‘I am a borderer […] between two generations’, announces Chrystal Croftangry in the early stretches of Scott's 1827 Chronicles of the Canongate. Living at the ‘threshold’ of ‘the two extremities of the moral world’, sandwiched between Edinburgh and the neighbouring wilderness, he has a vantage-point on history as improvement, which is expressed via competing versions of time: ‘one exhibiting the full tide of existence, pressing and precipitating itself forward […] the other resembling some time-worn anchorite, […] silent and uninvolved’ (pp. 51–2). This dual perspective shapes the text, for example in Croftangry's opinion of modern travel: ‘I like mail-coaches, and I hate them.’ Though convenient, mail-coaches cultivate ‘abominably selfish’ passengers and wear away ‘originality of character’ by ‘setting the whole world a-gadding’ – they are a form of ‘retrograde to barbarism’ (pp. 29–30). Traversing Britain's upgraded road network, the mail-coach becomes a measure of history, of time itself. In his classic essay on the subject, E. P. Thompson traces the rise of ‘clock time’ as an integral feature of modernisation, with time being mapped on to money ever more efficiently. This is a history to which ‘habitual customers’ of Croftangry's mail-coach seem especially subject. ‘Their only point of interest on the road is to save time’, he explains, ‘and see whether the coach keeps the hour’. They are blinkered by a new temporal economy marked by the rotations of the coach's wheels. In fact, this ‘flying chariot’ economises both time and space, ‘rattling’ around the country, allowing ‘only twenty minutes’ for dinner, with its passengers ‘jingling against each other’ (pp. 29–30). Still, Croftangry is no primitivist. While he mourns changes to his lost family estate, which are in poor aesthetic taste and unproductively ‘naked’ (pp. 32–3), he regrets a missed opportunity there for the exercise of ‘care and improvement’ (p. 27). Improvement, then, is once again a plural field to be traversed with caution, its dialectical complexities eliciting no easy answers or glib value judgements. Such concerns were by 1827 firmly established in Scott's Waverley Novels, yet Chronicles accentuates this agenda.