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Richard J. Grace’s Opium and Empire offers a close look at the lives and careers of two controversial Scottish capitalists, William Jardine and James Matheson. Recognized as giants on the scene at Macao, Canton, and Hong Kong, Jardine and Matheson have often been depicted as one-dimensional villains whose opium commerce was ruthless and whose imperial drive was insatiable.
In the following excerpt, Grace describes the Royal High School in Edinburgh’s Old Town where Matheson spent his childhood in the early 1800s.
The Edinburgh where this young lad (James Matheson) was to reside for about five years was a city of many faces. It had to be exciting for a boy of twelve to have a certain measure of freedom in the old, medieval buildings and alleys and streets of the “Athens of the North.” The principal road in the Old Town was the thoroughfare known as Canongate at its eastern end and then High Street, running uphill to Edinburgh Castle. Off High Street ran the wynds and closes that connected the streets and courts of the Old Town. In their excursions around the Old Town, Matheson and his schoolmates, scurrying through tunnelled entrances to the closes and thence on to the next wynd, would encounter water carriers, coal sellers, rummaging pigs, piemen with bells, barbers in transit, ragamuffin “caddies” (public messengers), and advocates in gowns. Under the dominating presence of the Castle atop the great mound, they would pass famous churches, the old Parliament House, the Royal Exchange, open-air markets selling fish and meat and all manner of things, the shops of watchmakers and jewellers, the booths of hosiers and hatters and drapers and glovers, and houses hallowed in the city’s history.
Yet the picturesque town was also dirty and crowded, ridden with soot and peopled by numerous hard-drinking men and women. Moreover, it was, with all its sunless, narrow lanes and wynds, its open sewers, and its refuse-strewn courts, decidedly unhealthy. The quaint designation “Auld Reekie” was bestowed on the Old Town by the housewives of Fife, across the Firth of Forth, who could tell when it was dinnertime in Edinburgh by the layer of smoke which sat upon the city from the forest of chimneys.
A world apart from Auld Reekie was the thriving New Town, on the northern side of North Loch (now Princes Street Gardens). The elegant regularity of the streets and squares of the New Town, offering comfortable residences to the upper classes of Edinburgh, had taken shape starting in 1767 according to a town plan prepared by the young architect James Craig. But the students of the high school and the university found their home amidst the convoluted twists and turns of the Old Town.
The Royal High School was located in a simple, barnlike building just below the eastern end of Cowgate which had been built in 1777. Class size was quite large (eighty or more), which forced the masters into pedagogical compromises. Nevertheless, the level of education at Edinburgh was regarded throughout Britain as being the best in the kingdom. The curriculum was heavily concentrated on mastery of Latin, with up to six hours a day being devoted to that subject, the lessons emphasizing grammar, translation, and prose. Mathematics and Greek were also in the program of studies. In addition, families generally supplemented the basic curriculum by engaging private tutors, who could be hired by the hour for instruction in French, German, geography, drawing, music, and engineering.
The boys were seated in class according to their level of attainment, with the “dunce” at the far end of the back bench in a place reserved for the dullard, and the ranks proceeding up to that of “dux,” the leading member of the class. By family report, young James was among a group of boys who competed for the position of head of the class. Henry Cockburn, who entered the high school twenty years before James Matheson, remembered it as being notorious for the severity of its teachers and the riotousness of the students. In his unflattering recollection, the tone of the school was “vulgar and harsh,” and he claimed that in a later period some of the masters could have been sentenced to transportation as violent criminals for the extent to which they whipped their students.
Young Matheson would have dressed like all the other boys at the high school. The typical attire included a round black hat, a shirt fastened at the neck with a black ribbon, a double-breasted waistcoat and a single-breasted coat with tail, corduroy breeches tied at the knees by a knot of brown cotton tape, worsted stockings (in winter), and clumsy shoes intended to be worn on either foot (necessitating that they be worn on alternate feet from day to day). The coat and waistcoat were always made of fabrics in glaring colours such as bright blue or grass green or scarlet.
Hence the boys of the high school were easily recognizable in the streets, and this may have helped to generate the “bickers” or street fights which pitted them against boys of the lower classes. The students seemed to take readily to this “rough mode of play,” which was without malice, according to Matheson’s contemporary, J.G. Lockhart. When one side charged against the other, which sought to hold its ground, stones and sticks and fisticuffs were the means of combat. Was Matheson scuffling in the streets like the others? We know that he was an adventurer, and so we cannot easily imagine him at age twelve or thirteen simply standing on the sidelines of a free-for-all between his schoolmates and some robust and tough young fellows from the Grassmarket or the wynds of the Old Town.
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