Edinburgh
In 1771, Edinburgh is Scotland’s largest city and one of its legal, cultural, and political centers.
Edinburgh’s popularity as a destination of internal immigration further attested to its wealth relative to the rest of Scotland and its importance as a seat of courts, universities, and academic and professional life generally. This concentration helped make its literacy (at least among men) comparable to London’s, though with far fewer people and a much smaller economy.
In Edinburgh, the city’s smaller size and higher density also meant that the professionally educated or trained were in closer contact with the aristocrats and the genteel (and their servants) along with highly literate tradesmen, day laborers, and beggars.
Thus, given the high levels of illiteracy outside Edinburgh, gender, occupation, and metropolitan residency had a pronounced effect on the reading or writing abilities of the city’s inhabitants leading to progress and diffusion of European Enlightenment for Edinburgh.
Edinburgh was nonetheless in the target year Scotland’s most populous city with a population around 55,000. It was also home to an influential mixed gender salon and coterie culture whose prime movers were well-born or -connected women who hosted parties, composed verse, corresponded, and who also tended to circulate their writings in manuscript rather than publish, which they sometimes did late in life.
Edinburgh also provided a lively atmosphere for women of different classes to engage in sociable reading and mutual self-improvement, which produced a great deal of intimate conversation, correspondence, or note-taking.