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This thesis proposes that the Scottish past lived a double-life, both as history and as memory. This is archived through an analysis of the discourse of commemoration in Scotland, focusing on the commemorative representation of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, John Knox and the Scottish Reformation, as well as the seventeenth-century Covenanters. In common with other nations in Europe and further afield, Scottish civil society was adept at commemorating its past as a means of proving its national legitimacy in the present. Analysis of these practices shows that, far from the Scottish past being elided from discourses of Scottish national identity in the nineteenth century, collective memories of Wallace, Bruce, Knox and the Covenanters were invoked and deployed in order to assert Scotland’s historic independence and ‘nationality.’ Furthermore, whereas until recently, the tension between Scottishness and Britishness was seen as having undermined attempts to express a coherent and viable Scottish nationality at this time, collective memories of the legacies of Scotland’s national heroes were used to assert Scotland’s role as an equal, partner nation in the enterprise of Great Britain and the British Empire. At the core of this national memory was the concept of ‘civil and religious liberty,’ whereby the Scottish past was defined by the struggle for and achievement of civil and religious deliverance from the hands of tyranny. As each period had its own set of heroes whose efforts had returned Scotland to its true path of civil and religious liberty, so each hero had faced his or her own despot intent on undermining Scottish nationality: for Wallace and Bruce it had been the Plantagenet monarchy, for Knox and his fellow Reformers it was the Roman Catholic Church, and for the Covenanters it was the later Stuart kings. These victories were woven, implicitly and explicitly, into an unbroken narrative of civil and religious liberty, sustaining Scotland’s historic nationality.

The Common Good was the ancient patrimony of a Scottish burgh, and the central resource of urban government before local rates. By the early nineteenth century this revenue was under considerable strain due to rapid population growth and urban expansion. As pressure on urban institutions and resources increased, so did debts secured against the revenue stream from Common Good assets, anxieties about which triggered the campaign for burgh reform. In 1833, as the Burgh Reform Act changed the electoral basis of burgh government, Edinburgh was declared bankrupt due to levels of borrowing incurred to build and extend the New Town and to expand Leith harbour. This thesis uses Common Good accounts as its quantitative basis. The disbursements of extant accounts for the period 1820-56 were recorded and assigned analytical categories in order to compare expenditure of different types over time. Such detailed analysis constitutes a major contribution to the existing historiography of Scottish cities and local government, providing insight into changing spending and priorities, and the effects on the unravelling of the old political order. It also facilitates discussion of the changing nature of corruption and probity in public life during a period when expectations of those holding office changed substantially. In the 1820s burgh reform seemed likely, yet in responding to the challenges of urban government, the unreformed Council was innovative. Two case studies illustrate the contingency function of the Common Good. Whilst George IV’s visit is well-known, that the Council used Common Good money to provide civic hospitality and promotion is not. The Great Fires of Edinburgh of 1824 were very damaging, especially around Parliament Square, and the Council offered a sophisticated response using the resources of the Common Good which included emergency aid to those in need, and the establishment of the first municipal fire brigade. In 1833 Edinburgh was declared bankrupt, and the City’s assets were transferred to trustees appointed for the Creditors. Without control of its finances during protracted negotiations, the new, elected Council suffered from a ‘legitimacy deficit.’ The Settlement Act 1838 served to ‘translate’ the Burgh Reform Act, 1833 to Edinburgh’s needs, as it restructured municipal debt and gave Leith a portion of Edinburgh’s Common Good, which meant Leith could make use of its police burgh status gained in 1833. This case shows the higher importance of local legislation to a major city rather than general acts. With the problems of the former political system resolved, Edinburgh’s 1856 Extension Act expanded municipal boundaries and transferred police powers to the Council, so moving towards a unitary authority. Neither burgh reform nor the restructuring of local government can be understood without first analysing how the Common Good was used, and this thesis takes important strides in that direction.

This thesis examines the history of Scottish settlement houses from 1886 until 1934. The Scottish settlements have attracted little attention from academics and no overarching study of these organisations has previously been done. This thesis seeks to address this lacuna and situate their achievements within the wider context of the changing role of voluntary organisations in this period. Using archival resources, it argues that settlements made important contributions to Scottish society through social work, training courses and adult education. They pioneered new methods, explored new areas of work and provided their local communities with access to services that they may not otherwise have received. This thesis demonstrates the way in which voluntary bodies evolved in response to local and national pressures and changing social attitudes in order to remain successful and relevant in a period during which their role was changing. There were six settlements in Scotland, each with their own agenda and areas of interest. The settlements remained distinct and independent organisations and there was a limited amount of cooperation between them. This diversity in both location and aims of the settlements gives rise to a range of themes that will be examined in the thesis. The original settlement ideal focused on ameliorating class differences by reforming the characters of working-class individuals through personal connection between them and middle-class settlers. The thesis will examine how this evolved over time. As the state at both a local and national level assumed more responsibility for social services, the role of settlements adapted to encompass training for professional social workers and as the working classes gained more political power the settlements sought to make them ‘fit for citizenship’. Likewise, as the original settlement ideal had denied the legitimacy of working-class culture and community, this attitude also evolved and settlements began to focus on developing strong communities within working-class areas.

This thesis sits at the junction of asylum history and Anglo-Jewish history, specifically Scottish Jewish history, and contributes new perspectives to scholarship on histories of both psychiatry and Anglo-Jewry. It explores the lived experiences of Jewish patients admitted to the royal asylums of Edinburgh and Glasgow between 1870 and 1939 using a range of both quantitative and qualitative archival sources. A discussion of the relevant literature that has focused on ‘Anglo’ asylums and Anglo-Jewry, particularly on Scottish asylums and Scottish Jewry, provides the historical context for the research questions being asked about how Jewish patients admitted to the royal asylums were understood, diagnosed and treated. The quantitative Jewish patient population is presented, discussing: demographic variables such as gender distribution, age at admission and the patient’s marital status at admission; social variables such as ‘class’ as regards a patient’s accommodation within the asylum and their occupation; diagnostic variables such as the mental disorders identified; and finally institutional variables such as a patient’s discharge status and the length of a patient’s stay within the asylum. This Jewish patient profile is compared to control samples of non-Jewish patients to detect similarities and differences between the two groups, providing scope for the qualitative accounts that follow. Qualitative sources are then used, pulling out a number of individual case histories as detailed exemplars of broader claims, spread across three substantial chapters. The first qualitative chapter draws on several of the themes presented in the discussion of relevant literature, such as matters of Jewish demography, migration, family dynamics, social standing, cultural experiences and the like, as these intersect with the ‘asylum lifecycle’, meaning periods spent in and outside of the asylum by these patients. This material opens a door to the Jewish patient experience through the discussion and analysis of several themes, such as: family, community, immigration status, social class, migration histories, big and small and the asylum lifecycle with respect to patients who experienced multiple admissions to asylums. The next chapter’s overarching theme is the Jewish body – all aspects of Jewish embodiment; of embodying Jewishness – in the asylum. This theme is further broken down into specific areas for discussion, such as: the male Jewish body; poisoning, because historically Jews have been associated with the act of poisoning; the diagnostic criteria as it was applied to Jews during the period under investigation; the role of language within the clinical encounter; and troublesome patients. The goal here is to illustrate how the Jewish body was often seen as inherently different from other (British) asylum patients and therefore pathologised because of those differences, such that in certain situations merely being Jewish suggested a likelihood of being mentally unstable and possessing a mental illness due to the Jewishness association. The final qualitative chapter concentrates on Jewish women and their experiences within Scottish asylums, highlighting some of the gendered differences within that experience when compared to the male Jewish experience of madness that was primarily tackled in the previous chapter. This chapter discuses Jewish women and their place within the Jewish community and wider Anglo-Scottish society, and further it addresses the perceived close relationship between Jewish women and mental illness, itself complicated by the extent to which the woman concerned sought to live up to a vision of the perfect Jewish mother while also being judged through an idealized version of domestically content British (middle-class) womanly reserve. Final conclusions are added which summarise the contributions made by the thesis, and speculate about further inquires that might be conducted in this field.