Modern Babylon

Modern Babylon is Wedderburn’s apocalyptic name for Glasgow, a city he presents as the material engine of the British Empire and the setting for Godwin Bysshe Baxter’s alleged demonic power. The phrase gathers industrial history, biblical imagery, and sexual accusation into a single theory: what looks like scientific progress is, in Wedderburn’s account, evidence of a vast spiritual conspiracy. Its elaborate proofs reveal less a coherent explanation than the fevered logic of a man trying to make his humiliation mean something.

The accusation behind the name

Wedderburn addresses Baxter as the hidden power behind a series of women whom he treats as successive appearances of the same destructive figure. He names Eve, Delilah, Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Salome, then connects Bella Baxter to Madame de Maintenon, Clementina Walkinshaw, and Jean Armour. General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington’s wife, Victoria Hattersley, completes the modern pattern. Wedderburn calls this recurring woman the White Daemon and casts her as the destroyer of men’s honour and manhood; Bella, he claims, came to him in that guise.

The accusation then shifts its centre of gravity. The women, Wedderburn argues, are not independent sources of evil but puppets and tools of a darker power. He identifies Baxter as that power: a material scientist who, in Wedderburn’s account, manipulates Bella and gains wealth and respect through disturbing work with human brains, morgues, and the deathbeds of the poor. Modern Babylon names the world that makes such a figure possible. Wedderburn imagines an older Scotland as a spiritual nation in which Baxter would have been burned as a warlock, setting that imagined past against a modern Glasgow ruled by science and material power.

A city turned into evidence

Wedderburn builds his case by treating ordinary details as prophetic signs. He points to Baxter’s home at 18 Park Circus and adds its digits—six, six, and six—to produce the number of the Beast. Bella’s fondness for red becomes proof that the Beast supports a woman clothed in scarlet. The moves are simple, but their accumulation gives the accusation the appearance of a numbered demonstration: a street address and a preference in clothing are made to confirm a cosmic plot.

Glasgow’s landscape supplies another item in the catalogue. Wedderburn says the Beast has seven heads, glossing them as seven protrusions, then argues that the image fits Glasgow because the city is built on seven hills. He lists Golf Hill, Balmano Brae, Blythswood Hill, Garnet Hill, Partick Hill, Gilmore Hill, and Woodlands Hill. The last two details sharpen the personal edge of the argument: Gilmore Hill is crowned by the University, while Woodlands Hill is crowned by Park Circus, where Wedderburn says Baxter sacrificed him to the Scarlet Whore of Modern Babylon. The city’s topography becomes, in his telling, both a scriptural clue and the geography of his own injury.

Glasgow as material empire

The phrase also enlarges from a city into a theory of imperial power. Wedderburn describes Babylon as the ancient world’s greatest material empire and identifies the British Empire as the greatest empire the world has known. He calls it wholly material because it rests on industry, trade, and military might, then claims Glasgow as its place of invention. The city’s industrial and intellectual associations become supporting exhibits: James Watt is linked to steam engines driving trains and fleets; Adam Smith to modern capitalism; and Sir William Thomson to the telegraph cables binding the empire across the oceans and to future diesel-electric engines.

That account gathers distinct kinds of power—manufacturing, commerce, military force, economic theory, and communications—under one accusation. Wedderburn treats their reach not as evidence of progress but as evidence that the empire has displaced spiritual life with material mastery. He even draws a contrast between Glasgow and the monarch’s preference for Edinburgh and Balmoral, while invoking the Grand Duke Alexis’s praise of Glasgow as a centre of intelligence. The contrast does not settle his case; it shows how he recruits both civic pride and outside judgment into a reading in which Glasgow’s prominence is itself suspicious.

Mystery and the limits of the proof

Wedderburn calls the Beast and the woman it supports Mystery, then points to chemistry, electricity, and anatomy as mysteries to nearly everyone except Baxter. The word bridges the biblical and the scientific: knowledge that ordinary people cannot understand becomes, in Wedderburn’s rhetoric, a sign of occult authority. His challenge to Baxter to examine the proofs coldly and logically is therefore deeply ironic. The numbered argument adopts the posture of rational inquiry while making an address number, a colour preference, and a list of hills carry the weight of prophecy.

The final image of a golden cup full of abominations exposes a limit even Wedderburn cannot overcome. He admits that he does not know what the cup corresponds to in the present, since Bella disliked wine and spirits, and proposes that he and Baxter might discuss the matter calmly. His certainty about the Beast thus reaches a conspicuous blank: the symbol demands a modern equivalent, but he cannot supply one. Modern Babylon holds together that tension between grand explanation and improvised evidence. It is at once Wedderburn’s name for an empire of industry and the architecture of his accusation against Baxter, with Glasgow’s real places made to bear a private, increasingly strained mythology.