Practices, Patterns and Perceptions

Nineteenth-century Scottish towns were centres of contrasts. The splendour of commercial success and the flourishing middle-class suburbs which sprang up in the west ends of the larger cities differed markedly from the rapidly-expanding, squalid, inner-city dens, lanes and lodging houses which were home to the poorest of the poor. Glasgow’s contrasting fortunes, in particular, stood out. The city that boasted about its contribution to Enlightenment thought, commercial expansion, and trade and industry had by the early nineteenth century acquired the unenviable reputation for being home to some of the most crime-ridden communities in Western Europe. ¹ In Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs (1858), the social investigator ‘Shadow’ – a pseudonym for Alexander Brown, a letterpress printer in Glasgow – depicted a wretched image of social segregation, urban squalor, criminality and moral destitution. ² Describing the inhabitants of alleyways in Argyle Street and the Gallowgate and Trongate districts he noted: ‘riot, drunkenness, theft and profligacy of every kind – it may be murder itself – are pastimes in which they are engaged.’ ³