This work is both a family history and a social history of Scotland seen against a city, Edinburgh, acity that to this day is soured by class divisions. In tracing the family back several centuries, the book embeds their lives into the larger forces shaping the Scottish culture, climaxing in the creation of the New Town of Edinburgh - one of the eighteenth and nineteenth century's extravagant romantic fantasies. The New Town produced a reality, shaped by the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment, which gave identity to a capital of a nation in name only, after the closing of the Scottish parliament with the Union of the Crowns in 1707.