When Krystyn Lach-Szyrma reached Edinburgh from Poland in 1820 the embers of the Scottish Enlightenment were still glowing. Dugald Stewart was alive and at dinner parties Lach-Szyrma could meet men like Francis Jeffrey, Walter Scott and James Hogg. As tutor to three Czartoryski princes on their Grand Tour, he found all doors were open to him. With his pupils he attended classes at the University in medicine, philosophy, rhetoric and economics and graduated with a Doctorate in Philosophy. In the summer months he visited Glasgow, Dumfries and the Borders or stayed with landowning friends in the Lothians. His interests ranged from fashionable balls and supper parties to prisons, lunatic asylums and gas works. In search of Ossian, he walked from Loch Lomand to Oban, sailed round the north coast of Mull and nearly drowned when trying to swim in Fingal’s Cave. He fell in love with Scotland, but his shrewd and witty observations embrace the poverty of the Highland peasantry as much as the manners of the upper classes.
Mona McLeod, author of Agents of Change: Scots in Poland, 1800–1918, has edited and annotated this previously unpublished text. With over 70 illustrations from contemporary sources, From Charlotte Square to Fingal's Cave is a narrative which no one interested in Scotland during the closing years of the Enlightenment can afford to miss.
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