Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet, died in 1796. His passing was mourned, and his birth and life celebrated, at numerous suppers or festivals held on or around 25 January (his birthday) since the start of the nineteenth century. Yet in January 1859, if not entirely without precedent, the scale, grandeur, and extent of public participation in celebrations to mark the centenary of Burns’s birth were little short of remarkable. In Lowland Scotland, there was hardly a town, village, or hamlet where some kind of celebration marking the occasion was not organized. One contemporary counted 676 local festivals in Scotland alone, with many thousands of people participating in them. Worldwide, there were almost certainly many more than the 872 recorded.Footnote ¹ That the nineteenth century was the heyday throughout Europe of the romantic cult of the national hero, and of national milestones, jubilees, and anniversaries, serves as a warning against exaggerating the significance of the outpouring of public enthusiasm for Robert Burns.Footnote ² In Scotland, Burns was just one of a number of historical figures, including William Wallace, Robert Bruce, John Knox, and the Covenanters, who were the focus of major campaigns of commemoration.Footnote ³ Even so, contemporaries were struck by the depth of the fervor there was for Burns, particularly in Scotland.Footnote ⁴ What is also clear, however, is that Burns was the subject of competing claims.

This essay is concerned with exploring central aspects of this contest over Burns’s memory by examining how he was portrayed, exploited, and received in the six decades after his death. Two remarkable events within this time frame serve to highlight the competition there was to secure Burns’s memory: the Ayr Burns Festival of 1844 and the centenary year of his birth, 1859. These will provide much of the essay’s focus. Burns as a poet and adaptor of traditional songs had multiple voices; not without good reason has he been called the protean Scot.Footnote ⁵ Consequently, it was, and is, difficult to claim him unambiguously for any particular set of values or a single political ideology, although in the 250 years since his death, many have tried so to do.Footnote ⁶ Of the tensions this created, the most public—and the focus of this essay—was between, on the one hand, Radicals both in and beyond Scotland and, on the other hand, Scottish conservatives. During his lifetime, Burns had associated himself with a number of anti-establishment causes, including the American Revolution, and for a time, the revolution in France, in which he sided with the Jacobins.Footnote ⁷ How lasting and deep was his commitment to the revolutionaries after January 1795, when the prospect of invasion from France seemed imminent, is a matter of debate.Footnote ⁸ At this time, Burns joined the Dumfries Volunteers and wrote “Does Haughty Gaul invasion threat,” a staunchly patriotic song. Even so, in the final weeks of his life, Burns’s attachment to the republican ideal seems to have been undimmed.Footnote ⁹ It is hardly surprising, then, that certain of the values and principles articulated in Burns’s work, as well as selective interpretations of aspects of Burns’s life, were appropriated by radically inclined Scots in the first half of the nineteenth century. Manifested first in Chartism, many of the same values were held equally dear by the Chartists’ immediate successors, the Radical Liberals. It was to this brand of popular Liberalism, anti-aristocratic and centering on notions of oppression and injustice, that large sections of the respectable working class turned after 1848, in alliance with the middle classes.Footnote ¹⁰ Nevertheless, and notwithstanding Burns’s radical associations during his lifetime, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, it was Scottish Tories and their allies (including Whigs such as Lord Francis Jeffrey) who led the way in commandeering and shaping in their own interests the memory of Burns. What I will argue in this essay is that despite their best efforts, conservatives in Scotland were unable to corral Burns’s legacy in the service of the political and social status quo against what many of them saw as the dangers of unbridled “democratic ambition.”

The conservatives’ aim was to counter the tsunami of social unrest they feared would result from the linked processes of rampant industrialization and rapid urbanization.Footnote ¹¹ They were deeply distrustful of the lower orders, whose numbers were multiplying in the manufacturing centers like Glasgow and Paisley.Footnote ¹² The first four decades of the period in question had seen unprecedented economic growth but also dislocation, allied to which was destabilizing social change. In the wake of the revolutions in France, not only that of 1789 but also 1830, Scotland’s dominant classes suffered from periodic intimations of the dangers posed by disaffection further down the social scale, even if many of the leaders of the Radical societies of the early 1790s, for example, were well-off merchants and manufacturers, along with physicians and dissenting clergymen.Footnote ¹³ Radicals, as several of them found to their cost at the time of the repressive sedition trials of 1793–94 (and sporadically thereafter until 1820), were considered by the notoriously reactionary Scottish judiciary to be especially dangerous. Although views about the appropriateness of transportation as a punishment for sedition moderated, and Whigs argued successfully that it was not a crime to debate or campaign for parliamentary reform, nor the duty of the courts to repress it, many of Scotland’s Tories remained fearful of what they perceived to be the Radical threat.Footnote ¹⁴ In 1819, Sir Walter Scott, a key figure within Scotland’s conservative establishment, defined the term “Radical” as “a set of blackguards a hundred times more mischievous and absurd than our old friends in 1794 and 1795.” He feared that their intention was to seize, by a general rising, the “property of the rich.”Footnote ¹⁵ The inclination of Scotland’s Tories therefore was to look backward to rural paternalism for a model of social relations appropriate for the industrial age. It was among the Scottish peasantry, they believed, that a sense of loyalty to their social superiors was still to be found, unlike the inhabitants of the manufacturing districts, where in years of bad trade, the large numbers of unemployed—“a separate class, a new state”—provided “excellent materials for the demagogue.”Footnote ¹⁶ But Tory idealism had to compete with the growing influence of those strands of Radicalism in Scotland that in the 1830s and 1840s were channelled into “moral force” Chartism, as well as for demands for political change that would ameliorate working-class distress.Footnote ¹⁷

As was reported at the start of this essay, by 1859, Robert Burns had become a major iconic figure in Scottish society. Accordingly, the contest over his memory and political legacy was the subject of intense public scrutiny. Of the numerous speeches about Burns that were delivered in January 1859, there were several that attracted press attention. Of particular interest was an oration delivered by Sir Archibald Alison, who in 1834 had been appointed sheriff and chief law officer for Scotland’s manufacturing heartland of Lanarkshire.Footnote ¹⁸ Alison was the Edinburgh-educated, lawyer son of an Episcopalian minister who became one of the most prominent and vociferous members of Scotland’s conservative phalanx until his death in 1867. Like many men of his generation, Alison had been shocked and horrified by the revolutions in France, which he studied in depth (and firsthand, having visited France in 1814) and spent many years writing about, not least so that lessons would be learned and a similar catastrophe avoided in Britain. He saw political reform as likely to lead to just such an outcome. As sheriff of Lanarkshire, Alison earned a reputation, for which he was attacked in the Radical press, as a scourge of the working class, largely through his determined efforts to contain the Chartist threat. On occasion backed by military force, Alison sought too to break the powerful combinations of cotton spinners and other groups of workers that formed in and around Glasgow during the 1830s and 1840s.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet in 1859, at a Burns centenary dinner attended by 800 “gentlemen” in Glasgow’s City Hall, Alison very publicly conceded that Burns had indeed been a Radical. Moreover, Alison declared, he welcomed the fact and wished “we had more Radicals like Burns.”Footnote ²⁰ The concession was important, as for the previous half-century, Alison and others in his circle had argued otherwise, albeit with increasing difficulty. Even in 1859, Alison still felt it necessary to temper his remarks by asserting that Burns was as much a patriot as a Radical; indeed, a patriotic regard for Scotland’s traditions was something both men had in common. It was almost certainly the fact that Burns was so strongly associated with the idea of Scottish nationhood that explains why Alison had been one of the prime movers, with Colin Rae-Brown, of the 1859 commemorations.Footnote ²¹ The two men were also prominent supporters of the campaign for the Scottish national monument to William Wallace, near Stirling.Footnote ²² Burns’s Radicalism, however, Alison excused by reference to poetic temperament—which, in most poets, he argued, tended toward liberalism—and to the febrile nature of the age in which Burns had been alive.Footnote ²³ (To be fair, in this, Alison was being consistent: his view was that the revolutionary ideas of the early 1790s in Scotland were temporary rather than endemic, leading him to the conclusion that the sentences imposed had been unduly harsh.)Footnote ²⁴ Anyway, Alison judged, the poems that “we now lament” had “long passed into oblivion”; by contrast, those upon which Burns’s “immortal flame” rested were “as pure as the driven snow.”Footnote ²⁵

Why Alison should have been at such pains to portray Burns’s Radicalism as something transient, and of much less substance than his patriotism, is not so difficult to explain. Burns the man, poet, song collector, and songwriter was more important as a carrier of core ideals and moral attitudes that formed part of the bedrock of beliefs held by Scotland’s early Victorian Radicals (and indeed their English counterparts) than has usually been appreciated. Social historians and historians of labor and popular politics in early nineteenth-century Scotland have had little or nothing to say about Burns’s influence, although one writer has asserted Burns’s significance in this respect but without offering much in the way of supporting evidence.Footnote ²⁶ Burns’s remarkable appeal in the first half of the century has also escaped the attention of most historians, who have tended to focus on the enthusiasm there was for Burns after the Disruption of 1843 and into the twentieth century.Footnote ²⁷ Largely missed too has been the impact of his legacy in the political sphere, well before the century’s end, when Burns’s influence is said to have been at its height.Footnote ²⁸ This is an interpretation that understandably but misleadingly conflates Burns’s popularity with the large number of Burns clubs that were affiliated with the Burns Federation, founded in 1885—although many of these had small numbers of members. Underpinning this impression of Burns’s later importance is the spate of personal testimonies about the influence of Burns on their politics by prominent Labour politicians of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ²⁹ Alison, however, was acutely aware of how inspirational Burns had become among Radicals and reformers. Indeed, elsewhere in Scotland on the very day that Alison was speaking in Glasgow, in Ayr, some miles to the south, at a soiree organized by the town’s Working Men’s Reform Association, a Colonel Shaw delivered a speech that unambiguously celebrated Burns as “the great Reformer” who “more than seventy years ago, ‘went for’ manhood suffrage’’—singing “a man’s a man for a’ that.’”Footnote ³⁰ Alison’s purpose was to counter such readings of Burns.

It may be that Burns’s influence in Radical circles in the first half of the nineteenth century has been underestimated, as too much emphasis has been attached to the fact that Burns was promoted as a role model by advocates of laissez-faire liberalism, a hegemonic “paradigm of Scottish bourgeois virtue.’”Footnote ³¹ He was certainly adopted in this manner by Scotland’s manufacturing and commercial elite. Burns, however, was revered across the classes. Even so and as will become clearer later, there is evidence to suggest that he was held in especially high regard by the mainly skilled and literate, independent, usually protestant and largely sober segments of the respectable working class in town and country. It was men of this stamp, in alliance with the petty bourgeoisie and sometimes also members of the solid middle class, who formed the bedrock of support of Scottish Radicalism in the first half of the nineteenth century (and of popular Liberalism for much of the second half). Scotland’s more moderate brand of Chartism is in part explicable by the degree of collaboration there was between the middle and working classes.Footnote ³² But as has become apparent from investigations of how other great figures and major historical moments were commemorated in the nineteenth century, the efforts of ruling elites to impose their own values through such activities often met with oppositional views.Footnote ³³ As Christine MacLeod’s study of the celebration by Victorians of the leading inventors of the Industrial Revolution has demonstrated, the virtues of particular inventors extolled by the middle classes and their allies in government were not necessarily those emphasized by working people. Thus, in the case of James Watt, there was a shared recognition of his ingenuity and skill. Some Radicals, however, were inclined to play down the role of the single inventive genius, preferring to emphasize instead the cumulative nature of mechanical knowledge and the contributions to this of generations of skilled workers. Respectable artisans were keen to claim inventors from relatively humble origins as their own (as they did in the cultural sphere with Burns) and as demonstrations of the contribution of working people to the prosperity of the nation. Others—William Cobbett, for example—drew attention to the alleged negative aspects of steam power. These included the factory system, child labor and long hours, as well as the human carnage caused by boiler explosions.Footnote ³⁴

This process of consensus-stretching is also applicable in the case of Burns. Something of the sort was recognized in 1859 by the editor of the Radical-leaning London-based Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper—who had been following the remarkable vigor of the Burns centennial celebrations in January of that year. Gleefully, he noted how Alison had “strained his toryism to the admission that Burns was not utterly contemptible, although he was a radical,” and drew attention too to Alison’s “blundering” explanation of Burns’s genius. Yet also, in an editorial headed “The Poet of the People,” the paper declared that “for the first time in this country, the nation has spoken out its gratitude to one of its unacknowledged legislators.”Footnote ³⁵ The call to celebrate poetry as “the most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people,” capable of working a “beneficial change in opinion or institution” had been Shelley’s (in his Defence of Poetry, 1819) and was therefore not new in 1859. The reference to Burns in this capacity, however, is clearly significant.

Yet as indicated earlier, most of the initial impetus to commemorate and celebrate Burns came from Scottish aristocrats and others of relatively high social standing—bankers, merchants, lawyers, and the like—whether in Scotland, England, or parts of Britain’s overseas empire. In America, too, Burns was avidly read.Footnote ³⁶ Three of the five men who in 1814 headed the campaign for the Burns monument at Alloway were of landed stock: Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, Sir David Hunter Blair of Blairquhan, and Hugh Hamilton of Pinmore.Footnote ³⁷ The committee established in 1819 for a national memorial to Burns in Edinburgh was chaired by the duke of Atholl, while among the “noblemen and gentlemen” present were Lord Keith and Charles Forbes, MP, sometime head of Forbes & Company, of Bombay.Footnote ³⁸ It was certainly not Burns’s Radicalism such men wished to commemorate. The sponsors of the Edinburgh memorial were keen to promote Burns as a product of Scotland’s superior educational system, and of a Presbyterian polity.Footnote ³⁹ In Dumfries, “the committee and noblemen and gentlemen connected with the south of Scotland,” which was behind the move to erect a mausoleum over the grave of Burns, had consciously played down Burns’s political views in order to persuade the duke of Buccleuch to participate. Eventually, Buccleuch subscribed, but declined to join the committee. The reasons he gave were that he not only disliked Burns’s politics, but also, with the war with France still being fought, he felt it was the “exertions and glorious death of some of our Countrymen who have fallen” that should be commemorated. For Buccleuch, a more pressing matter was the restoration of the existing public monument in Dumfries, to Charles, duke of Queensberry, a substantial patron and promoter of the burgh and to whose title Buccleuch had succeeded.Footnote ⁴⁰

Burns’s early biographers and editors of his works also turned a blind eye to Burns’s most scathing social commentaries, along with his politics. “I suppose it will be thought prudent to avoid all political allusions in the life,” wrote James Currie, before taking on the task of being Burns’s first major posthumous biographer.Footnote ⁴¹ Currie felt the same about Burns and religion. Accordingly, he left out of his Works of Robert Burns poems critical of the Kirk. One of these was “Holy Willie’s Prayer.”Footnote ⁴² Currie excluded this in the face of an appeal that “the keenness of its satire against those canting hypocrites and besotted blockheads, the John Knoxes of the present day” made it ripe for publication, and in spite of the fact that the poem was circulating in print in Glasgow for 2 pennies.Footnote ⁴³ Similarly, in his preface to the Reliques of Robert Burns, published in 1808, R. H. Cromek declared it proper to omit any of Burns’s compositions that displayed “a spirit of resentment, the result of the moment” or those, the publication of which, “although in these days perfectly harmless, might render the Editor obnoxious to the letter, though not to the spirit of the law.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Other critics in the same mould—Edinburgh University’s Professor John Wilson (“Christopher North”), an outspoken enemy of parliamentary reform—expressed disbelief that the man who wrote “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” could also have been a Jacobin. Foreshadowing Alison’s 1859 speech, Wilson explained Burns’s attachment to democracy as fleeting, born of a Byronic desire to shock, while also dismissing the charge as one exaggerated by Dumfries’s Tories.Footnote ⁴⁵ At core, Wilson declared, Burns was a patriot, his song “Does Haughty Gaul invasion threat” embodying more political wisdom and appealing more effectively to the “noblest principles of patriotism in the British heart” than any orator either inside or outside Parliament. Indeed, in the years immediately after his death and during the ongoing conflict with France, Burns was frequently used to galvanize the powerful pro-British patriotic sentiment that had broadened and deepened to reach down into the lower ranks of Scottish society in the wake of the threat of French invasion, his songs bowdlerized and embellished in the ubiquitous song chapbooks of the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁶ This was not simply a passing phase. Burns and Britishness were often conjoined by leading nineteenth-century celebrants of the poet, albeit that he was also celebrated as the savior of Scottish language, song, and national pride.Footnote ⁴⁷

Thus, Burns’s patriotic poetry, song, and sentiments—British as well as those that aroused Scottish nationalistic ardor—united Scotland’s Whigs and Tories and induced a cross-class consensus. Yet his work clearly had the capacity to unsettle. Initially it may seem perverse to conflate “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” with anything other than social tranquillity. The poem portrays a close-knit, humble peasant household at the end of the working day, its members led in prayer, hymn signing, and Bible reading by the “priest-like father.” It was from scenes like these, the poem announces, “old Scotia’s grandeur springs.” With the patriotic flourish of its final two stanzas, wherein a “virtuous Populace” is urged to rise and “stand a wall of fire around their much-lov’d isle,” and God is implored “never, never” to “scotia’s realm desert,” the poem could appeal equally to Scot and Briton. Although written around 1785, the sentiments expressed here were at one with the culture of unionist-nationalism that flourished in Scotland in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁸ Because it offered such a powerful recipe for social contentment within a secure homeland, the poem became, in effect, a manifesto for Scotland’s conservative elite.Footnote ⁴⁹ With its portrayal of a humble rural household, at the head of which was a pious patriarch, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” was a Scottish manifestation of industrializing Europe’s “discovery” of the stoical peasant, with commentators like James Currie in 1800 praising the poem for its representation of “a form of naturalised civil society operating harmoniously with minimum state intervention.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Not only in Scotland but throughout industrializing, urbanizing Europe, the peasant had acquired a moral image. It was in the “frugal life and noble labour” of the peasantry that the “virtues of goodness, humility, loyalty, piety, and natural wisdom” were to be found and which were toasted when members of Scotland’s upper and middling classes—including lawyers, lairds, and leading state officials—met in the early nineteenth century to honor Burns’s birthday.Footnote ⁵¹ The attributes that were intrinsic to this version of rural society, headed by the aristocracy and held together by the bonds of interdependence, paternalism, and deference, Scotland’s leading conservatives wished to inculcate into the hearts and minds of Scotland’s present-day country and small-town dwellers, tomorrow’s big-city migrants.

This was the primary ideological thrust of some of the speakers at the Ayr Burns Festival in August 1844, recently described and analyzed by Alex Tyrrell.Footnote ⁵² Ostensibly, the festival was organized to honor Burns’s three sons, two of whom had now returned to Scotland after many years overseas in the service of the East India Company.Footnote ⁵³ Homage was to be paid by “an admiring and repentant people,” thereby assuaging the widespread sense of guilt there was that the nation’s bard had been permitted to end his days in penury and pain and as a pariah cast out by his former lionizers. The location chosen was fitting: near the place of Burns’s birth, and in full view of the Alloway monument—described by some contemporary admirers as the “shrine of genius” and an “ornament to the country.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet the festival’s organizers also hoped that the festival would serve to reinforce the bulwark of aristocratic paternalism in Scotland and thereby counter the baneful effects of modernity.Footnote ⁵⁵ Almost certainly adding further to the organizers’ unease was the fact that the years immediately prior to 1844, from 1837 and into 1843, marked the deepest and most unrelieved economic depression of the nineteenth century. Consequently, there were serious threats to social stability, of which Alison in particular was aware firsthand.Footnote ⁵⁶ Accordingly, an important message the organizers sought to convey, as the highly influential Rev. Thomas Chalmers had urged two decades earlier, was that in Scotland, persons of “humble station”—like the “heaven-taught” ploughman Burns—who applied themselves and worked hard could succeed and achieve recognition for their God-given talents in Scotland’s meritocracy.Footnote ⁵⁷ There was no need for Radical politics or mob violence. In this regard, the Tory sponsors of the Ayr festival were at one with the laissez-faire-inclined economic liberalism of Scotland’s middle classes.

There were other, more local considerations for the festival committee. Recent developments in Ayrshire itself had revealed that behind the apparent quiescence of an agricultural district that was characterized by small family farms and had been relatively late in terms of the creation of a rural proletariat, there lurked the potential for serious unrest.Footnote ⁵⁸ As early as 1793, William Fullarton had observed the threat posed by the spread of manufactures in the county, in the shape of the subversive doctrines to which employees of such works were often attached. Even among the county’s rural inhabitants he detected a change, regretting that the “civil cordial manners of the former generation” were being replaced with a “regardless, brutal, and democratic harshness of demeanour.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Less than three decades later, following the Radical rising in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, including Kilmarnock in April 1820, James MacQueen warned of further dangers, with Ayrshire being one of those counties where the “largest portion” of the inhabitants were “deeply poisoned by the spirit of radicalism,” the lubricating essence of rebellion and revolution.Footnote ⁶⁰ Both in the agitation for parliamentary reform in the early 1830s and in the Chartist movement, Ayrshire was well represented. Even the violence that had accompanied the west of Scotland miners’ strike of 1842–43 had spilled over into the county.Footnote ⁶¹

This goes a long way toward explaining why several of the speeches that were delivered to the well-heeled audience who were crowded into the great tented pavilion at Ayr acknowledged the desirable attributes of the Scottish peasantry. These were first and foremost their “industry, frugality and contentment,” but also their piety and patriotism. Sir David Hunter-Blair of Blairquhan, proprietor of an estate to the east of Ayr, went further. These virtues, Hunter-Blair declared, contrasted with the situation in rural England where the “demon of discontent” was “arming the hands of her victims with the torch of the incendiary.” Almost certainly this was a reference to the wave of arson that had been sweeping East Anglia and other southeastern counties of England prior to and even during 1844.Footnote ⁶² Such horrific scenes, Hunter-Blair was certain, would never be seen in Scotland, “so long … as the genius and memory of the peasant Burns continue to be cherished amongst his fellow-peasants, as they are at this day.”Footnote ⁶³ The source of what he called the “beautiful attribute of contentment” was to be found in the Scottish rural worker’s household—as depicted by Burns in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” The choice of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” as the festival’s manifesto was masterly in another respect too. Albeit in an idealized fashion, with its emphasis on the family unit at the head of which was the hardworking, pious patriarch, the poem represented a way of life that was still recognizable, and with which Ayrshire’s rural population could readily identify and empathize. The poem was familiar to and resonated with ordinary people in rural and small-town Scotland.Footnote ⁶⁴

Although “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” was clearly a central element of the Ayr festival in 1844, its resonance was much wider than this and is worth exploring in more detail. Notwithstanding their attractiveness to Scottish conservatives, the virtues celebrated in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” of moral worth, integrity, independent labor, and rural living, also had a powerful appeal for mid-nineteenth-century Radicals in Britain.Footnote ⁶⁵ It was the familiarity of the scenes portrayed and evoked by Burns, and the nostalgia this induced among those for whom this was a world that was disappearing or had only recently disappeared in the cases of those now inhabiting the manufacturing towns and villages, that appears partly to explain Burns’s immense popularity. With their stress on unaffected simplicity, and references to the nobility of the poor, Burns’s poems provided a profoundly attractive image for the respectable working classes of the early nineteenth century. Large numbers of migrants to the towns in the early nineteenth century had formerly been country cotters and subtenants, forced to sever their rural links as a result of agrarian commercialism, improvement, and the formation of large single-tenant farms.Footnote ⁶⁶ A dominant theme of urban culture in early and mid-Victorian Scotland, which also had resonance in Radical circles, was that of a lost Arcadia, an imagined rural idyll that contrasted with the cramped environment of the manufacturing town, with its regimentation of work and space, little of which was open or green.Footnote ⁶⁷ This was one reason why working people living in towns in the nineteenth century spent time communing with nature or reading and writing nature poetry, thereby bringing imagined country scenes into the industrial city.Footnote ⁶⁸

But if it was for its nostalgia that “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” held much of its appeal, also embedded within the text of the poem itself were more overt challenges for those who sought to employ “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” as a checklist of domestic and societal harmony. Not only were there sentiments in the poem that were critical of the Kirk. Potentially more corrosive were the last seven lines of the third-last stanza, which in the context of its time can reasonably be described as a mini-hymn on the nobility of the smaller tenants and husbandmen on Scotland’s Lowland farms. Burns had written:

Professor Wilson was well aware of this and had condemned the leveling sentiments expressed by Burns, at the same time unwittingly exposing the limits of his publicly expressed admiration for Scotland’s peasantry. “Our moral nature revolts,” he had raged in 1840, with “a sense of injustice from the comparison of one class with the goodness of the other … the effect is the opposite of that intended, the rising up of a miserable conviction … that vice and crime are not excluded from the cots, but often alas! Are found in their darkest colours and most portentious forms.”Footnote ⁶⁹ For Wilson and his associates, that Burns had produced lines like those extracted above and written a poem such as “The Address of Beelzebub,” an antilandlord, antiaristocratic diatribe composed in 1786 but held back from publication until 1818, was deeply regrettable.Footnote ⁷⁰

It is ironic, therefore, given the aspirations of the festival’s organizers and their careful orchestration of the day’s proceedings that undesirable sentiments in Burns’s work, which they had done their best to neutralize, were still to be heard, literally. In consolidating a renewed sense of Scottishness among those present (but within the framework of the British union, the primacy of which was announced symbolically by several prominently located Union flags), the festival was a success.Footnote ⁷¹ In other respects, the Ayr festival achieved rather less, and there are doubts as to the extent to which it succeeded as an exercise in paternalist-led class conciliation. For Wilson, who earlier in the day had been cheered as he had grasped at an eight-foot-high thistle that had been carried by marchers in a procession that had preceded the formal opening of the festival, the proceedings ended in humiliation. The audience of 1,800 or so, who had paid either ten or fifteen shillings a head for a banquet in the great tented pavilion, were evidently irritated with the length of Wilson’s speech. In addition, so unhappy were they about his references to Burns’s moral “frailties”—spoken in the presence of surviving members of the poet’s immediate family—that he was booed off the stage, although Sir John McNeill of Barra also met with some displeasure for praising English poets and being insufficiently patriotic “at a festival in memory of Burns.”Footnote ⁷²

More telling perhaps and of greater relevance here was the reflection by a London journalist present that even if there had been no pavilion with its “tasteful draperies … and elevated galleries,” “the manifestation of respect on the part of the people towards their poet, would have been accomplished” and the “heart-beatings of Scotland” as clearly felt. This may be a reference to the inclusion among the banners held aloft by those in the procession of “the ancient historic flag of Scotland,” but more likely to the aforementioned thistle near the marchers’ tail, which, when it became visible, induced “loud and unrestrained” applause on the part of those watching. It should be emphasized that by “people” here is not meant solely the lower orders, the “peasants and farm labourers” who formed the bulk of the procession in the morning that preceded the festival proper.Footnote ⁷³ The visitors who crowded into Ayr had to be sufficiently well-off to be able to lose a day’s work, and pay, and to afford the train or steamer fare. The point is underlined by one description of the morning prior to the official proceedings, when “large crowds of well-dressed people, wearing medallions of Burns upon their breasts” were to be seen parading the streets.Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet struck too by the unprecedented fervor of the crowd, the same writer noted that the arrangements for the procession had been “the people’s arrangements,” a reference to the fact that a series of subcommittees had been established by the festival’s organizers to arrange particular activities. Processions of collective bodies such as guilds, urban elites, or trade groups had long been integral elements of Scotland’s town culture, but as a means by which the views of skilled artisans and other groups of working people could be expressed in an orderly but very visible way, the procession was a relatively new phenomenon.Footnote ⁷⁵ But in determining the composition, order, and appearance of the Ayr procession, Professor Wilson also seems to have been influential, not least in echoing at Ayr some of the flavor of the spectacular medieval tournament of 1839 that had been held in the grounds of Eglinton castle, where Wilson and the earl of Eglinton had also been key figures.Footnote ⁷⁶ Not only were some of the personnel identical, so too were the motives behind the Eglinton tournament. At the head of the 30,000–50,000 strong, three-deep, mile-long procession at Ayr was one of several music bands, that of the 87th Fusiliers, followed by the provost, magistrates, town council, and trades of the burgh of Ayr. The body of the procession included farmers and shepherds, members of a number of Masonic lodges from the west of Scotland, and groups belonging to various trades, including the Maybole tailors and Mauchline box makers. Visually most striking and in keeping with Tory visions of a feudalized Celtic Scotland (and harking back to Eglinton in 1839) was the presence of tartan-bedecked bagpipers and others dressed as Highland chieftains or as characters drawn from Burns’s poems.

But if this is clearly indicative of the influence of the festival’s organizers, it is highly unlikely that Wilson and his associates would have readily sanctioned (if at all) the decision that the procession would move, as it did, to the tune of “A man’s a man.” The genesis of this song, probably composed by Burns in 1794, was Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, the prose from which Burns had “transformed into poetry.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The song had not been published until 1805, however, almost ten years after Burns’s death. But by 1844, it had become an established element within the Radical song canon.Footnote ⁷⁸ In a recent article that emphasizes the significance of songs, singing, and music as galvanizing aspects of Chartist rituals, Kate Bowan and Paul Pickering have identified Burn’s “A man’s a man” as, in effect, the signature tune of those who had gathered in several Scottish towns in 1840 to celebrate the release of imprisoned Chartists.Footnote ⁷⁹ It is worth noting too that also much sung by Radicals, from 1817 if not earlier, was Burns’s “Scots wha hae.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The song is proudly patriotic but also a defiant rejection of slavery and tyranny and a hymn to liberty. Again, these were themes frequently articulated by British radicals, including Chartist orators, who were keen to arouse in their listeners the sense of a people excluded from their natural birthright, and therefore drew on Burns for his articulation of their humanitarian social vision.Footnote ⁸¹

Other than in the choice of music, it is difficult to infer anything more about how far the reception of Burns by the Ayr marchers differed from that of the festival’s organizers and the other participants. There are however, hints. That the procession—of its own accord—chose to slow down while hats were removed and heads bowed as it passed Burns’s birthplace (an alehouse in 1844) can suggest simply respect for the dead poet. Equally, the gesture might betoken some warmer affection on the part of the agricultural workers among the marchers for a man of their own rank and occupation who had been exposed to similar experiences. Burns’s poem “To a Mouse” has been described as an expression of empathy with a peasant class in decline.Footnote ⁸² Dignity, self-respect, and a sense of self-worth, combined with self-reliance, were of fundamental importance for most working people in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸³ In drawing upon a more or less familiar language that articulated these feelings, Burns was also clearly important. Noted already but as will be shown in greater detail below, his works were read and heard by large numbers of relatively ordinary people.Footnote ⁸⁴ There is, however, one piece of firmer and more direct evidence that may account for the warmth of the reception on the part of those in the procession at Ayr for Burns’s sons as well as for Burns’s memory. This is to be found in the report of a conversation held at Ayr in 1844 on the question of why Burns was preferred to Walter Scott. The discussion was recalled some time later by Charles MacKay, one of the spectators, who was also editor of the Glasgow Argus. His traveling companion had been Patrick Park, a sculptor who was evidently so moved by what he had seen and heard in 1844 that the following year he gifted a marble bust of Burns to the Trustees of the Burns Monument at Alloway.Footnote ⁸⁵ MacKay and Park reckoned that part of Burns’s appeal was the tragedy of his death at a relatively young age. Contributing too was the fact that he had been a sinner—a mortal man—who had also suffered public humiliation at the hands of parish elders for his sins. But above all, Park was convinced that the explanation lay in the perception of Burns as “a man of the people … a sturdy lover and preacher of independence.” Scott by contrast had apparently been free of sin (certainly he escaped Kirk censure). He was also “too far above the crowd to attract their affections.” Burns was “a democrat to the bone.”Footnote ⁸⁶

It is this last comment that goes a long way toward explaining why Britain’s Radicals, led by the Chartist newspaper the Northern Star, which promoted Burns as the “Poor Man’s Poet” (a subtle but significant variant of the more neutral term “People’s Poet”), lost no time in making their views on the Ayr festival known, picking over and contesting the arguments of the speakers. In Scotland the attack on the festival was led by the Reverend Patrick Brewster, Paisley’s Chartist minister.Footnote ⁸⁷ Immediately in the firing line for Chartist attacks was Wilson, who had long been the bête noire of Scotland’s political reformers.Footnote ⁸⁸ As we have noted in passing, the recruitment by Radicals of Burns for their cause was not unprecedented. As well as being a writer on agricultural matters, the aforementioned William Cobbett was proprietor and editor of the Political Register. As a “rural radical,” Cobbett offered, it has recently been proposed, “an influential alternative to … eirenic and deferential representations of a contented British peasantry.”Footnote ⁸⁹ On his tour of Scotland in 1832, Cobbett had visited Dumfries to pay homage to Burns’s widow, Jean Armour. It is not difficult to judge what lay behind Cobbett’s remark to her that one single page of her late husband’s writing was worth “more than a whole cart load that has been written by walter scott.”Footnote ⁹⁰ By the end of the same decade, Burns was included in the pantheon of Scottish, English, French, and American liberty-espousing radical philosophers and writers lionized by the Chartists, not only in Scotland but south of the border too.Footnote ⁹¹ Itinerant Chartist lecturers were among the thousands of self-styled pilgrims to the “land of Burns” and the sites associated with the deceased but revered poet in Ayr, Dumfries, Mauchline, and Maybole.Footnote ⁹² Some paid their respects by visiting Burns’s surviving relations and felt they had got closer to Burns by so doing.Footnote ⁹³ In harnessing the poetry of the romantics for the cause of liberty and against tyranny, the editor of Glasgow’s Chartist Circular, William Thompson, was not alone.Footnote ⁹⁴ What was different, however, was his positioning in the poetic vanguard in Scotland of Burns, whose works were to be taught in the Chartist schools Thompson was then in the process of advocating.Footnote ⁹⁵

Also, at this point, working against the conservatives’ efforts to maintain the political and social status quo was emergence of a Radical countercurrent over public memorials, in particular those relating to Burns. Radical interest in the erection of permanent memorials of their heroes had earlier manifested itself in a campaign for a monument to commemorate the three martyrs of the “Radical War” of 1820—James Wilson, John Baird, and Andrew Hardie, notwithstanding the disappointment of its supporters that the planned rising had failed to materialize.Footnote ⁹⁶ There had been moves too to erect a monument on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill to the Radicals who had suffered the penalty of transportation following the Scottish sedition trials of 1793–94. To a large degree, this was motivated by a desire by the campaigners to divert attention from the “humiliating” Tory statues to Henry Melville, William Pitt, and George IV that had been placed in prominent sites in the capital’s New Town, but it was also a means of advancing the cause of political reform in Scotland.Footnote ⁹⁷ Of immediate relevance here is that when the Martyrs’ Monument was eventually inaugurated, in August 1844 (in Calton cemetery, which lay below rather than at the top of the slope), speakers remarked with evident pleasure, on the proximity, and sight, on the hill above, of Thomas Hamilton’s monument to Burns, their brother Radical, along with Flaxman’s statue of the poet.Footnote ⁹⁸ This had not been the intention of the men who, under the guiding hand of the duke of Atholl and supported by the Prince Regent, had commissioned Hamilton’s edifice, which drew for its inspiration on the classicism of the Enlightenment, Burns’s time in Edinburgh, and perhaps the poet’s (and Hamilton’s) associations with freemasonry.Footnote ⁹⁹ Adding to the irony, but reinforcing the notion of contingency in the matter of reception of such memorials, is the fact that Hamilton was one of the organizers of the Ayr festival.

But it was the Burns monument at Alloway that drew the sharpest comment from Radical critics. The Ayr festival’s organizers along with Scotland’s aristocracy were denounced as hypocrites, honoring Burns in 1844, but ignoring him when he was alive (other than for a brief spell when Burns had been feted in Edinburgh) and during his final years in Dumfries, in desperate need of support. Do not “feast upon your poet’s grave,” thundered the Northern Star, “having first starved him into it.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The charge was a potent one, replicated in Ulster by the editor of the Belfast News-Letter.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It echoed the comments of the Chartist Julian Harney, who on a lecture tour of Scotland the previous year had visited the Burns monument in Alloway, designed by Thomas Hamilton. Harney readily acknowledged that this was a fine structure and a fitting altar to Burns. Designed in the form of a circular Greek temple, which had by this time come to be associated with poetry and “the romantic sensibility with eternity,” as with Hamilton’s Edinburgh monument its geometric framework owed much to Enlightenment rationality.Footnote ¹⁰² But, wrote Harney, the memorial did not reflect well on the class that had “patronised its erection”: whoever recalled Burns’s deathbed appeal for five pounds, he wrote, would regard “this cold stone pile as a monument to the meanness as well as pride, of the Scottish aristocracy.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Harney was soon joined by other Chartist propagandists in adopting this line of attack. The litmus test for the present generation of “owners of broad acres, the titled, and the wealthy” and a mark of whether they truly repented their forefathers’ treatment of Burns would be what assistance they would provide for living poets of humble origin, announced the Northern Star. Specifically, the Star had in mind William Thom, an Inverurie weaver and Chartist sympathizer who, like Burns, had been feted briefly (but in London, and with greater success financially) following the publication of his Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-Loom Weaver in 1844.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ If Scotland’s “repentant” upper classes failed again, Thom’s Chartist advocates asserted, posterity would regard the Burns monuments and festivals “as so many hideous mockeries … vile attempts of hypocrisy to appropriate a portion of those honours due only to genius.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This was a criticism to which members of Scotland’s aristocracy had long recognized they were vulnerable. To counter it had been one of the motives that earlier in the century had persuaded men such as the Earl of Aberdeen to take a prominent part in the campaign to erect a memorial to Burns in Dumfries.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Scrutinized and criticized too at Ayr in 1844 were the festival arrangements, not least the separation of the banqueters in the great marquee and the majority of those present who remained outside in the rain for the best part of three hours, to dance or engage otherwise in “rational amusements.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ “Far better there had been no feasting than that the class from whom Burns sprung should have been excluded by the fifteen shilling ticket.” But despite the discernible anti-Scottish coloring of some of the Star‘s comments, including its patronizing preparedness to overlook for English readers the “barbarous jargon” of Burns’s language, the paper was in no doubt about Burns’s importance for reformers: “Wherever the sons of freedom are gathered … ‘A man’s a man for a’ that’ [will] electrify them with the love of equality, while ‘Scots wha hae’ will inspire them to do and dare all for liberty. The writings of Burns embrace every human heart: hence, despite his nationality, the universal homage paid to his name.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

What the Ayr festival demonstrates forcibly is that by 1844, Burns’s memory had become a major cultural force in Scottish society, what Alex Tyrrell, following Pierre Nora, has called a “lieu de mémoire.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ There is a very real sense that Burns was celebrated—at Ayr in 1844 as at other public ceremonials—as representing the “quintessence” of the (Scottish) nation. The ceremony associated with laying the foundation stone of the Scott monument in Edinburgh in 1840 had served a similar purpose.Footnote ¹¹⁰ But what the Ayr evidence has also made clear is that Burns had the capacity to divide as well as to unite.

Public memory was pluralist, not monolithic. “Great was the grief of the people for their Poet’s death,” wrote Professor John Wilson, “They felt they had lost their greatest man.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Thus, while it was from the landed classes and the urban middle classes that the bulk of the subscriptions for the Burns mausoleum in Dumfries came, contributions were also made by “lowly peasants and mechanics” prior to its completion in 1815.Footnote ¹¹² The 1859 centenary, wrote the Rev. George Gilfillan, author of The National Burns, was supported by all ranks, “high and low, all creeds and denominations, all varieties of opinion and of caste—nobles, cotters, cotton lords, artisans, churchmen, dissenters, teetotallers, men of mason lodges, and many Englishmen, Irishmen, and foreigners,” and “not in riot and revelry” but “in calm, sober, though merry and multitudinous assemblies.”Footnote ¹¹³ This was true enough, although there is an element of wishful thinking in that Gilfillan overlooked the churchmen and teetotalers who deplored the Burns cult and his elevation to the status of secular saint.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Burns’s appeal, however, appears to have been especially strong among what the organizers of the 1859 celebrations called the “unlettered masses.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ This was recognized not only in 1844 and 1859, but thereafter too—during the 1870s until the 1890s, when a series of statues of Burns was erected in towns across Lowland Scotland. The highly ritualized ceremonies associated with the inauguration of these memorials can rightly be interpreted as elements of paternalist strategies adopted by urban elites to soften class antagonisms and bind together their disparate communities.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Even so, the scale of participation in at least some of the campaigns for Burns’s statues is striking, with an estimated 40,000 individual subscriptions of one shilling each being contributed by workmen for the statue of Burns in Glasgow, unveiled in Glasgow in January 1877. Thousands—again, mainly drawn from the ranks of skilled artisans—joined in the processions that preceded such unveiling ceremonies, while tens of thousands stood and listened to and cheered the speeches delivered by local and national dignitaries. One hundred thousand people were estimated to have been crowded into Glasgow’s George Square for the unveiling of the Burns statue there in 1877. A similar number lined the route of the pre-unveiling procession in Dundee three years later. Such a demonstration, remarked one witness, “as regards its vastness or the variety of its elements,” had “never [been] previously witnessed in Dundee.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

What requires explanation, however, is the means by which Burns was made accessible to such a sizable popular audience. Necessary too is a fuller account than has been offered so far, of how his life and works were read and understood in the decades immediately prior to and after the accession to the throne of Queen Victoria. Burns’s death had signaled the start of what would become an obsession with the poet’s life and times, his family and friends, and artifacts associated with him (including his bones and skull), along with a renewed urge to read his works.Footnote ¹¹⁸ By 1805, less than ten years after Burns’s death, James Currie’s Works of Robert Burns had reached its fifth edition and sold more than 10,000 copies. An eighth edition had been published by 1820.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In nearby Ulster, a remarkable sixteen editions of Burns’s works were published in the three decades after 1787.Footnote ¹²⁰ The Works could be borrowed too, from several of the 200-plus subscription libraries that were founded in provincial Scotland between 1800 and 1830 and through which much Enlightenment writing, including that of Burns, was disseminated. While the instigators of subscription libraries tended to be drawn from the urban elites—professionals including doctors, surgeons, and lawyers, and above all, church ministers—men from humbler occupations subscribed too, albeit in much smaller numbers. But in some mining and manufacturing districts, the employees of local works were the main subscribers, as for instance, the print-field and bleach-field workers who joined Renton Subscription Library (1797), one of several founded in the Radical centers of west and central Scotland in the mid- to late 1790s.

In the early nineteenth century, there could still be detected in the homes of many small tenant farmers, village tradesmen, and agricultural workers in Lowland Scotland a serious tone of conversation, where readings from the family Bible were commonplace, the Sabbath was observed, and children were reared with an appreciation of the importance of obedient behavior, honest conduct, reliability, and thrift.Footnote ¹²¹ But earnestness in (Presbyterian) religion, especially where there was a strong dissenting tradition, could be combined with an equally sincerely held belief in the cause of political Radicalism. This was notably so in places where there were concentrations of hand-loom weavers, as in Ayrshire itself, but also Dunfermline, Paisley, and other weaving centers where mechanization and the introduction of female labor were leading to the loss on the part of older male weavers of their former status as highly paid, privileged artisans.Footnote ¹²² Hand-loom weavers were renowned for their engagement in intellectual pursuits, including debates over the political issues of the day, informed by reading materials purchased for their own small but heavily used subscription libraries.Footnote ¹²³ Less sociable but also important outlets for sought-after reading materials were the circulating libraries, usually run by bookshops on commercial lines.Footnote ¹²⁴ More common among the laboring classes were reading rooms and reading societies that in the same period are said to have “proliferated.”Footnote ¹²⁵ It was in such environments that some familiarization with Burns occurred.Footnote ¹²⁶ Literacy levels were relatively high in Scotland, reading ability especially so. Thus, beyond the rapidly extending but still relatively confined orbit of the subscription and circulating libraries, cheap editions of Burns’s works and the unauthorized appearance of some of his poems and songs in chapbooks costing a penny and in equally cheap broadsheet form meant that Burns was accessible to thousands of ordinary people.Footnote ¹²⁷ As many as 200,000 chapbooks were printed annually and sold virtually everywhere, transported into the smallest hamlets by peddlers, hawkers, and chapmen.Footnote ¹²⁸ And just as Burns himself had acquired many of the songs he collected by listening, acquaintance with Burns’s poems and songs happened too by word of mouth, as was later recalled by Andrew Somerville, the son of a Berwickshire agricultural worker, who heard several of Burns’s poems and songs before reading them.Footnote ¹²⁹ Women appear to have been especially important transmitters of the songs.Footnote ¹³⁰

What may be important here is that at least some of Burns’s work was received unmediated by Tory commentators and censorious editors (although chapbook publishers included moralizers and improvers among their number, and remarkably few of these publications were remotely radical in content).Footnote ¹³¹ This was despite the proliferation of Bible societies, literary and scientific institutes, and cheap improving tracts that privileged theology and moral issues over politics.Footnote ¹³² Indeed, while the committees of some subscription libraries deliberately excluded from their stocks authors considered inflammatory—Paine and Godwin, for example—Burns’s poetry seems to have slipped under the wire. Where information on book borrowing is available, Burns appears to have attracted many readers.Footnote ¹³³ Heard or read thus, the effects could be profound, with readers from comparatively humble backgrounds testifying to their elation on first becoming acquainted with Burns’s works.Footnote ¹³⁴ Reading context was also important for certain kinds of poetry. Read in periodicals intent on fostering a popular radical culture, for instance, pastoral sentimentality as John Barrell has argued, could take on a sharp subversive edge.Footnote ¹³⁵ In addition, over time, a number of overtly radical poems and songs either written by or attributed to Burns appeared posthumously, such as “Why Should We Idly Waste Our Prime, Or a Revolutionary Lyric” (1834) and “The Tree of Liberty” (1838).Footnote ¹³⁶ Yet there is little to suggest that more overtly political productions of this kind were particularly widely read. As our examination of the reception of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” has shown, there was sufficient material among the standard canon of Burns’s work to arouse dormant passions and Radical ardor—or simply to instill a sense of individual self-worth among ordinary people. The much-reprinted Kilmarnock edition opened with “The Twa Dogs,” a poem that, at the Ayr festival, Hunter-Blair had used to exemplify peasant contentment. It could equally be read as a questioning of social hierarchy, or indeed as an attack on landlord greed and indifference, and a celebration of the spiritually richer lives of the far from docile cottar class.Footnote ¹³⁷ In this, as in other poems representative of what Colin Kidd has termed “the politics of sentiment,” Burns gave voice to the poor, hungry, and the hitherto powerless.Footnote ¹³⁸ Their verses not only offered empathy, succor, and support, but also articulated, often in the vernacular, the rumbling resentments that may have lain beneath the sullen and eerie silence that accompanied the processes of rural commercialization, with its corollary a rural proletariat, and clearance.Footnote ¹³⁹

Autobiographical evidence provides further support for the proposition that from an early date, Burns’s songs had a powerful mass appeal, and provided moral underpinning and inspiration for Radically inclined artisans. In his Recollections of 1844, William Thom, the aforementioned hand-loom weaver poet of the northeast, described the relentlessly dull, soul-destroying environment of the weaving shed in which he had been employed in Aberdeen. Thom also recorded his indebtedness to the gloom-lifting “Song Spirits as they walked in melody from loom to loom.” More specifically, he recalled how “when the breast was filled with everything but hope and happiness,” a vigorous chorus of “A man’s a man for a’ that” cheered the “fagged” weavers. The weavers’ songs were “all instead of sermons,” and poets their “priests,” their words “the dew drops that gathered during the long dark night of despondency … to glitter in the very first blink of the sun.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰

More than this, however, there is a case for arguing that Burns’s words offered hope, in praying that “come it may / As come it will for a’ that,” “That man to man, the world o’er/Shall brothers be for a’ that.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ One critic has called the song “the Marseillaise of Equality,” based as its final line was on Paine’s call for Europe to form “but one great Republic, and man be free of the whole.”Footnote ¹⁴² The quality of millenarianism in the song may further explain its popularity among reformers in Scotland in particular. Unlike Scott’s Scotland, in the words of Carol McGuirk, that of Burns (and, more important, that of his followers) was “not over yet.”Footnote ¹⁴³ There are suggestions that apocalyptic religious traditions, somehow “buried” among seceding congregations but dating back at least to the Covenanters of the early seventeenth century, may have resurfaced during the early years of the French Revolution.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Gordon Pentland has argued that for many of those present at the Scottish Radical conventions between 1792 and 1794, religion and politics were “one and same concern.” Hence, a reformer like William Skirving could act as a secretary to the British convention, demand rights based on an understanding of the universal rights of man, and at his trial for sedition defend himself against the ancien régime, “with an analogous understanding of Scottish church history coupled with a millenarian religious harangue.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ There was a discernible increase in the incidence of “salvationist exhortation” from secession and relief church pulpits between the 1750s and 1850s.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Strains of evangelical Presbyterianism are certainly to be found among the weaver poets of Ulster in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Even more pertinent is the observation that the most distinctive and vital feature of Chartism in Scotland was the millennialist character of the Chartist churches.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Certainly apocalyptic visions were part and parcel of the poetic apparatus of a number of the radical poets who followed Burns and acknowledged their debt to him. A telling example is the final couplet of William Thom’s “Whisperings For the Unwashed,” which looks forward to a time:

As with Burns, this was a moral millenarianism that emphasized human fraternity, its reference points being Christianity, the Enlightenment, and romantic thought and literature.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ In addition, however, Thom’s sentiments had roots in radical political economy and owed such to his personal engagement with Chartism, Chartist leaders such as Julian Harney, and class war.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Also indicative of Burns’s impact among artisans, tradesmen, small employers, and shopkeepers are fragments of evidence that suggest that the emerging tradition of keeping the memory of Robert Burns alive in a formal sense (at dinners, suppers, and other forms of associational activity) was not solely the preserve of Scotland’s aristocrats, Tories, and other members of the social elite who organized and attended most of the early dinners to mark Burns’s birthday.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Thus, while men of this rank applauded Burns’s advocacy of independence, this—especially independence from the state but also from aristocratic rule—was equally important to large numbers of working people, including plebeian Radicals. Their principles were practiced through a plethora of mutual aid societies, including trade unions.Footnote ¹⁵² An early example in relation to Burns is Paisley’s Burns Anniversary Society, established under the direction of the weaver-poet Robert Tannahill in 1805. Manufacturers, shopkeepers, and other employers were among the fifteen members of the committee, alongside others who had been journeymen hand-loom weavers or employees in other trades, in which a few continued to work. Some—James Scadlock, James Tannahill, and William M’Laren to name but three—had in the early 1790s been identified with French Revolutionary ideals.Footnote ¹⁵³ It was men from similar social backgrounds who were probably instrumental in setting up Burns societies in other smaller manufacturing centers, including Dunfermline (1812) and Fenwick (n.d.).Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In 1820, the year of the Radical War, in the weaving village of Kilbarchan, a New Burns Club was formed, partly as a reaction to the alleged aristocratic nature of Burns suppers held there hitherto.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Only bread and cheese and water were consumed at the new club’s suppers—a menu designed to deny the government tax revenue and force it to “submit to the views of the inhabitants.” Although less is known about the Burns Club of Ayr, the fact that in 1836 its president was Dr. John Taylor, Ayrshire’s Chartist revolutionary, suggests that at least some of its members had Radical leanings too.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

For his artisan admirers, Burns was not simply a poet and song collector, adaptor of songs, and songwriter whose works were recited and sung, or read. Encouraged by romantic notions that poetic talent was divine in origin, there was a widespread belief that Burns really had been a simple ploughman, someone of relatively humble origins and with little formal education. His example induced a stream of working-class imitators.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The same was true across the North Channel, where the image of Burns the ploughman poet, who stood outside the establishment, drew many Ulster-Scots to him.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ There Burns inspired a revival of the tradition of poetry writing among weaver communities, while in Scotland too his influence seems to have been particularly strong around the textile manufacturing center of Paisley.Footnote ¹⁵⁹

In terms of subject matter, poetic form, language, and sentiments, Burns’s impact can readily be seen in the work of his followers.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ In some of the Radical poetry that appeared in the final years of Burns’s life and the early years of the nineteenth century, direct links can be traced from Burns to his imitators and thence through traditional dissent to the sharper political program that culminated in the physical force thrust of the Chartist movement. An example is the Glasgow operative weaver Alexander Rodger’s “The Twa Weavers” (published in 1821), which borrows heavily from the dualistic format of Burns’s “The Twa Dogs,” in which Luath and Caesar debate and compare the lives of cotter and landlord. In Rodger’s poem, the two discussants, Robin and Tammas, highlight the plight of the hand-loom weavers who “live naewhere” but “starve at Tollcross” before expatiating on a litany of complaints about corrupt politicians, bankers, monopolists, machinery, and canting churchmen. The poem closes with the patriotic reflection on “Poor Britain! How sadly thou glories decline,” before conceding that the weavers’ prospects are “most gloomy and black”:

Just how many people from relatively lowly origins owed their venture into poetry writing to Burns is unknown, although it has been claimed that in the early nineteenth century, almost “every village in Scotland” could boast its local imitator.Footnote ¹⁶² By midcentury, places like Dundee were home to several worker poets, encouraged by the patronage of men such as Gilfillan. Certainly, working-class versifiers were to be found in many parts of Lowland Scotland, as, for example, James Taylor in Fenwick, Ayrshire, or Andrew Fisher, a Chartist from Larkhall in Lanarkshire who consciously adopted the role of bard of the local mining community.Footnote ¹⁶³ England too had its share of Burns-inspired worker poets.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ The emergence of self-styled “people’s poets” on the public stage was aided too by the relative ease with which such individuals could find publication—in poets’ boxes, and in the pages of the provincial press. In Scotland, there appears to have been a ready readership for popular Radical poetry following the collapse of physical-force Chartism after 1848 and the emergence of the post-Chartist Liberal consensus. Poets betraying Radical sympathies were no longer beyond the pale of literary respectability.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Indeed, artisan poets like Burns were considered by some influential Victorian commentators to be “the great representative of a class which is the peculiar glory of Great Britain.” Their poetry, argued William Howitt, provided evidence “of the awakened mind of the common people of England.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ But Burns had been the first, and it was his influence that was the most extensive.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Other than Thom, the most compelling example of a Radical poet both influenced and inspired by Burns in the first half of the nineteenth century was the now largely overlooked Robert Nicoll—although one rather plain monument was erected in his honor near his birthplace. Like Burns, Nicoll was the son of a modest tenant farmer in Perthshire, although his father’s circumstances reduced him to the rank of day laborer when Nicoll was still a boy. Like Burns, Nicoll, who was born in 1814, died young, but even earlier, at age 24. Like Burns, he was an avid reader. He was well versed in the scriptures, attended his local parish school, joined a circulating library, furthered his own education, and, again in a manner similar to Burns, tested his ideas in debating societies in Perth and Dundee. It was in Dundee, probably in 1834, that he set up his own subscription library and published his Poems and Lyrics (1836), the third section of which was subtitled, tellingly, “Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Illustrative of the Feelings of the Intelligent and Religious among the Working-Classes of Scotland.” The poems owed much to Burns in their form, subject matter, and phrasing. An example of the last is “We’ll Mak’ the Warld Better Yet,” the third stanza of which begins with the lines, “See yonder cooff wha becks an’ bows / To yonder fool wha’s ca’d a lord,” a clear reference to Burns’s “Is there for honest poverty,” There was a powerful sense of millenarianism too in poems such as “We’ll Mak the Warld Better Yet,” “The Bursting of the Chain,” “We Are Free,” and “The People’s Anthem,” with its chanting repetition of the last line of each stanza, “God Save the Poor!”Footnote ¹⁶⁸ An ardent, uncompromising, and in some respects, a naïve ultraradical and political activist who rejected compromise with the Whigs, Nicoll went on to become a highly successful but also very short-lived editor of the Radical newspaper, the Leeds Times. He died late in 1837.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Although Nicoll’s life was brief, his impact was substantial. He was credited through his poetry with having waged “a glorious warfare” against the wrongs of “an infernal system of society.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ In Radical circles, he was considered second to none, not even to Burns, whose successor he was in some eyes seen to be. At least one of Nicoll’s poems was published posthumously in the Northern Star. Yet it is evident that it was for his uncompromising Radical stance rather than the quality of his poetry that Nicoll was feted.

However, it is in Nicoll’s “Stanzas on the Birthday of Burns” that is to be found the kernel of the explanation for Burns’s appeal to the hearts and minds of ordinary people in nineteenth-century Britain, and why those of a radical persuasion so frequently read, quoted, and were inspired by him. The third stanza runs:

It is the last line that provides the key. With Burns’s example before them, wrote Charles Kingsley, working men had “taken courage” and “spoken out the thought within … in verse and prose,” and in their actions.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The point was made even more powerfully late in January in 1859, when the Illustrated London News sought to account for the number and fervor of the Burns centennial celebrations in Scotland. After surveying and either rejecting or judging to be of secondary importance a series of possible explanations, the conclusion reached was that, above all else, what drew people to Burns were his declarations that “A man’s a man for a’ that” and “rank was but the guinea stamp.” Burns, the News declared, had “held up his head among the highest in the land” and spoken to them as an equal; he stood, a “Ploughman and Exciseman,” as the “Poet of the Scotch,” “the representative of one great democratic idea and formula.”Footnote ¹⁷² The idea was not new; it had been around in 1844, as we have seen, and probably prior to that too. It goes a long way toward accounting for the large-scale participation there was by the respectable working classes in the manufacturing towns in campaigns for Burns’s statues, noted earlier. In Dundee between 1877 and 1880, appeals for subscriptions were targeted specifically at the town’s working men and women mill workers. The fifth verse of “A New Song on the Proposed Burns Statue in Dundee” that was circulated in sheet form called on Dundonians “to raise a joyous shout, for weel ye may be proud”:

It was the same sentiments that account in large part for the attendance of working people in such large numbers at unveiling ceremonies. Revealingly, Burns’s importance for the working classes in Scotland was evidently recognized in 1864 by Dublin’s building laborers, who were bidding to form a general union of the city’s laboring classes. A Mr. M’Corry, the secretary for the meeting organized for this purpose, called on his brother workers to exert themselves “in their own cause,” as they could expect little help from Dublin’s upper classes. In Scotland, by contrast, M’Corry declared to cheers, there was not a laborer “but flung back with contempt any slight sought to be put on him by the class above him, when he thought of Robert Burns.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴

The emergence of the Radical-Liberal consensus from the middle of the nineteenth century meant that there were no longer the stark divisions between elite promoters of such occasions and the lower class participants that were apparent at Ayr in 1844. Indeed, in Dundee, for example, some members of the committee formed early in 1877 to raise funds for the Burns statue had been active Radicals. Observers at unveiling ceremonies were left in no doubt about how participation on the part of the trades and others of similar rank on such occasions was to be interpreted. The arrangements for the procession that preceded the unveiling of the Burns statue in Glasgow in 1877 had been made by representatives of several of the trade societies from west-central Scotland. Significantly, the assembly point chosen was Glasgow Green, the “People’s Park,” the traditional gathering place for Radical demonstrations in the city from early in the century. Also important symbolically, expressed in the carefully chosen words of one reporter present, was that near the head of the procession was a decoration of evergreens, “conspicuously flaunting the legend of the day, as it might be called, ‘A man’s a man for a’ that.’”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ This of course was a gesture that, in relation to the celebration of Burns, had first been seen at Ayr in 1844. Most speakers too on such occasions recognized what Burns meant to their audiences and induced great roars of approval when they said as much. “Deafening and protracted” cheering followed the end of the speech of Frank Henderson, one of the two Liberal members of Parliament for Dundee, when he unveiled the Burns statue there in October 1880. Henderson had declared that Burns: “showed that the nobility of the soul was confined to no rank in life … that peers were the creation of earthly kings, but that the honest man was the work of God himself. … Under the inspiration of these two ideas with which Burns … furnished him—the essential dignity of his labour and the possible nobility of his life—the Scottish working man has been transformed.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Not everyone was as ready as Henderson to acknowledge that this was why Burns should be celebrated, although by the 1860s and 1870s, dissenting voices were very much in the minority. One of these was heard at the unveiling ceremony for the Burns memorial at Kilmarnock, in Ayrshire, in 1879, when the town’s member of Parliament, Colonel Alexander, revealed his reservations by arguing that “words are now and then wrested from their true meaning, and a construction put upon them which in my humble opinion Burns never intended them to bear.” Because Burns

Even Dundee’s Rev. George Gilfillan, a moderate Radical in the Presbyterian mold, was anxious that the democratic flame should be contained. Thus, while Gilfillan was content to commend Burns to working-class audiences as a democratic hero, he was careful to emphasize that progress toward widening the franchise should be achieved in a responsible way and gradually.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

But it was speeches of the kind made by Henderson that best captured the Radical spirit of the age that Archibald Alison and other Scottish conservatives had done their utmost to resist.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ It was what Alison was forced, reluctantly and very publicly, to confront and concede, in 1859. Social relations in Scotland were being transformed by the sense of self-worth that Burns had done much to nurture among the respectable working classes. If by 1859 the sting of Scottish Radicalism had been drawn, so that to embrace it, even halfheartedly, was a less momentous step than it would have been half a century earlier, what was undeniable was the part that the Burns legacy played in keeping its essence alive.