In a prose reimagining of Robert Burns's ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’ (1786), the Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine contributor John Wilson describes a nightmare scenario of radical revolution where the traditions and structures of rural Scottish life have been irreparably disrupted. ‘The Radical's Saturday Night’ (1819) holds a dark mirror up to the scenes of domestic piety and familial affection that characterise Burns's cottage poem. At the climax of the sketch, a cotter turned radical declaims to his distressed father that: ‘a hole dug in the earth is a grave – but we have no laws, I believe, against burial-grounds – only we must not call them kirk-yards – for where now are the kirks? This has been a glorious day for Scotland.’ The nightmare of radical futurity presented here is one that discards the religious, familial and historical bonds that tie the nation together. The loss of the ‘kirk-yard’ for Wilson is symbolic of a wider cultural disintegration where ancestral and cultural memories are lost. Wilson imagines the kirkyard as a resting place for the nation's forefathers that must be preserved. He also, through this Burnsian homage, participates in the construction of a Scottish literary tradition where Burns is co-opted as his own literary forefather.

This chapter uses Wilson's sketch as a starting point from which to tell the story of the emergence of kirkyard Romanticism in the works of Wilson and his close colleague J. G. Lockhart. Wilson and Lockhart were two important early contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and, I argue, used that platform to assemble a distinctive form of Scottish Romantic nationalism, where the rural graveyard played an important symbolic role.