Edinburgh: Literary Lives and Landscapes E-Book

David Carroll

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 246

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Edinburgh enjoys a long and impressive literary heritage and can claim connections with some of the world's most famous writers. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott were all natives of the city, while Robert Burns, Charles Dickens, J.M. Barrie and Samuel Johnson were just a few of those who forged links with what William Cobbett described as 'the finest city in the kingdom'. Edinburgh has provided the setting for countless novels over the years, not least in more recent times with Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993). Nowadays, the city hosts its annual International Book Festival, when, for a couple of weeks every August, authors and visitors from far and wide flock to Charlotte Square Gardens for 'the biggest celebration of the written word in the world'. Published to coincide with the 21st Edinburgh International Book Festival, this work includes not only native Edinburgh authors but others on whom the city had a profound influence.

Leseprobe

EDINBURGH

Literary Lives & Landscapes

For Bernadette – with love

EDINBURGH

Literary Lives & Landscapes

DAVID CARROLL

First published in 2004 by Sutton Publishing.

This paperback edition published in 2011 by

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© David Carroll, 2004, 2011, 2013

The right of David Carroll to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5352 8

Original typesetting by The History Press

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

One

Boswell and Johnson: A Man led by a Bear

Two

Robert Burns: A Meteor Appearance

Three

Sir Walter Scott and His Own Romantic Town

Four

Thomas De Quincey: The Mouse in a Blizzard

Five

Thomas Carlyle: The Sage of Chelsea

Six

Charles Dickens: Coming Home

Seven

Robert Louis Stevenson: A Mind on Fire

Eight

W.E. Henley: A Trojan of Letters

Nine

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Doctor of Detection

Ten

J.M. Barrie: Apart from the Crowd

Eleven

Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon: Passing Bells

Twelve

An Edinburgh Review

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The Nineteenth Century

The Twentieth Century

Postscript

Edinburgh en Fête

Source Notes

Bibliography

PREFACE

Outside London, Edinburgh can surely boast the richest literary heritage of any major city in Britain. Standing on the sometimes windswept south bank of the Firth of Forth, and presided over by an ancient castle and the extinct volcano of Arthur’s Seat, the spacious Georgian streets and squares of Edinburgh’s New Town, coupled with the tenements and narrow wynds of its historic Old Town, have echoed down the centuries with the footsteps of world-famous native writers such as Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There have been many illustrious literary visitors too, including Samuel Johnson, Robert Burns and Charles Dickens. Meanwhile, other famous authors – Thomas Carlyle and J.M. Barrie among them – were drawn to the city in their youth to study at Edinburgh’s venerable university.

My aim in this book is to explore the lives of many of those writers who, over the years, have to a greater or lesser degree forged a link with Edinburgh and to demonstrate, where appropriate, how that connection influenced – or was reflected in – their work. The result, I hope the reader will agree, has been to throw some light on the literary landscape of what many people still regard as the most elegant of cities.

Before we proceed I must point out that anyone delving into Edinburgh’s literary heritage owes a great debt to the work of two authors in particular: Trevor Royle, whose Precipitous City appeared in 1980, and Andrew Lownie, whose Literary Companion to Edinburgh was re-issued in 2000.

I have received help from many quarters during the preparation of this book. I am particularly grateful to Joan Lingard and Jenny Brown for talking to me at some length about the history of the Edinburgh International Book Festival; to Sarah Bryce at Sutton Publishing for her guidance; to my wife Bernadette Walsh for the time she spent researching and typing on my behalf (and for suggesting many of the chapter titles); to Andrew Bethune of the City Libraries’ Edinburgh Room and Alan Shedlock of Napier University for locating archive photographs; to Ian Ball and Richard Stenlake for other photographic assistance; and to the staff of Lochthorn Library, Dumfries, for their unfailing help. Finally, this book was completed despite the distractions of Sam and Toby who, each in their own special way, hindered my progress at every turn.

David Carroll

Shieldhill, 2004

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the following for permission to quote extracts from copyright material:

‘What Images Return’ in Memoirs of a Modern Scotland (ed. Karl Miller, Faber & Faber, 1970), Curriculum Vitae (Constable, 1992) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Penguin, 1961), the respective publishers, Muriel Spark and David Higham Associates; The Greenwood Hat (Peter Davies, 1937), An Edinburgh Eleven (1889), Margaret Ogilvy (1896), Letters of J.M. Barrie (ed. Viola Meynell, Peter Davies, 1942), speeches made by J.M. Barrie in 1896 and 1926, an article written by J.M. Barrie for the Nottingham Journal in 1883, a letter from J.M. Barrie to Sylvia Llewelyn Davies in 1909 and Portrait of Barrie (James Barrie, 1954) by Lady Cynthia Asquith, Samuel French Ltd on behalf of the Estate of J.M. Barrie; Rebecca West. A Life (1987), Victoria Glendinning and Weidenfeld & Nicolson; Lives of the Poets (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), Michael Schmidt © Michael Schmidt 1998; Compton Mackenzie: A Life, Andro Linklater (Chatto & Windus, 1987), used by permission of the Random House Group Ltd; The Journal of Sir Walter Scott (ed. W.E.K. Anderson, 1972), reprinted by permission of the editor and Oxford University Press; James Boswell’s Edinburgh Journals 1767–86 (ed. Hugh M. Milne, 2001 edn), Mercat Press Ltd; John Buchan by His Wife and Friends (ed. Lady Tweedsmuir, Hodder & Stoughton, 1947), Memory Hold-the-Door, John Buchan (Hodder & Stoughton, 1940), A.P. Watt Ltd on behalf of the Lord Tweedsmuir and Jean, Lady Tweedsmuir; ‘Man and Roy’ in Scotland on Sunday (August 2002), Roy Hattersley; The Kiss (2002), Joan Lingard and Allison & Busby, London; The Judge by Rebecca West (Copyright © Rebecca West, 1922), by permission of PFD on behalf of the Estate of Rebecca West; Edinburgh by Eric Linklater (Copyright © Eric Linklater 1960), by permission of PFD on behalf of the Estate of Eric Linklater; lines from ‘Edinburgh Courtyard in July’ and ‘Milne’s Bar’ from Collected Poems by Norman MacCaig (Chatto & Windus, 1985), reproduced by permission of Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd; Wilfred Owen, Jon Stallworthy (OUP, 1977 edn) and Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters (ed. Harold Owen and John Bell, OUP, 1967), reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press; J.A. Froude’s Life of Carlyle (ed. John Clubbe, 1979), John Murray (Publishers) Ltd; My Life and Times: Octave Ten, Compton Mackenzie (Chatto & Windus, 1971), the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Compton Mackenzie; Siegfried’s Journey (Faber & Faber, 1945), Sherston’s Progress (Faber & Faber, 1936) and an extract from Siegfried Sassoon’s 1917 Declaration, Copyright Siegfried Sassoon, by kind permission of George Sassoon; Claire Harman’s essay on Robert Louis Stevenson in Writers and their Houses (ed. Kate Marsh, Hamish Hamilton, 1993), The Penguin Group (UK); Charles Dickens, Una Pope-Hennessy (Chatto & Windus, 1945), used by permission of the Random House Group Ltd; The Carlyles at Home, Thea Holme (OUP, 1979 edn), reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press; the editor of The Bookseller for an extract from Tony Gould Davies’s letter in the issue dated 15 January 1983. Attempts to trace the copyright holder of A Flame in Sunlight, Edward Sackville-West (Cassell & Co. 1936) and of The Story of J.M.B., Denis MacKail (Peter Davies, 1941) have proved unsuccessful. Any omissions from the above list are entirely unintentional, and I would be pleased to rectify them (upon notification) in any subsequent edition of this work.

one

BOSWELL AND JOHNSON

A Man led by a Bear

On 16 May 1763, during one of his frequent and protracted visits to London, the future biographer James Boswell was visiting the Russell Street bookshop owned by his actor friend Thomas Davies in the Covent Garden district of the capital, when in through the doorway stepped the illustrious Samuel Johnson, thus setting in train one of the most celebrated of literary friendships in the entire history of English letters. Nearly two and a half centuries later their names are still inextricably linked – Boswell’s peerless biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, has been regarded as a literary masterpiece ever since its first appearance in 1791 – but, on the face of it, this was one of the unlikeliest of liaisons: the 22-year-old offspring of a landed Ayrshire family falling under the spell of the Staffordshire bookseller’s son who was more than thirty years his senior.

At the time of their first meeting, Lichfield-born Johnson was already a considerable literary celebrity, following the publication of his ground-breaking Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, a work of enormous scholarship and erudition that had taken him nearly ten years to complete. He was also a poet, critic, biographer, and a dauntingly prolific essayist.

Boswell, on the other hand, had still to make his way in the world. Born on 29 October 1740 in Edinburgh’s Parliament Close (later renamed Parliament Square), which lies at the rear of St Giles’s Cathedral, he was educated at James Mundell’s school in the nearby West Bow but with the added advantage of having private tutors at home. Boyhood illness had sent him south to Dumfriesshire and the famous eighteenth-century spa resort of Moffat which, in those days, was firmly established as ‘the Cheltenham of Scotland’. Here, for better or worse, the young Boswell duly ‘took the waters’ (which, according to one local guide book, tasted like ‘the scourings of a foul gun’).

The Edinburgh of Boswell’s day was much smaller, of course, than the present city. Although the area now known as the New Town, to the north of Princes Street, had begun to be developed during Boswell’s lifetime, he was born and grew up in the Old Town. This was a district characterised by tenement buildings and narrow streets and wynds that, in the early eighteenth century, even the mildest of critics would have been forced to describe on the whole as crowded, smoky and above all noisome. ‘The city suffers infinite disadvantages’, noted Daniel Defoe in his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), after visiting Edinburgh in the early 1700s, ‘and lies under such scandalous inconveniences as are, by its enemies, made a subject of scorn and reproach; as if people were not as willing to live sweet and clean as other natives, but delighted in stench and nastiness . . . Though many cities have more people in them, yet, I believe, this may be said with truth, that in no city in the world so many people live in so little room as at Edinburgh.’1

Captain Edward Topham, an army officer serving in the Guards, visited Edinburgh during 1774 and, in a series of letters written to his family at home in England, describes what he saw of the New Town taking shape. ‘The greatest part of the New Town is built after the manner of the English,’ he observed, ‘and the houses are what they call here “houses to themselves”. Though this mode of living, one would imagine, is much preferable to the former, yet such is the force of prejudice, that there are many people who prefer a little dark confined tenement on a sixth storey to the convenience of a whole house . . . In no town that I ever saw can such a contrast be found betwixt the ancient and modern architecture . . .’2

Although the age of Edinburgh’s great literary celebrity on the international stage – which perhaps reached its zenith with the reign of Sir Walter Scott – was a thing of the future when Boswell was growing up in the city, the poet Allan Ramsay was still alive (living in his octagonal retirement home nicknamed ‘Goose Pie House’ on Castlehill, where Ramsay Garden can be found today) and, from the group of Court poets who had flourished in Edinburgh during an earlier period, Boswell would have undoubtedly been familiar with the work of William Dunbar.

Little is known about Dunbar’s life, except that he was probably born in East Lothian in about 1460 and educated at St Andrews University. He certainly became a well-travelled man for his time, visiting the Courts of England and France and, according to his late nineteenth-century biographer, Oliphant Smeaton, ‘. . . travelling all over Europe from the banks of the Tiber . . . to those of “cauld Norway over the faem” . . .’ But, as Smeaton continues, ‘Like Samuel Johnson towards Fleet Street, William Dunbar considered the High Street and the Canongate of Edinburgh the fairest spots on earth . . . and to [him] the scenes which he daily witnessed in the busy, dirty, crowded malodorous streets of the capital . . . had a charm infinitely more fascinating than the matin-song of birds, heard in some leafy grove, [or] than the slumber of the summer sunshine on the green Pentland slopes, over which the cloud-shadows flitted like the voiceless spirits of the past . . .’3

Dunbar’s most famous work was possibly ‘The Thrissil and the Rois’ (1503), an allegorical poem relating to the marriage of Margaret Tudor and James IV, but his hard-hitting ‘Address to the Merchants of Edinburgh’ evokes the city he loved so well:

Quhy will ye merchantis of renoun,

Lat Edinburgh, your nobil toun,

For laik of reformatioun

The commone proffeitt tyine and fame?

Think ye not schame,

That onie uther regioun

Sall with dishonour hurt your name . . .

By the time he met Johnson, Boswell had been a student at both Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities, and was then studying the law under the supervision of his father, the Scottish judge Lord Auchinleck (the name derived from the family estate), although his heart leaned more towards literature and the theatre. He had already started to write and publish ephemeral verses, and had also befriended a number of actors and writers. These included Thomas Davies, the Russell Street bookseller, and, by coincidence, one of Johnson’s former pupils from his early days as a schoolmaster, the actor David Garrick. As Davies and Johnson were friends, it is not entirely surprising that the great man should put in an appearance at the bookshop while Boswell was present.

At first, Boswell was made slightly apprehensive by the knowledge that Johnson harboured a prejudice against Scotland and its people, but in the event this proved no barrier to their forming a friendship. ‘I was highly pleased with the extraordinary vigour of [Johnson’s] conversation,’ Boswell confided to his journal after their initial meeting, ‘and had ventured to make an observation now and again which he received very civilly; so that I was satisfied that though there was a roughness in his manner, there was no ill-nature in his disposition. Davies followed me to the door and when I complained to him a little of the hard blows which the great man had given me [on account of being Scottish] he kindly took upon him to console me by saying, “Don’t be uneasy. I can see he likes you very well.”’ Boswell also described Johnson’s ‘most dreadful appearance . . . He is a very big man, is troubled with sore eyes, the palsy and the King’s Evil [scrofula]. He is very slovenly in his dress and speaks with a most uncouth voice. Yet his great knowledge and strength of expression command vast respect and render him very excellent company.’4

A few months later Boswell left London, bound for Holland. From there he travelled in Germany and subsequently visited Italy and Corsica before returning to Edinburgh in 1766 and passing his examination in Scots law. For almost the next twenty years he practised diligently in the city as an advocate at the Scottish Bar. In the meantime, however, he retained his keen interest in all things theatrical and literary and, during his almost annual visits to London, his friendship with the irascible Johnson strengthened. From almost the first time they met, Boswell had been urging the famous lexicographer to master his self-confessed antipathy to Scotland and come and view the country for himself. Ten years were to elapse, however, before Johnson could be finally prised from the taverns and coffee-houses that were among his favourite London haunts to make the long journey north in the summer of 1773; at the age of sixty-four it was the first time he had ventured so far from home.

By now, Boswell was married to his cousin Margaret Montgomerie and living in a well-appointed flat in James’s Court (the birthplace in the 1960s of the Traverse Theatre) in Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket. Their daughter, Veronica, was just five months old, but neither marriage nor the novelty of fatherhood had done much to change Boswell’s habitual lifestyle. His new status as a family man signally failed to dampen his casual interest in other women, nor did it curb his frequently recurring bouts of heavy drinking, as his diary from that period amply testifies. ‘A great deal of wine was drank [sic] today,’ runs one typical entry. ‘I swallowed about a bottle of port, which inflamed me much, the weather being hot . . . [Later] I devoured moor-fowl, and poured more port down my throat. I was sadly intoxicated.’ The following day’s entry is all too predictable. ‘I was very sick and had a severe headache, and lay between ten and eleven, when I grew better.’ On another occasion, after drinking heavily, ‘I ranged the street and followed whores . . .’, although contrition had set in by the next morning. ‘My riot had distressed me terribly . . . I was so ill today that I could not rise.’5

On 3 August 1773 Johnson informed Boswell: ‘I shall set out from London on Friday the sixth of this month, and purpose not to loiter much by the way. Which day I shall be at Edinburgh I cannot exactly tell. I suppose I must drive to an inn, and send a porter to find you . . .’6 Johnson was as good as his word and, after travelling by way of Berwick-upon-Tweed, he appeared in the late evening of Saturday 14 August at Boyd’s Inn off the Canongate. Boswell duly describes his friend’s long-awaited arrival in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), his account of their subsequent three months’ Scottish journey together: ‘I went to him directly. He embraced me cordially; and I exulted in the thought that I now had him actually in Caledonia . . . He was to do me the honour to lodge under my roof . . . and [we] walked arm-in-arm up the High Street to my house in James’s Court. It was a dusky night; I could not prevent his being assailed by the evening effluvia of Edinburgh. I heard a late baronet . . . observe that “walking the streets of Edinburgh at night was pretty perilous, and a good deal odoriferous.” The peril is much abated, by the care which the magistrates have taken to enforce the city laws against throwing foul water from the windows; but from the structure of the houses in the old town, which consist of many stories [sic], in each of which a different family lives, and there being no covered sewers, the odour still continues. A zealous Scotsman would have wished . . . Johnson to be without one of his five senses upon this occasion. As we marched slowly along he grumbled in my ear, “I smell you in the dark!” But he acknowledged that the breadth of the street, and the loftiness of the buildings on each side, made a noble appearance.’7

Edward Topham, who stayed in Edinburgh the following year, graphically described how, away from public view in the narrow wynds leading off the High Street, many citizens, despite the threat of fines or harsher punishments, persisted in defying the magistrates’ ruling. ‘Many an elegant suit of clothes has been spoiled,’ he lamented, ‘and many a well-dressed macaroni sent home for the evening and, to conclude . . . in Dr. Johnson’s own simple words “many a full-flowing periwig moistened into flaccidity.”’8

Johnson was a self-confessed ‘hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has, for many years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool; who, with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnights, and with tea welcomes the morning’.9 Bearing this in mind, Boswell had made certain that his wife would be ready with the teapot to welcome their distinguished guest on his arrival in a fashion that he would appreciate. ‘[Johnson] showed much complacency upon finding that the mistress of the house was so attentive to his singular habit,’ recorded Boswell, ‘and as no man could be more polite when he chose to be so, his address to her was most courteous and engaging . . .’10

The Boswells’ flat was a positive hive of activity during the four days that Johnson made it his headquarters before setting out with his friend on their long journey to the Hebrides. Johnson’s national celebrity meant that he was fêted wherever he went in the country and Edinburgh proved no exception. Johnson, much to Mrs Boswell’s dismay, it seems, was ‘at home’ to a constant stream of visitors, many of whom were drawn from Edinburgh’s literati, and who wished to pay their respects in person to the man who was widely known as ‘Dictionary Johnson’.

Mrs Boswell, it has been suggested (not least by Johnson himself), did not greatly relish the company of her husband’s highly respected friend, whose brief – but, as far as she was concerned, all too lengthy – presence could hardly have done other than to dominate the James’s Court flat. When at home in London, Johnson habitually lived in a state of domestic chaos; he was a large man whose ungainly body with its host of tics and involuntary movements was best given free rein in the great outdoors, rather than in the confines of someone else’s home. Not surprisingly, he jarred Mrs Boswell’s nerves and threw more than one spanner in the works of her domestic arrangements. His tendency to upset candles and spill wax on the carpets was, according to Boswell, the habit that annoyed her most of all.

It must have been the source of some relief to the beleaguered Mrs Boswell, therefore, when her husband occasionally winkled the portly Johnson out of their home to view some of Edinburgh’s finer sights, including the Parliament House, St Giles’s and, inevitably, the castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the last two being ports of call that no present-day tourist worth their salt would ever leave Edinburgh without visiting. Almost wherever Johnson went a knot of interested spectators gathered around him and followed where he led. Calling upon his deepest reserves of stamina, he also made his way to the top of Edinburgh’s tallest building, which was thirteen storeys high.

On the morning of Wednesday 18 August, Boswell and Johnson left Edinburgh at the start of their epic tour; one that would take them – among other places – as far north as the Moray Firth and westwards to the Inner Hebridean islands of Skye, Raasay and Coll. Their journey, frequently made over the roughest of terrain on foot and horseback, carried them to some of Britain’s wildest and most remote spots, before leading them back to Edinburgh three months later, on 9 November, when once again Johnson was billeted at his friend’s flat in James’s Court. This meant a further interlude of general disruption to her household for Mrs Boswell, and another procession of visitors dropping in and out all day long to see her famous guest, but she weathered the storm stoically if not altogether silently. In a widely quoted remark, she waspishly declared that she had ‘often seen a bear led by a man but I never before saw a man led by a bear’, an observation that leaves no doubt about her feelings on the subject of her husband’s friendship with Johnson.

The social whirl, of which Johnson formed the epicentre, continued unabated. ‘On the mornings when he breakfasted at my house,’ recorded Boswell, ‘he had, from ten o’clock till one or two, a constant levee of various persons, of very different characters and descriptions. I could not attend him, being obliged to be in the Court of Session; but my wife was so good as to devote the greater part of the morning to the endless task of pouring out tea for my friend and his visitors. Such was the disposition of his time at Edinburgh.’ Johnson complained at one stage of having been ‘harassed by invitations’ before acknowledging ‘how much worse it would have been if we had been neglected’.11

Johnson, perhaps keen to return to London before the worst weather of the winter set in, left Edinburgh in late November, never to return. Surprisingly, in his own account of his Scottish jaunt, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), he dismissed Edinburgh out of hand in the second paragraph as ‘a city too well known to admit description’.12

Boswell owes his literary celebrity to Dr Samuel Johnson. Captivated from the start of their acquaintance by his friend’s personality and unparalleled powers of conversation, the Edinburgh advocate had been gathering information and material for a possible biography ever since the occasion of their first meeting in 1763.

After Johnson’s departure from James’s Court, the two friends continued to meet in London from time to time just as before, while Boswell carried on practising the law in Edinburgh. However, following Johnson’s death in December 1784, Boswell’s work on his friend’s biography accelerated, and he devoted an increasing amount of his energy to assembling for the press the vast wealth of material that he had gathered over the years. Now spending much of his time in London, Boswell moved to the capital permanently in 1786, eventually settling at a house in what was then the fashionable quarter of Great Portland Street. Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson was finally published in 1791, just four years before its author’s death. Boswell’s infinitely painstaking labours over the book – ‘Let me only observe, as a specimen of my trouble,’ he wrote in the Introduction to its first edition, ‘that I have sometimes been obliged to run half over London in order to fix a date correctly’13 – were duly rewarded. For over two hundred years this celebrated biography has remained the benchmark of its kind. Boswell was the author of several other books, including his Account of Corsica (1768) and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), which gave readers a foretaste of the biography that was to come. He was a noted diarist and essayist (between 1777 and 1783 he contributed many articles to The London Magazine using the pseudonym ‘The Hypochondriak’), but his Life of Samuel Johnson remains his single greatest achievement.

‘[Boswell] had all the weaknesses that afflict mankind,’ concluded the novelist Eric Linklater. ‘He was vain and foolish, drunken and lecherous, an ardent snob – and despite his weaknesses, or because of them, he wrote with genius and created a masterpiece. Not many men have been quite as silly as Boswell; and very few have made such good use of their lives, or written so well.’14

two

ROBERT BURNS

A Meteor Appearance

Robert Burns was twenty-seven when he arrived in Edinburgh during the dark winter days of late November 1786. The celebrated first – or Kilmarnock – edition of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect had been published the previous July and had achieved instant popular success. The volume contained most of the poems for which he is best remembered today, including ‘The Holy Fair’ and ‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night’. Robert Heron, writing in June 1797, a year after the poet’s death, described how eleven years earlier ‘even plough-boys and maid-servants would have gladly bestowed the wages which they earned the most hardly . . . if they might but procure the works of Burns’.1

Burns’s popularity among the agricultural community should give no cause for surprise, because he spent the vast majority of his life involved in one way or another with farming, and he is frequently described and referred to as the ‘ploughman poet’. (One critic, following the publication of the Poems, dubbed him the ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’.)

Burns was born in January 1759 in a long low cottage (the ‘auld clay biggin’) with a thatched roof at Alloway, then a rural village but now on the southern fringe of Ayr. At the age of seven he moved with his family to Mount Oliphant, a farm to the south-east of Alloway. The poet’s brother, Gilbert, wrote later that ‘at the age of thirteen [Robert] assisted in threshing the crop of corn, and at fifteen was the principal labourer of the farm . . . I doubt not but the hard labour of this period of his life was in great measure the cause of that depression of spirits with which Robert was so often afflicted through his whole life afterwards.’2