View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Scholar Commons - Institutional Repository of the University of South Carolina University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Selected Essays on Robert Burns by G. Ross Roy Robert Burns Collections 3-1-2018 Poems and Songs Spuriously Attributed to Robert Burns G. Ross Roy University of South Carolina - Columbia Publication Info 2018, pages 112-125. (c) G. Ross Roy, 1996; Estate of G. Ross Roy and Studies in Scottish Literature, 2018. First published in Études Écossaises, 3 (1996): 11-24; reprinted in Critical Essays on Robert Burns, ed. Carol McGuirk (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1998), 225-237. This Chapter is brought to you by the Robert Burns Collections at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Selected Essays on Robert Burns by G. Ross Roy by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. POEMS AND SONGS SPURIOUSLY ATTRIBUTED TO ROBERT BURNS (1996) The meteoric rise in the reputation of Robert Burns is well known. He had never published a poem before he brought out his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786 in a printing of 612 copies, which were sold out three and a half months later. In 1787 there was published an edition in Edinburgh, probably numbering 3,250 copies, as well as an edition in London and piracies in Belfast and Dublin; the following year there were further piracies published in Philadelphia and New York. By December 19, 1786, the first of Burns’s poems to appear in a newspaper was published in the Caledonian Mercury.