On Glasgow and Edinburgh (9780674070592) by Crawford Robert

Author:Crawford, Robert [Crawford, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr
Published: 2013-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

28. Affording pleasant glimpses of George Heriot’s School behind its trees, Greyfriars Kirkyard is an inner-city haven of peace. Here are memorials to the great and good of Edinburgh—from Renaissance poet George Buchanan to James Craig, planner of the New Town. Perhaps the kirkyard’s best-known resident is Greyfriars Bobby, buried by his guardian in a flower pot.

The canine hero’s story had local appeal, but was also researched from afar. Most famously, Chicago investigative journalist Eleanor Atkinson drew on it for her 1912 book Greyfriars Bobby. Atkinson had never visited Scotland’s capital city. She had, though, grown up listening to the work of Burns and Scott, her mother’s favourite poets, and had read about Edinburgh from her childhood. Clearly she admired Walter Scott’s dog-loving propensities, as well as the widely republished 1809 speech on cruelty to animals by Edinburgh-born radical lawyer Lord Erskine, but her favourite animal character seems to have been “Dr. Brown’s immortal Rab.” Atkinson’s book presents Bobby’s story as “quite the most complete and remarkable ever recorded in dog annals.” Her Skye terrier ventures across the city, even clambering (and eventually rolling) down the Castle Rock. Influenced by Scotland’s once-popular sentimental “kailyard” (cabbage-patch) fiction, Atkinson’s story was comfortingly sentimental; its original dust jacket advertised a “refutation of the Darwinian theory of universal conflict for a survival of the fittest.” Greyfriars Bobby was the reverse of Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Reviewed in such American magazines as the Atlantic Educational Journal and The Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness, it became an approved nursery favourite for younger readers, even if the Scotsman’s reviewer thought that “its American origin is discernable,” and complained that some of its supposedly Scots locutions “rather grate on Scottish readers.” Almost half a century after its first publication, Walt Disney filmed the narrative. Since then, it has been further diffused through television, radio, and the Web. There is a replica of Bobby’s statue in San Diego, but only in Edinburgh can you trot across the street from the small, shaggy bronze sculpture and, following the terrier’s 1860s route, proceed into Greyfriars Kirkyard.

This burial site affords splendid views of the Castle to the north, and of the elaborate Renaissance architecture of George Heriot’s School to the southwest. A bequest from “Jinglin Geordie”—James VI’s royal goldsmith, George Heriot—led to the building of the original school, a “hospital” (charity school), in the mid-seventeenth century. Its architecture is based partly on a design for an Italian palace by Sebastiano Serlio, and partly on the Lowland Scottish royal abode at Linlithgow. Turreted, cupolaed, and breathtakingly ornate with its 220 carved windows, the Jacobean school was built to provide for the “fatherless bairns” of guildsmen—skilled artisans—who had died before they could see their children educated. This school, which educated the orphaned painter Henry Raeburn, still offers free places to children of widows and assisted places to children of families below a certain income threshold, but is now one of many expensive educational establishments in a city where far more people are privately educated than anywhere else in Scotland.

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