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A city that's a study in contrasts. And a wellspring of literary inspiration.
With the schizophrenic difference between the Old and New Towns, it should come
as no surprise to learn that the man who wrote Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Lewis
Stevenson, was a native of Edinburgh. The New Town, where Stevenson grew up, was
planned out in the 18th century as a gracious, orderly pattern of wide streets and
spacious town houses. But Stevenson was also fascinated by the medieval Old Town,
which has always been one of Europe’s most haunted enclaves. It's a romantic warren
of alleyways that twist and turn past moldering graveyards and gas-lit pubs. The
laneways often end in ghostly cul-de-sacs, which now bear little bronze plaques
with quotes from Edinburgh’s most famous poets and writers. (Robert Lewis Stevenson
gets one, of course: "The stars in heaven aren’t so beautiful as the lamps of Edinburgh
on a misty night," he once wrote). The eeriest corner of all is Mary King's Close.
When the Black Plague broke out here 1645, this whole lane was bricked up by the
authorities with the tenants still inside, dooming them to starvation. Today, standing
inside its fetid tunnels, you can easily imagine when Edinburgh was the most crowded
city in Europe, it was filled with the frail tenements that rose as high as 14 stories
and were prime fodder for fires and collapse. Back then, pedestrians would have
to dash from door to door, dodging the buckets of refuse tossed from above. Tenants
would yell gardylou, a corruption of the French gardez l'eau, 'watch out for the
water!' Stevenson himself suffered from serious health problems due to Edinburgh’s
chilly climate, and later in life he was obliged to leave his beloved city. After
many epic journeys, he died far away from his damp, dark homeland, on the tiny tropical
island of Samoa in the South Pacific.
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