Edinburgh, Scotland
In modern times Edinburgh has been the capital and the chief cultural
force of Scotland. During the eighteenth
century, particularly because of the eminence of the faculty of the
University of Edinburgh, the city was the seat of the Scottish
Enlightenment. It was at this time that most of the "New Town" was
constructed -- the fashionable buildings built on wide, geometrical
thoroughfares in the eighteenth century contrast sharply with the
labyrinthine streets of the medieval Old Town.
At the time of the publication of Frankenstein this intellectual
vigor continued to flourish, with two of the major periodicals published
in Great Britain -- Blackwood's Monthly Magazine and the
Edinburgh Review -- and many literary luminaries, Walter Scott in particular, as centers of
gravity.
