Introduction

TY - CHAP

T1 - Introduction

AU - Morton, Graeme

N1 - © The European Ethnological Research Centre.

PY - 2025/12/21

Y1 - 2025/12/21

N2 - A member of the financial middle classes is perhaps not an obvious chronicler of national life and society in nineteenth-century Scotland, yet the nation developed around Lindsay Mackersy in ways that were significant. He sat at a private dinner table with George Combe in February 1820 when the Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded. He was in the audience when Walter Scott revealed himself as the author of Waverley in February 1827 and in the backroom of the Conservative party’s campaign to represent Scotland’s capital at the first post-reform parliamentary (1832) and municipal (1833) elections. He was a monarchist and a staunch Presbyterian who was prepared to accept Catholic emancipation in 1829. His professional skills were called upon to administer the Fife Banking Company, a casualty of the British-wide financial crisis of 1825/26. His rise in society saw him become a director of one of Edinburgh’s leading financial companies and dine with fellow board members led by the duke of Buccleuch and the marquess of Lothian He attended the first great meeting to honour Scott upon the novelist’s death in 1832. He witnessed the installation of statues to George IV and William Pitt in Edinburgh and admired sites of memory associated with Robert Burns. On the cusp of passenger railway expansion, he was an enthusiastic traveller by coach and ferry, but remained ever willing to walk long distances irrespective of the weather. When away on business, he would find time to explore Scotland’s history before returning to his Edinburgh home and a network of friends he joined for dinner or the theatre. He had a fulsome home life and, like a growing number of his neighbours and friends, a dispersed family life. Two of his brothers were amongst the first of Scotland’s non-convict settlers in Van Diemen’s Land, present-day Tasmania. Their struggle to settle was an emotional burden for him, one intensified by the logistical difficulty of keeping the chain of communication alive. The diary of Lindsay Mackersy delivers an eye-witness account of the most significant political, religious, scientific, diasporic, economic and cultural events of the Scottish nation during the 1820s and 1830s.

AB - A member of the financial middle classes is perhaps not an obvious chronicler of national life and society in nineteenth-century Scotland, yet the nation developed around Lindsay Mackersy in ways that were significant. He sat at a private dinner table with George Combe in February 1820 when the Edinburgh Phrenological Society was founded. He was in the audience when Walter Scott revealed himself as the author of Waverley in February 1827 and in the backroom of the Conservative party’s campaign to represent Scotland’s capital at the first post-reform parliamentary (1832) and municipal (1833) elections. He was a monarchist and a staunch Presbyterian who was prepared to accept Catholic emancipation in 1829. His professional skills were called upon to administer the Fife Banking Company, a casualty of the British-wide financial crisis of 1825/26. His rise in society saw him become a director of one of Edinburgh’s leading financial companies and dine with fellow board members led by the duke of Buccleuch and the marquess of Lothian He attended the first great meeting to honour Scott upon the novelist’s death in 1832. He witnessed the installation of statues to George IV and William Pitt in Edinburgh and admired sites of memory associated with Robert Burns. On the cusp of passenger railway expansion, he was an enthusiastic traveller by coach and ferry, but remained ever willing to walk long distances irrespective of the weather. When away on business, he would find time to explore Scotland’s history before returning to his Edinburgh home and a network of friends he joined for dinner or the theatre. He had a fulsome home life and, like a growing number of his neighbours and friends, a dispersed family life. Two of his brothers were amongst the first of Scotland’s non-convict settlers in Van Diemen’s Land, present-day Tasmania. Their struggle to settle was an emotional burden for him, one intensified by the logistical difficulty of keeping the chain of communication alive. The diary of Lindsay Mackersy delivers an eye-witness account of the most significant political, religious, scientific, diasporic, economic and cultural events of the Scottish nation during the 1820s and 1830s.

KW - Accountancy

KW - CONSERVATIVE PARTY

KW - phrenology

KW - Walter Scott

KW - Robert Burns, ceremonials, festivals, identity, civic Scotland

KW - Emigration

KW - Diaspora

KW - Australia

KW - Scotland

KW - Insurance companies

KW - Theatre

KW - Culture

M3 - Chapter

VL - 39

T3 - Sources in Local History

SP - ix-xxxv

BT - The Diary of Lindsay Mackersy, Accountant, Edinburgh, 1827–1834

A2 - Veitch, Kenneth

PB - The European Ethnological Research Centre

CY - Edinburgh

ER -