Although the ‘romance’ of the Highlands loomed large in the imagination of visiting royalty and aristocracy in the late-Victorian era, the reality for many of the inhabitants was extensive poverty and squalor. In the aftermath of the potato blight years of 1846 and 1847, much of north-west Scotland was left destitute. Added to this, sheep prices plummeted and landlords turned to the creation of more lucrative deer forests to provide the space for visiting hunters. Emigration, clearances and the push and pull of economic pressures led to a falling population. Between 1851 and 1901 there was a 10 per cent fall in population in the four northern counties of Caithness, Sutherland, Ross & Cromarty and Inverness. Although in decline outside the North-west, Gaelic was still the everyday language for many, before schools were used to try to eradicate it. Despite this, the Highlands were able to sustain an extraordinary number of newspapers in the period.
With a population of around 13,000 in the 1850s, Inverness was by far the largest town in the Highlands, and it was an anglicised town within a still extensively Gaelic hinterland. By 1850 the four-page Inverness Courier & General Advertiser for the Counties of Inverness, Ross, Moray, Nairn, Cromarty, Sutherland and Caithness was well established as the main Highland newspaper, with an average of 1,900 stamped copies per week. In 1847 it had seen off the earlier Inverness Journal that had existed since 1807. Partly owned and edited by Robert Carruthers since 1831, the Courier, which had first appeared in 1817, the same year as the Scotsman, had a wide reputation for its coverage of literature. Thanks to Carruthers's extensive and perceptive reviews, it attracted attention well beyond the Highlands, and Archibald Forbes, the well-known war correspondent of the London Daily News, described it as the most scholarly provincial newspaper in the UK.
Carruthers, a native of Dumfries, who had first come to the paper in 1828 from a teaching job in Huntingdon, combined his editorship with a continuing literary output. He was largely responsible for much of the material in Robert Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature in 1844 and he subsequently edited and revised the second and third editions. He contributed a number of pieces to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in 1853 produced a Life of Alexander Pope.