A lantern and entryway in Weir's Close,1906, in a photograph by the Boston-born Alvin Langdon Coburn. Stevenson's description of Edinburgh deeply influenced Coburn's extensive photographs of the city; in his 1966 autobiography, Coburn wrote, ""For over fifty years I have followed lovingly in [Stevenson's] footsteps, endeavouring to see [Edinburgh] as I thought he saw it." Some of those footsteps are now untraceable: Weir's Close disappeared in renovations later in the century and no longer exists.
"Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence," Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish writer, wrote of Edinburgh in 1878. "It has long trances of the one and flashes of the other... it is half alive and half a monumental marble."
On Sept. 18, Scots voted to remain within the United Kingdom in the country's first-ever independence referendum. Had the results been different, Edinburgh would have become more than Stevenson ever imagined. The city would have been the capital of Western Europe's first 21st-century state, the seat of an independent government serving around 5 million people, setting taxes, directing a military. MORE
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