement had overthrown the government of the ‘bourgeois monarch’, Louis Phillipe. What he had perceived just across the Channel was a revolutionary breakdown of social and economic order that would soon after be associated with a regime headed by a Bonaparte. The threat posed by Napoleon I was no distant memory to many, including Burton whose
Romantic History Beveridge, Craig
Recovering Scottish History,
02/2022
Book Chapter
In many passages of his full History of Scotland, Burton’s narrative Ireflects quite different, even contrasting characteristics when compared to the sceptical and practicalist perspectives described ...in the last chapter. These have much in common with elements of the romantic literature that had swept all before it earlier in the century and had strongly influenced other cultural forms including painting and the theatre.
In recent times, scholars have identified one of those elements as a recurring ‘performative’ tendency in writers of the period, authorship becoming ‘a site of negotiation between writers and readers’. The most prominent example is
