Dundee, standing on the north bank of the Firth of Tay near its mouth, was already, by the close of the eighteenth century, the effective capital of Angus, though historically administered as part of that county rather than as a separate jurisdiction. An eighteenth-century survey recorded a busy town of some 24,000 people, its harbour handling around nine thousand tons of shipping in a brisk trade of linen, thread, leather, glass, tobacco and snuff, the wealth of the place immediately apparent to any visitor approaching the town Cross along its two principal streets, the Overgate and Nethergate.
At the town's centre stood the Cross Church, a lofty Gothic tower forming part of a foundation dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the twelfth century, one of the oldest and most striking buildings in Dundee even as newer civic structures, including a New Church and an elegant Town House displaying a portrait of the long-serving local Member of Parliament George Dempster, rose around it. Broughty Castle, a ruined fort east of the town built to guard the mouth of the Tay, and the Law, a green hill to the north still bearing traces of ancient fortification and commanding a wide prospect over the whole district, framed the town's approaches.
Dundee's native sons already included Admiral Lord Duncan, celebrated for his naval victory at Camperdown, and the jurist Alexander Wedderburn, later Lord Loughborough and Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, a roll of distinguished figures that anticipated the town's rapid growth into one of the great industrial cities of Victorian Scotland, built in the following century on jute, jam and journalism rather than the linen and tobacco trades that had already made it, in 1799, the wealthiest town on the Tay.