Romances of the old town of Edinburgh — A Closer Reading

The Frame of Demolition and Legend

Leighton opens 'The Story of the Two Red Slippers' by anchoring it to a specific, vanished location: the old house called Gowanlock's Land, in the Luckenbooths area of the High Street. The demolition of this building, he writes, 'has given rise to various stories,' and he selects one 'very strange legend' from among them. This framing device recurs throughout the collection: each tale is presented as emerging from a particular site or relic of Edinburgh's Old Town. The narrator does not claim to have witnessed the events but rather to have gathered them from local tradition, a method Leighton defends in his preface by asserting that his stories have 'so much of a foundation' as to be withdrawn from 'the category of fiction.' The reader is left to decide how much is invention, a choice Leighton compares to a showman who lets viewers pick which of two figures is the 'great duke.'

Listening, Secrecy, and the Unseen

The excerpt from 'The Two Red Slippers' is dominated by acts of listening and concealment. Mrs Gilchrist and Robina are stationed in a 'blue-painted chamber' to hear what passes 'within the veil of the secret temple of Lucina'—a classical euphemism for childbirth. They are forbidden to see anything until the 'priestess of the mysteries' permits it. The narrator notes that history nowhere records what took place in that room for an hour or two, leaving a deliberate gap. When the child's cry is heard, Mrs Gilchrist nips Robina's arm as a signal, and the cry is immediately assigned a monetary value: two thousand merks. Yet the father, sitting in a back-room, hears nothing. The scene is built on what is overheard, whispered, or withheld, and the narrator repeatedly draws attention to the limits of knowledge—what the women do not know, what the father does not hear, what history fails to record.

Money, Mortality, and the Cat's Comfort

Leighton intertwines financial anxiety with the physical realities of death. Burgess Whitelaw's wife dies in childbirth, the child is stillborn, and the two thousand merks that depended on a living heir are lost. The narrator reflects that money can ameliorate any evil from the 'Treasury of Evils' mentioned by Greek poets, but here it fails. In a curious detail, the family cat—Tom, with a 'bright scarlet collar'—comes to the grieving father, sits on his knee, and purrs 'so audibly' that one might think it expressing sympathy. The narrator comments: 'nature is always laughing at her own work.' This juxtaposition of a purring cat with a dead wife and child is characteristic of Leighton's tone: he leavens tragedy with wry, almost cynical observations, and he does not shy away from the economic stakes of domestic life. The story's moral oscillation, as he calls it, swings between loss and the small consolations of a creature's warmth.

Classical Allusions and Vernacular Speech

Leighton's narrator moves between learned references and colloquial Scots dialogue. In the space of a few paragraphs, he invokes the 'famous cats of Tartesia,' the 'animals in Trophonia,' Pindar's phrase 'a man of money,' and the Greek 'Treasury of Evils.' At the same time, the women speak in broad Scots: 'That's the scream o' the wean!' and 'ye have had a short life.' The howdie (midwife) retorts, 'Did ye expect the bairn to laugh, ye fule woman that ye are?' This alternation between high and low registers is a deliberate stylistic choice. The narrator himself adopts a knowing, slightly arch tone, addressing the reader directly and commenting on the action. The preface further signals Leighton's awareness of his audience: he anticipates the charge that such books feed 'a too natural appetite for images and stimulants' and defends his work with a Latin tag, fides semper est inevidens in re testificata—faith is always unclear in a matter testified to.

Readers approaching this collection should expect each story to be framed by a specific Edinburgh landmark—a demolished building, a seal, an iron press—and to unfold through a narrator who is both learned and gossipy. Leighton's tales are not straightforward ghost stories or moral fables; they are layered with classical references, financial calculations, and a skeptical view of human motives. The preface warns that the author pleads guilty to invention, yet claims a foundation in fact. The best approach is to treat each romance as a performance: enjoy the voice, note the recurring motifs of listening and secrecy, and let the question of belief remain open.

I was turning the pages of Romances of the Old Town of Edinburgh, thinking how Leighton’s preface worries about our hunger for images, when a quieter thought surfaced. That same pull between invented feeling and remembered fact seems to live in The Sun of Saratoga: A Romance of Burgoyne's Surrender — Edition Insights. Both lean on old stones, and both know how a cry—from a dead child or a surrendered field—stays longer than any claim to history.