Literary Communities and Commemorations in the Edinburgh Cape Club

Abstract This article examines the roles of literature and poets in Edinburgh's Cape Club towards the end of the eighteenth century. It examines the club's manuscript collection of songs and poems, including a long narrative poem on its history entitled ‘The Capeiad’, to demonstrate that literature had simultaneously celebratory, commemorative and moralistic functions within the Cape's private world. It analyses the club's yearly literary ‘jubilees’, which memorialise James Thomson, author of The Seasons , and William Shakespeare, to reveal the literary networks at play in the Cape, thereby demonstrating that literature is central to its community.