Thread by @ScotiaIndyref2, Glasgow's oppressive nightmare - in many parts..Glasgow, Scotland’s other capital city has [...]

Glasgow's oppressive nightmare - in many parts.
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Glasgow, Scotland’s other capital city has always had an image problem. On the one side, there is the official projection of a great metropolis which the city fathers have systematically and quite successfully promoted:

Glasgow’s majesty and grandeur, its “uniqueness”, its place among the great urban centres of the world, its proud title of “second city of the British Empire”. From the mid-nineteenth century it had become an industrial giant with a reputation for quality recognised the world

over under the trademark, “Clyde built”. Along side this massive industrial infrastructure it clung to its other image of a “dear green place”, and its harmonious integration of beautiful landscapes, parks, river and vistas, the opulence and the majestic splendour of its

city architecture. Long before being designated Europe’s Capital of Culture in 1990, it had already displayed its genius to the world with international exhibitions in 1888 and 1901. The secret of Glasgow’s success, it was believed, lay in a rigid adhesion to the Protestant

ethic of hard work and discipline, as the city motto proclaimed, Since Scottish Protestantism was believed to be a matter of correct moral and social values not a set of beliefs and practices necessary for salvation, Glasgow, as the “World’s metropolis of Puritanism”,

naturally gravitated towards a form of municipal organization which aspired to be the most sophisticated in the world. Under this system the whole of the community’s spiritual and material needs would be catered for and, thus, the moral improvement of the people guaranteed.
But

no matter how much the city fathers vaunted its remarkable qualities, the other image of Glasgow, its alter ego, has always challenged and undermined their claims.

- more to follow -

If Glasgow was a place of unique grandeur its slums too were in a league of their own. For the visiting Nathaniel Hawthorne,

“The poorer classes of Glasgow excel even those of Liverpool in the bad eminence of filth, uncombed and unwashed children, disorderly deportment, evil smell and all that makes city-poverty disgusting”

a view confirmed by numerous medical reports and statistical analyses in the following years. Far from being a model of harmonious co-existence between the forces of nature, humanity and industry, Hawthorne was struck by the degree to which prosperity

and abject poverty coincided inside the city boundaries.

“stateliest city I ever beheld... it is difficult to make one's way among the sallow and unclean crowd, and not at all pleasant to breathe in the noisomeness of the atmosphere. The children seem to go unwashed from

birth, and perhaps they go on gathering a thicker and thicker coating of dirt till their dying days”

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Even those visitors who recognized its Puritan character were quick to add that it was also the,

“Metropolis of Impurity... the most religious and most drunken city in Europe or the world”

Glasgow’s aspirations to cultural greatness have likewise fared no better, being mercilessly ridiculed by others. For one English wit, the essential climax of a Glasgow Hogmanay was being sick on the pavement, while others have waxed lyrical on that other great contribution

to world culture, the “Glasgow kiss”. Even the city’s motto has been reworded to reflect this negative side to its character,
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“Let Glasgow Flourish by the preaching of the Word... and the drinking of whisky”

Official reactions to criticism of the city have always been frosty, suspicious and even hostile depending on their source. Where these have originated from official enquiries, as with the Poor Law reports prepared by Edwin Chadwick, or reports into the state of the

population’s health, they tended to be accepted with resignation, the blame being placed squarely on the immorality of the lower orders9. Where these originated from non-official sources, however, the reaction tended to be much more hostile. Glasgow would not be lectured to

by representatives of other cities who no doubt followed their own agenda in denouncing its weaknesses. Yet their greatest hostility has always been reserved for negative comments on the city emanating from its own “children”. When Arthur McArthur wrote

No Mean City in 1935, in which he fictionalised life in the city’s slums as he had lived it, the official outcry was immediate and dramatic, the book even being banned from the Corporation Libraries. This is a factor which should perhaps be taken into consideration when

attempting to explain what Andrew Noble has termed the urbane silence surrounding Scottish writing on the nineteenth century city when compared to other countries.

-more to come -

Yet if the general rule among Scottish writers was to shy away from the urban reality of their time exceptions do exist. One of the earliest of these was a little book written in 1857 and 1858 by a mysterious author using the pen-name of

Shadow(I have other threads on this writer). Under the intriguing title of Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs he takes his readers on a week-long journey of exploration of the living city, its rhythm of life, its multiple faces and, above all its dark side. This “other”

Glasgow is described in graphic detail but without the excesses of style or moralising that others found necessary to include at the time by way of justifying the enumeration of the horrors they found. Shadow’s manuscript is therefore not a work of fiction but of

proto-sociology, less a political tract than a series of penned “photographs.
Unlike other militant authors, little is known about the Shadow. His real name was Alexander Brown a letterpress printer who had recently settled in Argyle Street in the centre of the city. From

indications dotted around the manuscript it would appear that he was of Scottish descent but not necessarily from Glasgow itself.

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Before setting up in the city he had lived in a small town in England, probably Gloucester, which he fondly admired for its beauty and charm. Little is known about his background or upbringing but from the quality of the manuscript itself and the numerous quotations liberally

interwoven into the text, Brown was undoubtedly a man of considerable culture and great reading. His reputation, perhaps through journalism and the printing trade, seems to have allowed him to establish a working relationship with important figures of his day such as

George Combe and George Cruickshank who accepted to draw the frontispiece for the original work. Although he carefully avoids exposing his political sympathies in his work, it is clear that he would today be placed on the left of centre, a reformer with strong religious

convictions. It is no doubt this political orientation which drew Brown to the Glasgow Argus, a weekly paper renowned for its interest in local affairs, its outspoken radicalism and its sympathy for the cause of the people.

Although we do not know precisely what triggered his decision to explore the shadowy world of the city, it seems likely that a combination of factors contributed to it. Firstly there was the contrast between his new surroundings in central Glasgow and his previous existence

in the “sweetest town in England”. Secondly, there was the oppressive reality of that other Glasgow every time he stepped out of his door for he lived in the centre of the city. Thirdly there were his apparently well-established contacts with the city’s police force and

journalists, who no doubt discussed these questions with him. Lastly, and to my mind most significantly, Brown was probably outraged by the ridiculous claims made in the Glasgow Herald over the state of the city’s poor districts. On 11th April 1857 the Glasgow Argus

reproduced, without comment, an indignant editorial from its rival, the Glasgow Herald, entitled “The Wynds of Glasgow” in which it rejected criticisms made in the Times of London about the poor living conditions in the city. Indeed, it claimed that

“these dark places of our city (have been) much improved over the last two or three years”, so improved, in fact, that it challenged anyone to visit them and not to recognise these improvements!

-more later -

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