by Robert Burns
Forming a bachelors’ club and debating society at Tarbolton, young Robert became a Freemason, worked as a flax dresser in Irvine and enjoyed an active social and sexual life. He began to write poems, inspired to use Scots by the work of Robert Fergusson. His father’s illness, his debts, and a court case over his rent arrears brought the poet back to Lochlie and when William Burnes died in 1784, Robert and Gilbert took up a farm at nearby Mossgiel and found themselves supporting the family. By this time Burns was involved with Betty Paton, by whom he had a daughter, and Jean Armour was also pregnant. (She was to bear him two pairs of twins before he eventually married her in 1788.) During these years (1784–6) Burns wrote some his most famous poems, including many epistles to various friends, his attacks on religious hypocrisy in ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, his celebration of Rabelaisian energy in ‘The Holy Fair’ and ‘The Jolly Beggars’ and his subtle but scathing satire on social injustice ‘The Twa Dogs’. Creative or not, these were difficult and exhausting years and, faced with local scandal, nervous strain, unrewarding hard labour and rising debt, Burns considered emigrating to Jamaica. The success of his first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) did much to change his mind. This first ‘Kilmarnock edition’ sold out, it was praised by Henry Mackenzie, the most influential author and critic in Edinburgh, and a revised ‘Edinburgh Edition’ followed in 1787 to even greater acclaim, with an American edition published the following year.
Burns spent the winters of 1786–7 and 1787–8 in Edinburgh, lionised by society and the literary establishment, if largely misunderstood and sentimentalised by them as a ‘heaven-taught ploughman’. The winter of 1788 saw the start of a sentimental correspondence with Mrs Agnes McLehose in Edinburgh, remembered as ‘Clarinda’ in his letters from ‘Sylvander’. Despite his literary success, Burns found it difficult to get any money from his Edinburgh publisher, William Creech, and was still in need of a patron or a job. Having spent the summer months of these years touring the Borders and the Highlands, he took an interest in old Scots songs and this led to his writing, collecting and re-writing songs for Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803) and Thomson’s Select Scotish Airs (1793–1818), a major task to which he devoted himself for the rest of his life. The poet took up farming again at Ellisland in the summer of 1788, and set about training to be an Excise Officer. In the early 1790s, like Wordsworth, Coleridge and Mary Wollstonecraft, Burns supported the libertarian ideals of the French revolution. Such opinions were dangerous, however, when government informers were on the look-out for sedition and his verses to the radical press were often published either anonymously or under various pseudonyms. The farm at Ellisland was not a success, and in 1791 Burns moved to Dumfries where he took up the post of Excise Officer. These last years were times of considerable political and social unrest throughout Britain and in 1795 severe shortages and food riots broke out in Dumfries. Burns’s health was as uncertain as his finances. The poet’s weak heart was exacerbated by the medicines of the day and, fevered and fearing for the future of his family, he died at home on 21 July at the age of 37.
ANDREW NOBLE is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde. His books include The Art of Robert Burns edited and introduced with R.D.S. Jack (1982) and the uncollected Scottish criticism of Edwin Muir (1982). He has also edited and introduced critical studies of Robert Louis Stevenson (1983), as well as Stevenson’s account of his emigrant journey, From the Clyde to California (1985). An authority on Scottish cinema, he has written particuarly on Bill Douglas, A Lanternist’s Account, 1922.
PATRICK SCOTT HOGG is a native of rural Galloway and comes from a fishing family. After graduating in History (Stirling University) he took a postgraduate Diploma in Information Systems (University of Portsmouth). He returned to Scotland after a successful career in London publishing and lectured at Dumfries and Galloway College of Technology for three years. He is the author of Robert Burns: The Lost Poems (1997); has published essays in The Edinburgh Review, The Herald newspaper, The Burns Chronicle and most recently, in the American volume, Critical Essays on Robert Burns, edited by Prof Carol McGuirk (1998).
Copyright
First published as a Canongate Classic in the UK in 1995
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
Revised edition published simultaneously in the UK
and North America in 2003
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books Ltd
Introduction, glosses and notes copyright © Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg, 2001, 2003
All rights reserved
The editors wish to acknowledge research grants from The Carnegie and Leverhulme Trusts which helped make this book possible. Andrew Noble would also like to thank the Institute for Advanced Studies in The Humanities, University of Edinburgh for a Visiting Research Fellowship in 1990
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards the Canongate Classics series and a specific grant towards the publication of this volume
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 445 6
www.meetatthegate.com
