The Signet Library 200th Anniversary Online Exhibition

signet Library digitized originals

The Diary of George Sandy 1788

This part of the exhibition begins with our new digitization and introduction to the 1788 Diary of George Sandy. George Sandy WS (1772-1851) was at a loose end in his mid-teens when he began his 1778 diary, having finished school but being too young to commence his legal apprenticeship. The diary follows the adventures of George and his friends in the Edinburgh of the high Scottish Enlightenment and the building of the New Town, and is richly illustrated by his own drawings and sketches. Sandy was the son of the Clerk of the WS Society, also George Sandy, and would go on to be the Society’s reforming Librarian in adulthood. He spent most of his career as secretary to the Bank of Scotland and the exhibition includes the recollections of other Edinburgians of this much-loved local character.

A Manuscript Fragment from the Journals of Sir Henry Cockburn

A unique diary fragment written by the legal and literary giant of late Enlightenment Scotland, Sir Henry Cockburn (Lord Cockburn) 1779-1854. Sir Henry’s diaries are a unique record of Scotland in the first half of the nineteenth century as the Scottish Enlightenment came to a close. The Signet Library was believed to hold the last of his diaries to survive in his own hand - the Circuit Journeys - until now.

A Manuscript Fragment believed from the Journal of John Cockburn of Ormiston, 1706

A unique diary fragment believed to be from an otherwise unknown diary maintained by the Scottish politician and agricultural reformer John Cockburn of Ormiston (1679-1758). The author discusses the changing seasons and natural history of the Scottish Borders with a sensitive eye, whilst also paying attention to the fortunes of his neighbours and the War of the Spanish Succession then raging overseas.

The diary came to light in 2014 as part of a collaborative project studying many of the Signet Library’s smaller manuscript fragments dating from the eleventh century to the eighteenth.

The Travel Diary of Robert Pitcairn WS (1793-1855).

[Please note that the digitized diary is temporarily offline for maintenance as of 31 August 2023]

Robert Pitcairn was a lawyer and historian, author of Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland amongst other works. These diaries relate his mid-life adventures in a journey across the Savoy,  France, Belgium and Switzerland of the early 1830s.

Pitcairn was a friend of Sir Walter Scott, a member of the Society of Antiquaries in Scotland, and part of the group around James Maidment in the Bannatyne Club and other intellectual societies that led the editing and reprinting of countless key Scottish historical works. For much of his career he acted as assistant to Thomas Thomson, the Deputy Clerk Register at Register House, the home of Scotland's national archives. This was not always a happy arrangement, with Pitcairn at one stage involved in a complaint to the Commissioners on the Public Records as to promises made him about pay and remuneration. From 1853 he was one of four official searchers of the national records for incumbrances.

This pair of volumes tells the story of Pitcairn’s midlife journey across central Europe and dates from the height of his career as an author, lawyer and historian. His travels began in July 1832 with an eye-witness account of Belgium amid its war of liberation against the Netherlands, a conflict that would end with the declaration of Belgian independence in 1839. The journey would take Pitcairn through France, parts of what is now Germany, Switzerland and as far as the Savoy in the Western Alps.

It is not known whether Pitcairn intended the diaries for publication, and this is their first appearance in any published form. He was already a published historian, and 1833 would see the appearance of his greatest work, Criminal Trials in Scotland from 1588 to 1624 which appeared under the aegis of the Bannatyne Club and which inspired Sir Walter Scott's Ayrshire Tragedy. It is still considered a useful and significant source today.

Pitcairn is no Boswell, but he is an interested and observant traveller who makes considered and generous comment on everything he sees and is prepared to take pleasure - for the most part, at least - in what he experiences: the Europe he passes through has since been radically reshaped and reordered by conflict and social change and his accountis a valuable one. Above all, this is a Europe before the coming of modern industry and the railway: it is still very much a Georgian Europe in that sense and one that Pitcairn experiences at a pre- industrial pace and with pre-industrial attitudes.

Coming Soon:

The Memoirs of Charles Marjoribanks (1794-1833). Marjoribanks’ astonishingly indiscreet and darkly entertaining memoir of his life and travails in Scotland and the East (he having served with the East India Company).

The Memoirs of Ralph Richardson WS (1845-1933). Ralph Richardson was a lawyer, a politician and a geologist who was with Gladstone throughout the famous Midlothian Campaign and who would later be an eye-witness to the 1916 Zeppelin attack on Edinburgh. His vivid memoir is one of the most important unpublished sources for mid-Victorian Edinburgh life and society.