Based on a range of sources - local newspapers and journals, published accounts of travels to Scotland, diaries, letters, and reminiscences - this work covers the social and literary history of Edinburgh from around 1760 until 1832, the year in which Sir Walter Scott died. It presents a picture of how Edinburgh and its inhabitants were seen at the time by visitors, and also shows how notable local figures saw their own city. The opinions of people such as Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Robert Southey, Thomas Carlyle, Francis Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Thomas de Quincey, Walter Scott, David Hume and Percy Bysshe Shelley are all represented.