The Canongate Burns (151 page)

Robert Burns (1759–96) entered the world on 25 January as the first of William Burnes and Agnes Brown's seven children (four boys and three girls). Originally from Kincardineshire, Burnes worked as a gardener in Ayrshire where he also leased land as a tenant farmer and built a two-roomed cottage at Alloway. Burnes was not a successful farmer and had to struggle with harsh land and demanding factors first at Mount Oliphant and then at Lochlie farm at Tarbolton. Nevertheless, he aimed to give Robert and his brother Gilbert a decent education, sending them to village schools and making arrangements for Robert to spend some of the summer months studying French and Mathematics with his former teacher as tutor. By the age of fifteen Burns was widely read in English literature and considered something of a ‘prodigy' in French, but it seems likely that hard labour on the farm weakened his heart and eventually contributed to an early death.

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).