ROBERT BURNS AND PASTORAL This page intentionally left blank Robert Burns and Pastoral Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland NIGEL LEASK 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX26DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–957261–8 13579108642 In Memory of Joseph Macleod (1903–84), poet and broadcaster This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements This book has been of long gestation. Early drafts of Robert Burns and Pastoral accompanied me on my return to Scotland from the English Faculty at Cam- bridge in the summer of 2004, when I was appointed to the Regius Chair in English at Glasgow University. Replanted in native soil, the project flourished in the congenial scholarly community of Glasgow University’s School of English and Scottish Language and Literature, as well as with involvement in Scotland’s various Burns networks. My research was facilitated by easy access to the unrivalled Burns collections held in Glasgow University Library, the Mitchell Library, and the National Library of Scotland. A full draft of the book was written during an AHRC-funded year’s research leave in 2007–8: my thanks to the Council, and to Glasgow University for permitting me time out from a busy teaching and administrative schedule. It was completed in the summer of 2009. The poet’s 250th anniversary in 2009 provided opportunities to present work in progress at international Burns conferences in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Prague, and Vancouver: thanks to the organizers for inviting me to speak. I’m also grateful for invitations to lecture on Burns in Cambridge, Sheffield, Newcastle, London, Kolkata, Warsaw, Derry, Belfast, Dublin, Edinburgh, Dumfries, St Andrews, Perth, and Glasgow. This book wouldn’t have been possible without the mighty labours of Burns editors and scholars past and present, particularly James Kinsley, whose monumental 1968 edition has been my point of reference throughout, and to J. De Lancey Fergusson and G. Ross Roy, for their fine edition of the poet’s correspondence. Thomas Crawford’s pioneering criticism from the 1960s, and newer perspectives on Burns from Carol McGuirk, Liam McIlvanney, Robert Crawford, and Gerry Carruthers, have informed every aspect of my research: my debts to them will be apparent in the chapters that follow. My critical approach was ultimately inspired by Raymond Williams’s seminal The Country and the City, by John Barrell’s work on John Clare and the politics of landscape, and by Annabel Patterson’s Pastoral and Ideology. Special thanks are due to Andrew McNeillie at Oxford University Press for encouraging me to write a ‘big’ book on Burns, and to Ian Duncan and Liam McIlvanney, readers for Oxford, for their positive and constructive comments on early drafts. A major personal debt is to Gerry Carruthers, who has been generous in sharing his knowledge of and enthusiasm for the poet, as well as his extensive experience of the often fractious world of Burns studies. Other Glasgow collea- gues Colin Kidd, Kirsteen McCue, and Murray Pittock have read individual chapters and offered valuable advice and criticism: I am fortunate indeed to have had the benefit of their knowledge and friendship. (I look forward to further scholarly collaboration with Gerry, Murray, and Kirsteen as co-editors of viii Acknowledgements Oxford’s recently commissioned Collected Works of Robert Burns, which will replace Kinsley as the standard scholarly edition for the twenty-first century.) My introduction also benefited from Dan Gunn’s thorough overhaul of its style and argument. Shona Mackintosh provided assiduous editorial help in the final stages. All remaining shortcomings are my own. I’d also like to thank Neil Ascherson, John Barrell, Alex Benchimol, Chris Berry, Kirstie Blair, Valentina Bold, Iain Gordon Brown, Rhona Brown, Graham Caie, Jim Chandler, John Corbett, John Coyle, Richard Cronin, Bob Cummings, Leith Davis, Penny Fielding, Sarah Gibson, Douglas Gifford, Stuart Gillespie, Kevin Gilmartin, David Goldie, Dorian Grieve, Harriet Guest, Pauline Gray, Andrew Hook, Claire Lamont, Tom Leonard, Donald Mackenzie, Dorothy McMillan, Ralph McLean, Susan Manning, Hamish Mathison, Jon Mee, Michael Moss, Andrew Noble, Alan Riach, Daniel Sanjev Roberts, Simon Schaffer, David Shuttleton, David Simpson, Ken Simpson, Jeremy Smith, Martin Prochazka, and Nigel Wood. Thanks also to Jaqueline Baker, Ariane Pettit, Sylvie Jaffrey, and other members of Oxford’s production team who saw the book through the press. Earlier versions of Chs. 7 and 9 have been published in the Burns Chronicle (Winter 2006), 26–31, and Romanticism’s Debatable Lands, edited by Claire Lamont and Michael Rossington (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 64–79. Thanks to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Glasgow University Library, the Mitchell Library Glasgow, and Glasgow Culture and Sports, for permission to reproduce maps and images. Finally, my love and thanks to Evelyn, and our daughters Isabel and Flora, for their patience and support: ‘Till a’ the seas gang dry ...And the rocks melt wi’ the sun’. Contents Illustrations xii List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction: ‘The Heaven-Taught Ploughman’ 1 1. Robert Burns and the ‘New Husbandry’ 15 Robert Burns, Tenant Farmer 15 Agricultural Improvement in Eighteenth-Century Lowland Scotland 23 ‘Prose Georgics’: Burns and the Ideology of Improvement 31 ‘Agrarian Patriotism’ and Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account 37 2. Scots Pastoral 43 Burns and Pastoral 43 Generic Crossovers: Love and Labour 51 Pastoral Theory and the Vernacular 55 Allan Ramsay and Scots Pastoral 56 Robert Fergusson’s ‘Hame Content’ 64 Burns’s Kilmarnock Poems and the Copia Verborum 70 Dispossession and the ‘Virgilian Dialectic’ 76 3. The Making of a Poet 81 The First Commonplace Book 81 Verse Epistles in the Kilmarnock Volume 84 Burns and the Problem of Patronage 94 ‘The Vision’: Labour, Poetry, Credit 98 Mapping Coila’s Mantle 103 Georgic Eulogy in the ‘Additional Stanzas’ 108 x Contents 4. Pastoral Politics 115 Burns and Politics 115 The Divison of Ranks: ‘Twa Dogs’ and ‘Man Was Made to Mourn’ 118 John Barleycorn 125 America Lost 134 The King’s Birthday 137 5. Beasties 144 Man and Beast 144 Sheep and Poetry 146 The Rights of Maggie 153 Of Mice and Men 159 ‘To a Louse’ and Upward Mobility 168 6. Hellfire and Common Sense 179 Auld Lichts, New Lichts 179 Kirk Satire in the Reserved Canon: ‘The Holy Tulzie’ and ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ 186 The Popular Supernatural: ‘The Holy Fair’, ‘Address to the Deil’, and ‘Halloween’ 189 ‘A candid lib’ral band’: Religion and Improvement in the Edinburgh Poems 201 7. The Annals of the Poor 210 ‘A Tabernacle of Clay’ 210 Cottage Politics 212 ‘Peace to the Husbandman’: Pastoral Idealism and the Cotter Clearances 215 ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ 222 ‘The Cotter’: Reception, Imitation, Influence 231 ‘The Beggar’s Saturday Night’ 236 Contents xi 8. The Deil and the Exciseman 247 Poetry and The Excise Years 247 ‘The De’il’s awa wi’ th’ Exciseman’: Burns’s Song Art 248 Burns and Antiquarian Irony 256 ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ as ‘National Tail’ 265 9. Across the Shadow Line: Robert Burns and British Romanticism 276 Dr James Currie’s Life of Burns 276 Observations on the Scottish Peasantry 285 Burns, Wordsworth, and Romantic Pastoral 292 Glossary 299 Bibliography 311 Index 329 Illustrations Dust cover. Robert Burns, Poet by Alexander Nasmyth (1828). Oil on panel, by permission of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Fig. 1. ‘The Ploughman Poet’, from Burnsiana Gleanings, viii. 10. Mitchell Library, Glasgow. Original provenance unknown. 5 Fig. 2. ‘Hairst Rig’, from P. Hately Waddell, Life and Works of Robert Burns (Glasgow: David Wilson, 1867), facing p. 186. A coloured print of Ayrshire’s landscape of improvement, looking west towards Arran. Mitchell Library, Glasgow. 17 Fig. 3. ‘Mossgiel’, from P. Hately Waddell, Life and Works of Robert Burns, facing p. 57. A coloured print showing Burns’s farmhouse and detached steading, in the new style. 101 Fig. 4. ‘A New Map of Ayrshire’ (1775), by Captain Andrew Armstrong and his son Mostyn. A detail of the baroque title engraving. 109 Fig. 5. ‘Machline’ and environs, from the Armstrongs’s ‘New Map of Ayrshire’. 111 Fig. 6. The Cotter’s Saturday Night, by Sir David Wilkie (1835). Oil. 229 Fig.