University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Faculty Publications English Language and Literatures, Department of 2-6-2015 A Lost Collection of Robert Burns Manuscripts: Sir Alfred Law, Davidson Cook, and the Honresfield Collection Patrick G. Scott University of South Carolina - Columbia,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/engl_facpub Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Publication Info Published in Robert Burns Lives!, ed. Frank R. Shaw, Issue 210, 2015. "A Lost Collection of Robert Burns Manuscripts: Sir Alfred Law, Davidson Cook, and the Honresfield Collection," Robert Burns Lives!, ed. Frank R. Shaw, no. 210 (February 6, 2015): (c) Patrick Scott, 2015. This Article is brought to you by the English Language and Literatures, Department of at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. A “Lost” Collection of Robert Burns Manuscripts: Sir Alfred Law, Davidson Cook, and the Honresfield Collection by Patrick Scott Earlier this month, I was working with Ross Roy’s reminiscences from his twenty-plus years editing The Letters of Robert Burns. Elizabeth Sudduth and I are preparing a selection of Ross’s Burns essays for publication, and the introduction, “Encountering Robert Burns,” brings together sections from the autobiographical oral history interviews that Ross made in the spring of 2012 with shorter passages from other writings, such as his last article for Robert Burns Lives! about his grandfather W. Ormiston Roy. One paragraph about editing the Burns letters brought me up short: The problem is, of course, that over the years letters have disappeared into private hands.