Love Scotland podcast mini-series: Robert Burns

Transcript

Six speakers: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Bill Adair [BA]; Gerry Carruthers [GC]; Chris Waddell [CW]; David Purdie [DP]

[MV]
Love Scotland, brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
Just a few weeks ago, many of us welcomed in the new year with a rousing rendition of ‘Auld lang syne‘, a global anthem born from the pen of Robert Burns in 1788. And on 25 January we‘ll turn our attention to Burns once again, as plates of haggis, neeps and tatties, not to mention the odd dram of whisky, are eaten and drunk in celebration of Scotland‘s national poet.

To celebrate this month of Robert Burns, we‘ve gone deep inside the Love Scotland archives. You‘re about to hear one of three previously released episodes of the podcast about Burns‘s life, legacy and work. Make sure you‘re subscribed, so you don‘t miss any of the trio. And we‘ll be back in just a few short weeks with a brand new series of Love Scotland.

Until then, let‘s hear it for the bard!

[BA]
There’s nought but care on ev’ry han’, in ev’ry hour that passes, O
What signifies the life o’ man, An’ ‘twere na for the lasses, O.

[JB]
Robert Burns, the ploughman poet, born in 1759, died in 1796 aged just 37, but whose work during that short life resonates down the centuries. His words have inspired and influenced an incredibly diverse group of people, from William Wordsworth to Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King to J D Salinger, Abraham Lincoln to Nick Patrick, a NASA astronaut who took a book of Burns poetry into space. But who inspired and influenced Burns himself?

No matter how great the talents of an individual, there are always people, places and moments that feed into that genius. Well today, in an effort to cast some light on that, I’ve brought together a couple of people extremely well versed not only in the poetry of the Bard, but on his life and times.

Gerry Carruthers is Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, who has researched and written more pieces of work on Robert Burns than this podcast, quite frankly, has time to list. So, take my word for it! Is that a fair enough description, Gerry?

[GC]
That’s very kind. Thank you.

[JB]
He's joined by Chris Waddell, Learning Manager at Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, which is run by the National Trust for Scotland. The museum is not only the premier place to visit to get the overarching story of Burns’s life, but is a treasure trove of more than 5,000 Burns artefacts, including handwritten manuscripts and – a quote from Chris himself – ‘a pair of Burns’s scabby old socks’. Although you do add, Chris, that if your old socks are in a museum 250 years on, you must have made your mark! Have you examined said pair of socks?

[CW]
Intimately, yes, and they’re very scabby indeed, but they have the hint of celebrity about them. Absolutely.

[JB]
But very, very special. So, the premise of our chat today is loose, gentlemen. I asked you to give me a handful of names that you believe influenced Robert Burns. And from you I got some other poets, I got family members, I got educators. Again, a very diverse group. So, before we start, are any of those names acknowledged as influences by Burns himself, or are they results of retrospective analysis of his life and output? Gerry?

[GC]
I think, Jackie, you can find traces of all the names that Chris and I have given you in the work mentioned, or you can find direct lines of influence in other ways. In some cases, what we’re talking about is correspondence with people that’s now a bit lost, so we wish we had more. For instance, William Tytler, the man who basically schools Burns in Jacobite-ism, we pretty certainly know there is correspondence lost between the two; and if we had that correspondence, we would clearly know a lot more. William Tytler is the man who makes Burns think that the Scottish muses are all Jacobites, as he more or less says. And he is the man who, for instance, writes a book justifying Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been vilified as a female, a Stuart, the despotic Queen, a Catholic. And the revisionism that follows on, especially from Tytler, feeds into Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Frederick Schiller and indeed the kind of iconicity that we have with Mary today.

There’s one wee line where a historian, a lawyer, a song collector is a big influence on Burns and makes an impact on his creative output and his, if you like, Jacobite mentality, because people often wonder, where does that come from? Burns is a Presbyterian boy – how can he be a Jacobite? He makes that choice personally, but there are influences like Tytler and others who make him the Jacobite that he becomes, so to speak.

[JB]
Chris, what’s your view on the sources of the names that you have provided?

[CW]
As Gerry says, a lot of these are names that crop up in letters, but they crop up in poems as well. I mentioned Fergusson and Ramsay because they’re hugely important to Burns. They’re often thought of as a bit of a triumvirate, with Ramsay coming first. And there’s a bit of overlap between the three lives, then Fergusson in Edinburgh and then Burns following on.

And these are three guys who in many ways helped to preserve the Scots language at a time where it’s under threat because of the great political machinations of the 18th century. There’s a movement in Edinburgh contemporaneous with Burns where people are actively hoping to excise the Scottish-isms from their mode of speech. Hume was one of them. And yet here we have Burns lionised when he goes to Edinburgh in 1787 for using that very language and a very popular form of poetry. He’s standing on the shoulder of significant giants, Ramsay and Fergusson.

[JB]
Let’s talk a wee bit more about because we’ve already thrown three names into the mix, some of whom may be known to our listeners and some not. So, let’s talk about the poets that we’ve discussed. Allan Ramsay: now, he was dead before Burns was born. How and when would Burns have come across him?

[CW]
Well, Ramsay was genuinely very popular. There’s a thing about these three poets that’s been mentioned to me by a number of contemporary poets – they would love to have had the notoriety nowadays that Burns, Fergusson and Ramsay had in their own lifetimes. Ramsay sets out in, I have to say, a very prosaic way. He starts life in Leadhills. He goes to Edinburgh. He’s a wig maker and then a bookshop owner. But he starts to compose poetry. He’s the guy who really popularises the Habbie stanza – this stanza that’s the very heart of Scottish poetry. This wonderful rhythmic stanza that’s used again by Fergusson and ultimately by Burns to a degree, that eventually becomes known as the Burns stanza.

But Ramsay uses Scots, and he’s thoroughly unashamed of its use.

[JB]
Although Ramsay became a very successful wig maker, and we talked about Ramsay because he’s also the father of the portraitist Allan Ramsay, but he was lowly born. Is that something that Burns felt they had in common?

[GC]
It might be, but I think what’s really going on, Jackie, is that Burns in 1782 in Irvine is looking for an influence. At this point he’s largely writing poetry in English, but sometimes songs in Scots, and he discovers the poetry of Robert Fergusson. He already knows Ramsay and he thinks there’s Fergusson influenced by Ramsay. Ramsay is the governor. He’s the kind of godfather of Scots poetry, as Chris is indicating. But Fergusson in some ways is a miniaturist, writing more spectacular miniature pieces. Burns discovers Fergusson, begins to write in Scots in poetry from his discovery of Fergusson, and then increasingly reads back to Ramsay and finds also that Ramsay’s a song collector, which is a big influence again on the song collecting.

And the other thing that goes on there that’s very important is religion. Because Burns, he’s got form for speaking out against what he sees as the hardline Calvinists; both Ramsay and Fergusson have got that. And Ramsay does it in the context of Edinburgh where he’s against the Whigs. He’s the man who establishes the first real post-Reformation theatre in Edinburgh – doesn’t last long because the Calvinists don’t like it. He encourages portrait painting, including his son. In other words, he wants Scotland to be inculturated with poetry, with song, with painting, because, rightly or wrongly, he reads it as a puritanical place.

[JB]
So, tell me more about Fergusson, because Fergusson was a contemporary of Burns, who died at a terribly young age, 24?

[GC]
Robert Fergusson is a man who is schooled at the University of St Andrews and he comes out actually of a North East tradition – goes to school in Dundee. And the Scots poetry revival in men like Ramsay and Fergusson is associated as often as not with Episcopalians and Catholics and Jacobitism – and Burns is the man who makes it Presbyterian. Fergusson in some ways has more formal schooling than Burns, but Burns clearly identifies with him – ‘my elder brother in misfortune; my elder brother in the muse.’

And Burns, being a wee bit solipsistic at times, thinks ‘there’s a young dude that was writing poetry and dies tragically young; that’s a bit like me’. And he says that Fergusson and also Ramsay are guys he would like to aspire to. And it’s partly genuine. And it’s partly not genuine because ultimately Bums is a much better poet.

But it’s a modesty topos where they become part of his calling card and part of the context where he breezes into Presbyterian Ayrshire with his first collection and says, ‘right, we’re now going to do the Jacobite Scots poetry thing’. That’s part of the reason that a lot of people are quite hostile to Bums until the end of the 19th century, until they’re suitably able to forget about all those other denominational influences and begin to earth the Scots poetry revival as Presbyterian.

[JB]
Chris, did you want to add anything about Fergusson’s influence?

[CW]
Yeah, just that it’s massively important. Gerry mentions that North East influence and of course there’s an influence of that on Burns as well – his father is from Kincardineshire and the Mearns, Burns’s father. So, he hears the speak of the Mearns in his house in Alloway as he’s growing up. So, there’s this strong thread of a Doric influence going through both of them, even though Fergusson largely grows up in Edinburgh and Burns grows up in Ayrshire. They have this strong background in Aberdeenshire. And that brings with it, as Gerry points out, a whole raft of issues, not least issues that are political and religious as well as linguistic.

[JB]
Was Burns influenced by any female poets or writers?

[GC]
He’s not particularly influenced by any female poet. We’re talking Ramsay, Fergusson on the English side; we’re talking Milton, Dryden, Pope, more than any female. But what I would add in there, which is why I’ve chosen Lady Don, is that Burns has got a very astute sense of the intellectual females around him to whom he can send work, and they can help him finesse it, critique it, etc. The obvious person here is his confidante Mrs Dunlop, for instance. So, there’s a whole bunch of women where – I’m not quite claiming a feminist Burns, although I would almost go down that line – Burns likes talking to females with brains. He’s not remotely sexist in that sense.

[JB]
You mentioned religion a lot, and it does figure a lot in Burns’s work. And his father, is that where it came from? His father was, I think, Chris, in the information that you gave me, you say his zealous Presbyterianism both influenced and indeed caused friction with his son.

[CW]
Absolutely. Burns, like most of the people in that part of Scotland at that time, is a subscriber to the Kirk, to the Church of Scotland; it’s largely unavoidable. It’s this massive powerhouse institution that finds its way into people’s everyday lives, not least through things like the Kirk session, these kangaroo courts that are set up.

But Burns very early on starts to lock horns with the Kirk in a way that feeds into a lot of the scurrilous stuff that people love about Burns: the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. I could just point out there were no actual drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, but there was a moderate amount of sex. And Burns finds himself locking horns with a Kirk, being admonished by them, having to sit on the cutty stool in Mauchline.

And of course this is going to have an effect on his father. But there’s other things as well where the petty Presbyterianism of his father creeps in, such as Burns attending dancing classes in Tarbolton as a boy. Burns later writes that he attends these country dancing classes to give his manners a brush. It’s to meet the lassies of the parish as well; there’s no doubt about that. Although he wants to learn to dance, it’s a vital social skill in those days. His father objects to this bitterly, and there’s friction between them as a consequence.

But then again, it’s that same Presbyterian zeal, which manifests itself in a desire for learning, that gets Burns his initial education as well. When Burns is a boy, he and his brother Gilbert are sent off to the local school in Alloway. It closes within weeks due to a combination of financial pressures and the master moving out of the district. So William, who’s very, very active almost as a community leader, catalyses the local families to find a replacement tutor.

The people find this unusual when they approach Burns and they have this notion that he’s this great man of the people, but he has a tutor as well. The tutor was active in the community in teaching many of the children, but it’s driven by William. And that’s that zeal for learning that goes right back to John Knox and his proclamation that every parish in Scotland should have a parish school. That only comes about to lesser and greater degrees, depending on how successful it was locally.

But the Scots have this zeal for literacy. It’s seen as a godly trait to be able to read your Bible. Of course, when the Scots start reading their Bibles, the genie gets out of the bottle. They read anything that they can get their hands on, so that by the time of Burns, Scotland is arguably one of the most literate nations per capita in the world.

About eachy peachy with Sweden, incidentally – they’re Lutherans, we’re Calvinists – but it’s similar processes that have brought them to that point. So, William’s very much a supporter of education, of learning for the sheer beauty of it as a godly trait, and he instills that in Robert. The consequence is that this young man, John Murdoch, is engaged to teach the children in Alloway and to teach the Burns boys. And he’s only 18 when he’s interviewed and given the gig. He’s little more than a boy himself.

[JB]
OK, so before we go on though to John Murdoch, because that is one of your other chosen influencers, let’s not forget Burns’s mum. What part did she play in this? Tell me about her.

[GC]
Well, we don’t know as much as we might want to know about her, Jackie. And it’s the case that a lot of stuff is overly passed down, that supposedly she had a sweet singing voice. Maybe she did. That she and other family members like Betty Davidson, that no one quite knows exactly how she’s related to the Burns or the Burnesses, but she’s in the household – these are tradition bearers who probably are passing on stories and legends and songs.

[JB]
So, his mum was Agnes. Agnes Broun.

[CW]
Agnes Broun, yeah, and she’s a Maybole woman. And as Gerry says, there’s not a lot about her, but one has to assume that the way that Burns writes about the happiness of his youth and the fact that he comes from essentially a stable background, she has some bearing on holding the household together.

Burns’s sister writes about Agnes and describes her in fairly explicit terms. It’s a good-looking woman, a bit inclined to plumpness, I believe – for the 18th century, that’s a terribly politically correct term! Inclined to plumpness, but that she could also have a fierce temper. She also describes her as having light red hair, but dark brows and incredibly dark eyes. So, there’s elements there of a very strong physical link with Burns.

But she’s described as having a sweet singing voice. And of course, people sung all the time. These were the days when families actually spoke to each other, remarkably enough. But they also sung to each other. They would also recite poetry and tell stories. It wasn’t just a conversation-based entertainment of an evening. People entertained each other because it was all they had to do, other than reading their Bibles, of course. And even William would have relented on that occasionally.

[GC]
Agnes Broun had lost her own mother very young and was more or less a surrogate mother to her siblings from about the age of 11 or 12. Later on, she – a bit like Burns’s wife, Jean Armour – is very indulgent, very much into looking after Burns’s illegitimate kids. She’s very much a family woman. It’s slightly strange that Burns never writes to her, but that’s probably because her reading skills were limited; we know she had some. But a very powerful, very loving woman. I know that sounds traditional, but I think in some ways she represents an ideal that Burns always aspired to.

[JB]
Well, let’s take a break at this point, and when we come back, we’ll talk more about the people who have influenced the life and work of Robert Burns.

[MV]
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[JB]
Welcome back to the Love Scotland podcast where I’m joined by Professor Gerry Carruthers from the University of Glasgow and Chris Waddell from Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. Now, just before the break, we mentioned Robert Burns’s teacher John Murdoch. Many of us can single out a teacher who made an impact on our lives, and Burns was no different. Chris?

[CW]
Absolutely. Murdoch had a significant influence on Burns. They remained friends throughout Robert’s life. Murdoch actually, despite living in very reduced circumstances in London in the latter part of his life, makes it to the grand old age of 77. But he has to leave Ayrshire because of an almost comic element of scandal. He decries a local minister, Dalrymple, who’s actually the guy who christens Burns, isn’t he? He’s described as a great friend of the Burns family and he’s usually respected by Burns’s father. He’s described as ‘Dalrymple mild’ because of his more soft leanings as a moderate, as a new licht in the Church of Scotland.

But in a rather bizarre, possibly drink-fuelled, episode, the young John Murdoch – and this is the actions we bear in mind of a young man who’s perhaps speaking out of turn, because bear in mind he’s only 18 when he’s engaged to teach the Burns children – says some very scurrilous things about Dalrymple. These are picked up publicly. There’s a trial of sorts. And he has to leave. He goes then to London to try and make his fortune. He settles in Bloomsbury, the hub of all literary greatness in London, and for a wee while he makes something of a living teaching French there.

But then a little thing called the French Revolution happens, and suddenly London’s filled with people who can speak French and who can teach it clearly far better.

[JB]
So, it’s not a USP anymore!

[CW]
Yeah, it’s not! He works away doing various things, but he writes to Burns later on. And I think this conveys a sense of the affection that they have for each other. When Burns has been lionised and he’s in Edinburgh, then does his tours in 1787, Murdoch writes to him and points out that he is as respected by the Caledonians of London as he would be by the Caledonians of Edinburgh. The expat community in London has really taken to Burns, to the point where he’s already being recited and quoted at their dinners and meetings and things like that. And Murdoch says something along the lines of ‘I’ve indulged my vanity. I’m pointing out to these people that I was an early cultivator of the genius that is Burns.’

There’s clearly a lot there. These are guys who appreciate each other’s intellectualism, and there’s a genuine friendship that seems to blossom as they enter into adulthood. Murdoch would have been, as all Scots schoolmasters, as all dominees would have been, fairly strict with them.

There’s a wonderful thing that he writes in a letter that always kills me a wee bit. He early on figures Gilbert as the smart one, as the brains, as the more talented one. And he speaks specifically about music, which is a strong element of things curricular in those days. He says Robert’s ear was remarkably dull, and his voice untunable – cannot get him to distinguish one tune from another. Well, go anywhere on Hogmanay and you’ll see that Burns made the grade as a bit of a musician!

[JB]
Everyone loves a report card like that, from a teacher about a famous person, that they were proven very very wrong.

[GC]
Also because, a bit like Burns, he liked to push boundaries. And Chris has mentioned the French thing and his brightness comes out in the fact that he has some success writing pedagogical books in French, etc. But also when he’s tutoring Burns, and Burns has been young and sensitive, Murdoch is horrifying him with the really gruesome scenes from Shakespeare, and the young Burns doesn’t like this. So, Murdoch is always pushing boundaries.

And then Chris has mentioned the outspoken contretemps with Dalrymple, about which again we’d like to know a wee bit more. Goes to London, has the confidence to make it in London, and wants Burns to come to London. Unfortunately, doesn’t happen. ‘See, if you came to this place, this would be great material for a poem’. And there is one of those many opportunities you get in any artistic life where wouldn’t it have been great to have Burns writing about London? But so it goes.

[JB]
There’s a counterfactual there, isn’t there?

[CW]
Oh yes, it’s one of the great ‘what ifs’ in Burns’s life. That familial closeness that Murdoch has with the broader Burns family manifests itself in London when Burns’s younger brother William, who’s a saddler, passes away very young whilst he’s working in London. And Murdoch takes it upon himself to largely oversee his funeral and to be present at it, and to act as liaison between what’s happening in London and with the Burns family back in Ayrshire. So, it’s more than just a teacher-pupil relationship; these guys become friends. But the influence early on – as Gerry points out – he’s introducing Burns to great literature. I think it’s Titus Andronicus, isn’t it?

[JB]
And how old would Burns have been at that time?

[GC]
Oh goodness, very young.

[JB]
Because if we’re saying John Murdoch was only 18, then Burns would have been what?

[GC]
We’ve got probably a couple of early dealings where Burns is about 8 and then a bit later when he’s 12, he gets a bit of exposure to Murdoch. And of course, the other thing that goes on, as well as that sexy stuff, we’ve mentioned religion already and everything Chris says about William Burness, the father, is right, but John Murdoch helps William Burness write the …

[JB]
Let’s just clarify, William Burness is Robert Burns’s dad, but he pronounced the name differently.

[GC]
I think Robert thinks that Burns is a cooler name. The artist for the family formerly known as … ! So, Burns is a bit cooler than the clunky peasant-like Burness, I think. William Burness wants a religious manual written for the instruction of Robert and Gilbert, and the man who feeds into that is John Murdoch. And although there’s a lot of traditional Calvinism in there, there’s also bits of moderatism that one might suspect is coming from Murdoch. For instance, there’s a bit of emphasis on kindness and good works as well as faith alone, where the hardline Calvinists might just want faith.

There’s something between harder-line Calvinism and the newer moderate thing going on. It’s never exactly black and white. And also, Murdoch is a man who thinks about religion a lot, which again I think is why he gets into a fankle with Dalrymple. He’s outspoken, etc. And Burns is watching this and thinking, ‘Oh, you can speak back to ministers?’ And the rest is history.

[JB]
So I can see why, at such a young and impressionable age, having a trendy young teacher who perhaps wasn’t what your dad intended would have made such an influence on Burns. OK, so let’s leave John Murdoch there. Gerry, you mentioned Lady Don: Henrietta Cunningham. Tell me about her.

[GC]
She is the sister of the Earl of Glencairn, James Cunningham, who is one of Burns’s patrons in a number of ways, including getting entry to the Excise Service. And from 1787 in Edinburgh, Burns, as well as the brother, has made the acquaintance of the sister. We again don’t know the precise details – and he starts sending her work.

If you look at the kind of work he’s sending her, he’s not just being a wee bit salacious about it, writing sexy stuff to a woman, but he’s sending her, for instance, ‘Holy Willy’s Prayer’ or ‘The Jolly Beggars: Love and Liberty – A Cantata’. He’s sending her some of the radical work that he only usually shows to blokes, and this is because the Cunningham family have got a lot of brains and he clearly believes … 1787 Edinburgh. He’s still got to be a wee bit careful with men and women. He clearly believes that Henrietta is someone who can receive this stuff. Again, there’s probably lost correspondence, but there’s a whole bunch of what were known as the Don Manuscripts, material that Burns sent to Lady Don, now in Edinburgh University. And that’s a significant corpus of Burns text that tells you a lot about how he was operating and how he was having this intellectual friendship with a semi-aristocratic woman.

[JB]
Now, that’s really interesting: an intellectual friendship, because in terms of women and Burns, his dalliances are well known. Was he able, therefore, to differentiate between women he was sexually attracted to and those with whom who could have a platonic relationship?

[GC]
Sometimes.

[CW]
Sometimes, yeah. And I think there’s an element of overlap there. The classic one that most people know about is Agnes MacLehose or Clarinda. Similarly, she’s a woman from a significantly higher echelon in society than Burns. She’s the daughter of a family of Glaswegian lawyers. She’s decamped to Edinburgh with her husband. When she knows Burns, she and her husband have separated, but he instantly finds in her that intellectual spark, which I think is a bit of an unknown for them ...

[GC]
Well, it is. You’re dead right, Chris. There’s something intellectual going on. I was going to say mental there, but that means something different in Glasgow. But at the same time, Clarinda, Mrs MacLehose is full of religious zeal, and they’re writing poetry to one another. And sometimes it’s like, do you feel the religious zeal? Yes, I feel it. Are you burning with religious …? Yeah, I’m! Clearly burning with something else. It’s classic Freudian sublimation. But there’s a number of things going on there that are formative in Burns’s life and lead ultimately to the great song ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, for instance.

So what we’ve got is time and again, Burns – yes, it’s undeniable; he likes women for their bodies – but he also likes women for their minds. There’s no question of that. And Lady Don falls into that category, among others.

[CW]
And the way that society is ordered then, that intellectualism only manifests itself where women have the opportunity to do so. So, it’s women from the upper orders that he tends to cleave to, and he seeks advice from them. He trusts them. Gerry’s already mentioned Mrs Dunlop, Frances Dunlop. She’s this confidante. She’s an older woman to the point where there’s clearly no sexual element there. But Burns really trusts her. And it’s a relationship that becomes frayed at times because of disagreements that they have. But this isn’t the great Burns throwing his ideas onto the table and expecting these women, especially Frances Dunlop, to fall down at his feet. They will argue back. And I genuinely feel that he takes something from that, Gerry, that ability to engage intellectually – an argument and indeed an agreement.

[JB]
Let’s talk in more general then about the upper echelons of society that he began mixing with when he was in Edinburgh particularly. Many people with lowly beginnings are influenced by people with money or with status, and perhaps they’re overwhelmed sometimes by their education. Did that apply to Burns in any way?

[GC]
Burns genuinely likes a number of aristocrats. There are points when he’s a bit of a crawler because he needs to be to get on. There are points where he explicitly doesn’t like members of the aristocracy and writes political ballads against them in election campaigns, etc, etc. There’s a whole mixture of these things.

One of the things he enjoys on his tour of the Highlands and elsewhere is being received in his first flush of celebrity by aristocrats who want to know him. And for a while, with many of these folks, there is a kind of equilibrium where it’s a meeting of minds. Status is very nice: you’ve got a big posh house so you can give me a nice dinner, you can give me resources. But actually, the thing that’s really going on is the artistic thing, where you can introduce me to so-and-so who’s also a song collector or whatever. So, he has that engagement.

He also has what my late parents would have called a good going foot, where he’s more or less happy introducing himself to people from all walks of life because he’s got this promiscuous sympathy – that phrase I probably over-use – where he’s interested in everything. Like many writers, he’s nosy and he wants to get into lives of all kinds and all statuses.

[JB]
Chris?

[CW]
Yeah, absolutely. He draws inspiration from all echelons of society. Burns is as happy in Poosie Nancy consorting with the prostitutes and ploughmen there, as he is in the literary salons of Edinburgh.

[JB]
He was a social chameleon.

[CW]
Very much so. But he uses that chameleon-like ability to great effect in his work in that he’s able to portray a very broad swathe of Scottish society at that time. Following on from what Gerry says, he goes to Edinburgh, he goes on his various tours – initially the Borders in spring 1787, then the Central Highlands and the Highlands proper. And he does become a wee bit of a dancing bear, but a lot of it is very much on his terms as well. Burns is benefitting from this. He’s savvy; he knows he’s benefitting from it.

Burns is a man of ultimate ambition. He wants to be recognised as a poet. He knows he’s a great poet. There’s no doubt about that. And he has this almost carefully managed image. Burns striding up and down the Royal Mile is an image that I often have in my mind, with his blue frock coat and his riding boots and his hair kept in a ponytail, which was unfashionable at that time, but with a ribbon. He knows what he’s doing.

He didn’t decide he was the heaven-taught ploughman, but he certainly does ascribe to that as time goes on. And he knows it’s beneficial to him and he knows it’s working, especially with those people. And crudely speaking, he can be seen as a bit of rough, but I think there’s a genuine appreciation of his intellectual capacity and his abilities as an artist as well among those people.

[GC]
And if he’s a chameleon, we retrospectively impose lots of different contradictory qualities on him. It’s a truism because it’s true that you can make him into anything you want politically. But one of the reasons when he dies that some people say basically he was a Tory was because if you look at the second edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, the so-called Edinburgh edition of 1787, it’s dedicated to the Caledonian Hunt in Edinburgh.

There you’ve got that semi-aristocratic society. It’s the upper nobs. He knows what he’s doing – that’s the group to which he wants to appeal. And he knows that they, rather than the peasantry at that point, can broadcast his name, his fame – can do things for him. And that’s fair enough, I suppose.

[JB]
Before we leave the aristocracy, if we had to nail it, what did those particularly influential women, how did they influence him? Or was it just a case of such was his thirst for knowledge that he just wanted to learn from them … and quite fancied a few of them too?

[CW]
I think he quite fancied them. But they act as genuinely useful sounding boards for Burns. And that’s, I think, the thing he takes the most from. He does write poems about them, especially Agnes MacLehose. It’s a funny one. I think there’s this notion that we think about in terms of this sexual conqueror, but that’s a relationship that, as far as we know, goes unconsummated. It’s conducted largely on paper and there seems to be a sense of real affection, to the point where it becomes really flowery. These letters are flying back and forwards with classical sign-offs on them. The caddies are carrying them across Edinburgh. This is texting!

[GC]
He’s speaking to these ladies when their aristocratic brothers are possibly a bit too snooty to condescend. So, there’s an nudge there to people who are educated, which is it’s easier speaking to these aristocratic women than it is to men. I think there’s a lot … again, I don’t want to get a cliche here about feminine reception, feminine sympathy, but in some ways many of these women are more receptive. You look at the women who are receptive to Burns intellectually – Agnes MacLehose, Mrs Dunlop, Lady Don, and there’s at least a dozen others. There’s something going on where there is a meeting of minds. And again, partly that is because Burns is a poet who’s interested in some of the traditional female themes.

And I know that’s a bit stereotypical, but Burns isn’t being stereotypical about that. He knows that women very often, as he found in his own family, are singers of songs, are tradition-bearers, and he’s getting some of that from them too, as well as other things.

[JB]
So, we come back to his mum then, Agnes. Gerry, you’ve given me some names. We are running out of time. If I gave you the names William McGill, William Tytler (the historian that we’ve sort of talked about already) and Captain Robert Riddell, which would you choose as most influential and why?

[GC]
In some ways, Jackie, I think they’re equally influential, but the one that I am drawn to – which doesn’t necessarily mean that we should go there but maybe we will – is Captain Robert Riddell. He is the man who owns Friars Carse, the house along the road from Burns when he takes his farm, Ellisland, from 1789. And he again is minor gentry, and they become bosom buddies. He is a man who is a historian, who’s a song collector. And to some extent, there’s a creative partnership going on there, which has never properly been acknowledged.

We see that to some degree in the Glenriddell manuscripts, where Bums gifts to Riddell and his family some of his work, and he’s adding more work into it. Clearly, there are discussions going on that we’ll never be privy to because they’re not recorded, not even in correspondence, where Riddell is collaborating with them. Indeed, there are several airs written by Riddell that Burns sets to music. So, we’ve got the romantic myth of the individual writer working alone, but with guys like Riddell, we should bear in mind the collaborative thing.

I’m going to be making quite a lot of that riff when I edit the poetry for Oxford University Press in a couple of years – that Riddell is one of his creative partners.

[JB]
You’re nodding furiously, Chris.

[CW]
Yeah, absolutely. He’s hugely significant in that latter part of Burns’s life. If I can indulge myself with a plug for the museum here, Burns famously gifts to Riddell the interleaved Scots Musical Museum, which puts down a lot of his working notes as to how a great many of these songs, airs and poems come about.

So, there’s a strong collaborative element. And I think it’s reflective of the notion that Burns was never that tortured artist. He’s gregarious, he’s garrulous, he likes to be around people. He’s a people person, if I can use that somewhat irritating phrase – but it’s people from all echelons of society.

We often think that the upper echelons of society will exploit the lower. I think Burns is able to kick it into reverse a wee bit at times. He’s able to be that dancing bear. He’s able to flirt not just with individuals, but with an entire group of people in 18th-century Scotland, and he does it very well. At times, he’s the guy that they want him to be, but he ultimately benefits out of it in terms of the doors that it opens for him – those minor nobles who are genuinely influential in literary circles.

From the outset when Burns goes to Edinburgh, he starts to try desperately to meet people. He writes to Dr John Moore, the famous autobiographical letter. Moore’s a man who’s influential in literary circles. Burns sets out to gain success in the way that modern people set out to gain success.

[GC]
Patronage is something you need to succeed as a poet, and that’s what he’s in search of wherever he can get it. Why wouldn’t you be?

[JB]
From the people that we have discussed, and perhaps we haven’t even touched on the answer to this next question, is there a towering influence? And if so, who would you both say?

[GC]
I think in poetic terms, and this might not go down well in all circles, there’s no question for me that the man who teaches Burns to think poetically in didactic moral terms is Alexander Pope – and his poetry and his letters are replete with references.

Pope isn’t the only one we’ve mentioned. Ramsay and Fergusson, hugely influential, but in many ways I think the poet who is most influential is the Englishman Alexander Pope. And why not? That is the influence if you have to pick out one, in terms of aesthetic terms for me.

[JB]
I get the feeling that you’re agreeing, Chris.

[CW]
There’s signs that Gerry and I’ll argue about, but not Robert Burns. I know when I’m going to get beat, let’s be honest. Pope’s massively influential on Burns and from a very early age as well. He’s there on that Murdoch-inspired reading list. And if we look at some of his earliest, the one I’ve quoted already, song composed in August ‘Now Westlin Winds’. It’s replete with Popian influences. Pope composes a piece called ‘Windsor Forest’. It’s an Augustan description of the Thames Valley; it creates an Elysium out of the Thames Valley.

But Burns does that thing that Scots writers do. He does it, but he takes a more demotic approach to it. He very cheekily uses phrases that are almost identical to Pope, but he casts this whole thing as happening somewhere in Ayrshire, somewhere around about Alloway or Mauchline or Tarbolton most likely, going by the time it was written. And he does it with a lassie on his arm far by.

[JB]
And that is the Burns twist.

[CW]
And that demotic approach to poetry also goes to his appreciation of those writers. He mentions Ramsay and Fergusson in a number of poems. He mentions them almost as a pairing, and he mentions them in these epistolatory poems to Lapraik and to William Simpson. It’s almost as if he’s saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve read these guys as well.’ He’s throwing it in there.

[GC]
And the verse epistles also. Everyone thinks that’s what farmers in Ayrshire did. No, they didn’t. The verse epistle form he’s taking from Alexander Pope because that way of speaking and urbane, cultivated, widely cultural fashion he’s getting from Alexander Pope. We forget these influences and that’s fine because we do see Burns writing verse epistles, but the lineage of that is in writers like Alexander Pope, Dryden, and also Ramsay and Fergusson.

The other thing he gets from Pope also is a preferential option for the Stuarts, because Pope is also a Jacobite.

[JB]
We have run out of time, but I’ve got one more question for you both, and we’re sort of turning the tables. We’re talking about the people who influenced Burns. I’d like to ask is there a piece of poetry or lyrics from Burns that has supremely influenced you both. Chris?

[CW]
Absolutely. I was a late developer in many ways, but especially about in finding Burns. I grew up in a house that was filled with books, but there wasn’t a book of Burns in my house. I went to a school in East Kilbride called Hunter High and the school motto was ‘The man’s the gowd’. Yet in five years of English, I didn’t get taught one single line of Burns.

I started reading Burns when I was in my late 20s, when I was a countryside ranger, because in a moment of dreadful homesickness, I was working in the Cotswolds and I went into a bargain bookstore and picked up the Lomond edition, which is where a lot of us start. The Lomond Complete Poems and Songs of Burns. And I opened it at ‘The Holy Fair’.

‘The Holy Fair’ is this wonderful acidic polemic against the local clergy, this ongoing battle, which I know is a particular area of interest for Burns. And it’s a funny read, but the opening verse is wonderful nature poetry. I’m always banging this drum that Burns isn’t appreciated as a nature poet.

[JB]
Go on, give us the opening verse.

[CW]
Upon a summer Sunday morning,
When Nature's face is fair,
I walked forth to view the corn,
And sniff the caller air.
The rising sun, over Galston Moors,
With glorious light was glinting;
The hares were hirpling down the furrows,
The lav’rocks they were chanting
Fu’ sweet that day.

Fu’ sweet indeed. This is Burns as a boy, alive and enjoying the countryside before he goes off to the Holy Fair and gets involved in the various flesh pots that leads him to …

[JB]
OK, from flesh pots, Gerry, what would you?

[GC]
So, there’s a number of fancy pants academic answers I could give to this, but if I really boil it down, if you said to me that everything that Burns wrote was going to disappear except for one piece, the one piece I would hold onto would be Tam o’ Shanter because it’s his greatest performance in Scots.

It’s a great mock epic and it contains within it, in miniature, a lot of his different signatures that you get elsewhere across his oeuvre. So, everything else has been destroyed, I would keep Tam o’ Shanter.

[JB]
And is there a particular stanza there that just gets you going?

[GC]
All of it. And in fact, the answer here means that I can’t recite any particular bit of it. It’s the shifts between different voices. It’s the shifts between moods that you need to have in totality. It’s a great organic work where he’s all over the place a wee bit, mimicking Tam and his supposed drunkenness – so, it’s the totality of the poem that is wonderful.

[JB]
Well, perhaps in the future we will devote an entire podcast to Tam o’ Shanter, because I’m sure it could take it … and then some. That is all we’ve got time for, gentlemen – thank you so much. I hope we’ve thrown some additional light on the life and work of this complex and talented man whose work has meant so much to so many.

As I said at the start, whether you’re a Burns expert or a newcomer, the Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway run by the National Trust for Scotland should certainly be a port of call. And, you can say hello to Chris! It exists and its collections are growing because of you, because of your support, your membership and your donations. Thank you.

Archive collections from the museum are now available for everyone to explore online. Just head to the Trust website for more information. So, thank you once again to Professor Gerry Carruthers.

[GC]
Thank you.

[JB]
And to Chris Waddell.

[CW]
Thank you.

[JB]
Thank you both. Until next time on Love Scotland, goodbye.

And if that has whetted your appetite for all things Burns, there are plenty of other podcasts about the Bard. Just take a look on the National Trust for Scotland Love Scotland podcast feed.

[DP]
The poet was no teetotaller, not at all. Sometimes he overdid it, there’s no question of that. Sat with his friends on the evening hours in the taverns of Dumfries or Ayr or whatever. But he was no alcoholic. His behaviour and what was observed about him do not support that.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird. For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.