Readable and full of interesting information, Christopher Whatley's Immortal Memory: Burns and the Scottish People concentrates on aspects of public reaction to Robert Burns in nineteenth-century Scotland. Whatley is most interested in public commemorations and in the many Burns statues erected between the poet's death and the outbreak of World War I. After discussing the years from 1796 to 1914 over the course of 160 pages, he covers the period from 1914 until 2016 in under twenty pages, which is a pity. He points out that “On 25 January 2009, the 250th anniversary of Burns's birth, an estimated nine million people in over 80 different countries participated in Burns suppers worldwide,” but shows very little interest in analyzing present-day uses of Burns (5). Even in his detailed consideration of nineteenth-century Scottish Burnsians, Whatley's focus is sometimes strikingly selective. A historian rather than a book historian or literary critic, he does note, for example, the influence of James Currie's edition of Burns's Works, but he offers little detailed discussion of the way Burns's work was shaped by later editions (or how it was discussed in school or university classrooms) and shows little interest in the way other writers reacted to Scotland's national poet. Robert Chambers, Burns's greatest nineteenth-century editor, as well as one of Scotland's most important and popular nineteenth-century publishers, is omitted completely from the book. He makes token references to A. H. Clough, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Liz Lochhead, but offers no sustained literary discussion. Many present-day names, including those of Calum Colvin and Don Paterson, are absent from the index.

What the research of Immortal Memory does present with conviction is how far Burns was seen throughout much of the nineteenth century in terms of what Whatley, with reference to an Ayr festival of 1844, calls “a Tory version of Scottish patriotism that owed much to Walter Scott” (13). Tellingly, it was Scott, not Burns, who was afforded Edinburgh's largest literary monument. Burns, whose libertinism made him problematic not least to some members of the Kirk, was not always universally lauded; his work could be regarded as “corrupting.” An eager freemason, Burns was remembered loyally by his masonic brethren who were in 1885, Whatley points out, the founding fathers of the influential Burns Federation. One aspect of this may have been that the use of Burns as part of the public articulation of Scottish masculinity was strengthened: the masons were hardly known for encouraging women to participate in their brotherly rituals. Instructive is Whatley's account of reactions to the statue of Burns by Amelia Hill (first woman to sculpt the bard) in Dumfries: its accessories were denounced as “woman-like”—not least the “carefully brushed collie” (151).

More radical admirers of Burns, including several weavers, the best known among whom was the poet Robert Tannahill, were sometimes wary of what they saw as the aristocratic tendencies of Burns suppers. Some Burns clubs had rulebooks that banned political discussion. This policy served to take the radical edge off the poet of “Scots Wha Hae” or that other favorite, “A Parcel of Rogues.” In 1859, the centenary of the poet's birth, a wide variety of Scottish groups paid tribute to the bard in their distinctive ways: in Kilmarnock (where Burns's Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect had first appeared) Masons processed and dined heartily, while the Abstainers Union enjoyed a separate “social tea” (79). In Dumfries, where the poet was buried, county gentry gathered in the upscale George Street Assembly Rooms but were interrupted by a delegation of workers from the local woolen mill, whose spokesman pointed out with an ironic barb how pleasing it was “‘for working men to see a meeting of what might be called the aristocracy of the town’ doing homage to one who belonged to their own class” (83). Burns might be an icon of generalized Scottishness, but marking Burns anniversaries sometimes forced Scots to remark on persistent inequalities in their society.

By 1884, Lord Rosebery, an ardent Burnsian, could hail Burns as Scotland's greatest son. In the wake of Thomas Carlyle's treatment of Burns and John Knox, Rosebery linked Burns “with Knox's ‘intensely democratic’ preaching” while dismissing Scott “as the ‘poet of feudalism’” (101). A few years later, the Scotsman newspaper could contend that Burns, as Whatley puts it, “had replaced St Andrew as Scotland's patron saint” (119). Scottish literary professor David Masson saw “Scots Wha Hae” as “the Scottish national lyric for all time” (131); the provost of Dumfries called his town, with its Burns mausoleum, “the shrine of Scottish independence” (132). Yet such declarations were statements of cultural more than political Scottish nationalism; the same provost saw the flag that accompanied Burns celebrations as “the Union Jack” (132).

Whatley shows in some detail how the Tory Burns of most of the nineteenth-century found a rival in an emerging socialist Burns, whose radicalism could be linked by some with international radicalism. For the talented proto-nationalist sculptor-poet James Pittendreigh MacGillivray, Burns could represent “social revolution incarnate” and even in the 1920s a “potential Mussolini” (155). The same poet had come to be regarded by the more conservative-minded English editor William E. Henley as “a local poet” who was “last of a school” (159). Such arguments over Burns's political nature and uses as well as over whether he should be regarded as a figure for elegy or for energetic emulation would continue into the twentieth century; they were derailed only temporarily when Burns was co-opted by some as a poster boy for the Great War. If Whatley's book, rich in its treatment of nineteenth-century Burnsians and their statues, shows much less interest in modern uses of Burns by writers and politicians from Catherine Carswell and Hugh MacDiarmid to the Scottish National Party's Alex Salmond and the generation of Scottish poets now in their fifties, then Immortal Memory certainly serves as an essential starting point for such future investigations.