Victorian Periodicals Review

As anyone who even remotely follows British politics will know, these are momentous times for Scotland. Issues of identity and institutional legitimacy are more topical than ever, and in the fringe of the party-political and governmental debates, a plethora of initiatives has been set up to develop new perspectives on Scottish national culture and on the country’s constituent regions. There are of course significant differences between the goals and focal points of these initiatives, but what all of them share is a “belief that an appreciation of place is essential to sustainable and convivial living today,” as noted in the prospectus to the publication presently under scrutiny (goodpressgallery.co.uk).

This “new season” of the Evergreen will be of interest to those who wish to keep abreast of Scottish cultural politics, but it will also be of interest to Victorian periodicals scholars, who will appreciate its continuation of the important but largely forgotten Scots Renascence journal of the same name, which appeared in four numbers in 1895 and 1896. The historical Evergreen, founded and edited by pioneering sociologist and activist Patrick Geddes, with the assistance of William Sharp, evoked in its title [End Page 437] Allan Ramsay’s eponymous anthology of Scots poetry that was intended to reinstate a Scottish poetic tradition dating to before the 1707 Act of Union. The journal focused on local traditions and the social exigencies of specific locations in Scotland and abroad, and it developed a strand of applied sociology designated as “civics,” which informed the work of Geddes and his followers in urban planning, public sanitation, and cultural politics. This new Evergreen also intends to contribute to the well-being of its own community by dedicating its proceeds to the Edinburgh Old Town Development Trust, an organization committed to the renovation of the Scottish capital’s ancient centre as a “living city.” Editor Sean Bradley clarifies in the preface that “as Scotland debates what kind of country it wants to be, the Evergreen prompts a shifting of the question to our neighbourhoods: what kind of places do we want to live in? And what are we prepared to do about it?” (7).

This political mission is reflected in an integrated design aesthetic. Like other so-called “little magazines” of its time, the historical Evergreen adhered to the contemporaneous artisan and collectivist aesthetic associated with the Arts and Crafts movement and its nearest Scottish counterpart, the Glasgow School. This showed from its appearance as a “book beautiful,” complete with morocco bindings, elaborate decorative devices, and impeccable letterpress, all designed by artists from within the coterie that produced the magazine.

The “new season,” with its print in two colours between green cloth boards, also has a conceptual presentation recalling the design of the original; however, thanks to a more modern layout, it avoids fetishizing the past. It includes illustrations and stand-alone visual art in the form of drawings and photographs connected to Edinburgh, as well as poems and impressionistic causeries, short pieces on ongoing projects improving life in the Old Town, and essays. There are many references to the precursor but always with an awareness of the problems and opportunities of the present. Despite its unapologetic localism, the “new season” also builds on the example of the original by not just drawing from the foisons of Scotland. Sudanese-born novelist Leila Aboulela addresses challenges faced by immigrants, and with authors from or based in Northern Ireland, England, Italy, and the United States, the magazine demonstrates its openness to contributors from outside of Scotland who contend with their own sense of place.

An important aspect of Geddes’s ideal of “civics” was that it required a resolution of the purportedly false opposition between the cultivation of aesthetic responsiveness and of scientific knowledge, and in the historical Evergreen the boundaries between academic exposition and literary or visual-artistic expression were continuously called into question. The “new [End Page 438] season” has few strictly...