The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

His Dumfries years led not only to his attempt to send carronades to the French Revolutionaries but, as we now know, to his membership of the Dumfries cell of The Friends of the People. By this time he was not only under scrutiny by his masters in The Excise but by Robert Dundas’s extensive security apparatus centred in Edinburgh and reporting to London. Little wonder that after the 1793–4 Sedition Trials Burns should write:

      The shrinking Bard adown an alley sculks

      And dreads a meeting worse than Woolwich hulks

      Tho’ there his heresies in Church and State

      Might well award him Muir and Palmer’s fate …

      Given the poetry and the letters with this mass of corroborative contextual historical evidence from within and without Scotland, it is hard to understand why not only in current Scottish popular culture but, indeed, in significant elements of Scottish academic culture, there is still a persistent compulsion to downplay, even deny, the revolutionary Burns. One cannot imagine kindred spirits like Blake or Shelley being so treated. One tangible reason for the denial is due to the fact that we will never be able to retrieve the full volume of radical writing in the 1790s. Key newspapers, such as The Glasgow Advertiser 1795–7, are irretrievably lost. Governmental scrutiny was intensive against radicals and the postal system monitored to such a degree that communication was furtive and restricted. To corroborate Burns’s radicalism further, he himself was wholly aware of this factor. As he wrote to Patrick Millar in March 1794:

      —Nay, if Mr Perry, whose honor, after your character of him I cannot doubt, if he will give me an Adress & channel by which anything will come safe from these spies with which he may be certain that his correspondence is beset, I will now & then send him any bagatelle that I may write.— … but against the days of Peace, which Heaven send soon, my little assistance may perhaps fill up an idle column of a Newspaper.— I have long had it in my head to try my hand in the way of Prose Essays, which I propose sending into the World through the medium of some Newspaper; and should these be worth his while, to these Mr Perry shall be welcome; & my reward shall be, his treating me with his paper, which, by the bye, to anybody who has the least relish for Wit, is a high treat indeed.

      In the general implosion of British radical writing culture under governmental pressure, the loss of Burns’s political writings was particularly severe due, as we shall see, to the panic surrounding his premature death at the darkest point of the 1790s.

While significant, however, the denial of Burns’s radicalism is not essentially based on missing texts. The denial of Burns’s actual politics is much more multiform and historically protracted than that. As we shall see, the after-shock of the revolutionary, even insurrectionary, activities of the 1790s was so colossal that it extended deep into the nineteenth century. It was particularly severely felt in Scotland. What we see, then, in Victorian Scotland is Burns, with oceans of whisky and mountains of haggis, being converted into an iconic national figure by a nation in almost complete denial of the political values he stood for. Editorial and critical work inevitably reflected this absurdity with activities which included sanitising, suppressing and trivialising any evidence, textual and otherwise, contrary to the travesty they were creating. Edward Dowden in his seminal The French Revolution and English Literature, written at the end of the nineteenth century, included Burns among writers so affected. If for English radical writers, this book marked the beginning of mature, objective scholarship regarding the reality of their engagement with the political issues of the 1790s, this was ignored by Scottish Burns scholars. Hugh Blair’s remark that ‘Burns’s politics always smell of the smithy’ held sway with almost all subsequent commentators. Indeed, in the early twentieth century W.P. Ker designated Burns as a Tory Unionist. Heroic efforts in the 1930s by that greatest of Burns scholars and critics, tellingly American, Professor De Lancey Ferguson, ended in bitter comments such as his attempt properly to locate Burns in history had been met in Scotland with ‘passionate apathy’. Insofar as Burns was permitted to express political values, the critical strategy was either to claim that his political poems either did not meet their tests of aesthetic quality or that such poetry expressed confusion. These tactics persist. Dr James Mackay has recently noted that ‘Burns’s politics were … never less than moderately confused …’8 Dr Mackay’s opinion is hardly one to cause surprise since essentially his biography presents no advance on the nineteenth-century criticism of Burns but, in fact, is extensively based on and partly plagiarised from nineteenth-century published biographical sources.

      Such assertions of confusion are grounded on ignorance of the radical tradition within which Burns was operating. A coherent tradition dating from the Civil War, British radical thought in the latter stages of the eighteenth century combined Scottish and English elements in alternating proportions. Burns is not to be understood as some sort of barely rational political oddity. With Blake, he is a central poet of a long established revolutionary vision. Consciously or otherwise, the vast bulk of Burns criticism has detached him from his proper intellectual, cultural and political context so that, an isolated figure, his politics can be seen as subjective, whimsical, even eccentric. In proper context, he is wholly different. Much of this, of course, smacks of a bourgeois condescension to not only Burns’s class status but also the actual power of poetry itself. Poetry is not, for such minds, ‘hard’ knowledge. Burns himself constantly stresses the ‘bedlamite’ tendencies of the poetic personality but he never confused the turmoil and travails of the process of poetic productivity with the absolute perfection of the formal and linguistic nature of the poetic product. Also what we see constantly in his letters is a polemical and dialectical skill based on a wholly coherent grasp of the key intellectual issues of his age. Maria Riddell was not alone in thinking him an even greater conversationalist than poet. Never granted a public stage, his extraordinary prose suggests he would have been among the greatest in that arguably greatest of rhetorical ages.

      Painful reality taught Burns economics, but he was not only aware of Adam Smith’s sentimental theories but his economic ones. As he wrote of his current reading to Robert Graham in 1789:

      By and by the excise-instructions you mentioned were not in the bundle.— But ’tis no matter; Marshall in his Yorkshire, & particularly that extraordinary man, Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, find my leisure employment enough.— I could not have given any mere man credit for half the intelligence Mr Smith discovers in the book. I would covet much to have his ideas respecting the present state of some quarters of the world that are or have been the scenes of considerable revolutions since his book was written.

Central to the ‘considerable revolutions’ that had taken place was Burns’s chastened experience that the manifest increase in wealth in the latter part of the century was not accompanied by any growth in equitable distribution. All boats were certainly not rising on this flood tide of new wealth. As David Cannadine has cogently pointed out there was throughout Burns’s adult life an intense massification of wealth among the aristocracy both by carefully calculated pan-British marriages and their capacity to insert themselves in the burgeoning civil and military offices of a state expanding to meet its ultimate conflict with France.9 Nor did the initially reformist middle-class, the ‘stately stupidity of self-sufficient Squires or the luxuriant insolence of upstart “Nabobs”’, offer the people political and financial hope. Thus in The Heron Ballads, Burns lifts a stone on Scottish provincial life to reveal a bourgeois world replete with sexual but mainly fiscal chicanery. His vision of the entrepreneurial personality is significantly close to John Galt. Indeed, his vision of crime and Edinburgh makes him a precursor of R.L. Stevenson. Indeed, even Stevenson never wrote anything quite of this order about his loved and loathed Edinburgh —the letter is to Peter Hill, the Edinburgh bookseller, a correspondent who always evoked his most extraordinary rhetorical salvoes:

      I will make no excuses my dear Bibliopolus, (God forgive me for murdering language) that I have sat down to write to you on this vile paper, stained with the sanguinary scores of ‘thae curst horse leeches o’ th’ Excise’. —It is economy, Sir; it is that cardinal virtue, Prudence; so I beg you will sit down & either compose or borrow a panegyric