My Old Portfolio

My Old Portfolio is a collection of shorter prose pieces by Henry Glassford Bell, the Scottish lawyer, sheriff, biographer, and poet who lived from 1803 to 1874. The title suggests the character of the volume. These are pieces gathered together from across many years of occasional writing, the kinds of essays and sketches that a literary man of the period might produce for the better Edinburgh magazines and that he eventually collected together when there was enough to make a small book.

The contents mix various kinds of shorter prose that nineteenth century readers expected from a collection of this kind. There are essays on historical subjects, drawing on Bell’s serious interest in Scottish history that produced his more substantial biography of Mary Queen of Scots. There are sketches of Edinburgh personalities and Edinburgh literary life, of the kind that would later be more systematically gathered in books like Lord Cockburn’s Memorials. There are brief travel pieces about Scottish places Bell had visited in his capacity as sheriff or as a private gentleman. There are critical and reflective pieces on literature, including some on Scott and Burns and the major Scottish writers of the previous generation whose work Bell had grown up admiring.

The writing reflects Bell’s combination of legal training, literary cultivation, and Scottish national feeling that gave his work its particular character. The pieces are generally clear and well constructed without being especially original in their views. Bell was a competent and intelligent literary man of the second rank, who knew the major figures of his time, who participated in the substantial cultural life of mid nineteenth century Edinburgh, and who produced solid useful work without making any major contribution to literature in his own right.

The book is short, perhaps two hundred pages, and is best dipped into rather than read straight through. For readers interested in the Edinburgh literary scene of the second quarter of the nineteenth century and in the kinds of secondary literary figures who supported the major writers of the period, this is a useful example. It pairs naturally with the Edinburgh memoirs and reminiscence literature of Lord Cockburn, Andrew Lang, and others who recorded the same cultural milieu in their own books.