Edinburgh Conclusion
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.
(Fig. 8a): Total City/Category/Genre Graph: Edinburgh and (8b) Women’s
Contributions, p. 35 (Kalena Holman)
A wide variety of genres were still disseminated in Edinburgh in 1771. The three hundred thirty-seven texts in the dataset were split into forty-two genres, indicating that the late eighteenth century was a time of significant literary innovation in British literature. However, a majority of these genres were authored by men. Of the forty-two genres, thirty-eight, or about ninety percent, were authored by men. Only four genres, or about ten percent, were authored by women. Twenty four texts comprising of fifteen genres have no known author (NKA).
Category/Genre
The male-authored genres, shown in the sunburst visualization (Fig. 8a), are split into nine major print categories: Religious, Literary, Legal, Instructional/Reference, Historical, Scientific/Scholarly, Puzzles/Music/Jests, Periodical, and Addresses. Each print category is then further split by genre. The largest categories of male print output falls within the Religious, Literary, and Legal categories, which is reflective of the interests of male occupational professions at the time (chiefly clergymen, lawyers, doctors, and academics).
Twenty-four percent (23.68%) of texts published at the time fall within the Religious category. The category is comprised of nine genres: sermons, hymns and psalms, religious histories and biographies, ecclesiastical and denominational histories, doctrinal texts, didactic and devotional texts, conversion narratives, controversies, and catechisms. Twenty-one percent (21.05%) of texts fall within the Literary category. The Literary category includes eight genres: poems, plays, letters, fiction, essays, dialogues, conduct books, and allegories. Thirteen percent (13.16%) of texts fall within the Legal category. These five genres include: trial proceedings, petitions, memorials, informations, and acts. The Instructional/Reference category also makes up thirteen percent (13.16%) of texts published at the time. Its five genres include: tables, manuals, grammars, dictionaries, and almanacs/ pocketbooks/ calendars. Eleven percent (10.53%) of texts fall within the Historical category. Comprising of four genres, the category includes: autobiographies and biographies, classical histories, English/British history, and travel histories. The Scientific/Scholarly, Puzzles/Music/Jests, and Periodical categories each make up five percent (5.26%) of the published texts. Two genres each, they are comprised of medical and mathematics, songs and jestbooks, and newspapers and magazines respectively. The smallest category is Addresses, which makes up three percent (2.63%) of published texts and comprises of one genre: letters/addresses. The women’s genres are split into only two print categories, reflected in the horizontal bar chart visualization (Fig. 8b): Legal and Religious. Unlike the male generic visualization, the female genres are divided by category, then genre, and then even further by print count.
Women's Contributions
The two categories of women’s publications included here, legal and religious, situate them in relation to two key male dominated institutions of the city, its legal system and churches. What is interesting, however, is that a majority of the records fall into the Legal category, which makes up ninety-five percent (95.45%) of the texts published at the time. Women’s considerable contribution to legal publishing suggests a certain outline of legal literacy in Edinburgh at that time, rather than a focus on commercial or literary publishing. Additionally, this lack of generic diversity could be due to the fact that although well-born or -connected women who hosted parties, composed verse, and corresponded, they also tended to circulate their writings in manuscript rather than publish. The legal category can be split up into genres as following: twelve texts, or fifty-seven percent (57.14%), were trial proceedings, five texts, or twenty-four percent (23.81%), were petitions, and four texts, or nineteen percent (19.05%), were memorials. Whereas the Religious category was most plentiful for male authors, it provided the fewest texts from the women. The Religious category comprises of one text, or five percent (4.55%) of the records. Authored by the Lady Jean Steuart, the genre is didactic/devotional texts.