Highland Mary: Objects and Memories

Pittock, M., and Mackay, P. (2012) Highland Mary: Objects and Memories. Romanticism, 18 (2). pp. 191-203. ISSN 1354-991X http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/66818/ Deposited on: 5th July 2012 Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Pauline Mackay and Murray Pittock Highland Mary: Objects and Memories Keywords: Robert Burns, composure, widely believed story is that Burns and Foucault, Highland Mary, memory, objects Highland Mary’s affair commenced in April 1786, following Burns’s separation from the Very little is known about Robert Burns’s affair then pregnant Jean Armour (who had been with Mary (or Margaret) Campbell removed to Paisley). On 14 May, just six weeks (c.1763/66–86), whom the poet is thought to later, it is held that the couple parted to make have immortalised as ‘Highland Mary’ in arrangements for their proposed emigration to poems such as ‘My Highland Lassie O’ and ‘To Jamaica, at that time exchanging Bibles as a Mary in Heaven’, certainly not enough to merit token of their attachment. Shortly after their the attention and status that she has acquired farewell, it is believed that Mary contracted a among many Burns devotees. With the fever, dying within a matter of days, and before exception of the poems, there are only two word had reached the poet of her illness.3 suspected references to ‘Highland Mary’ in The essay that follows will argue that Burns’s correspondence and even these serve Highland Mary’s fame is due not so much to only as introductions to the poet’s related verse: the archival record, but rather to the images, the first in a letter to Mrs Frances Anna Dunlop objects and memorialisation through which her on 13 December 1789, accompanied by the relationship with the poet was constructed as an sentimental verse ‘To Mary in Heaven’;1 the act of public memory in the nineteenth second in a letter to the poet’s editor George century. The memorialised relationship of Thomson dated 26 October 1792, a trifling Burns and Highland Mary is, we will argue, a introduction to the song ‘Will ye go to the clear example of biography not being Indies my Mary’ (Letters, ii. 154). Despite this, determined by recollection or documents, but an elaborate myth has developed and Highland by the influence of objects ‘beyond text’, the Mary remains the most famous of all women role played by material culture in composing associated with Burns. It seems likely that the memory in the nineteenth century, just as the mystery surrounding the affair has formed a electronic media have influenced the nature of significant part of its attraction. Scholars are recollection in the twentieth. The composure of unable to determine Highland Mary’s exact a narrative of memory helps to promote name, date of birth, when or how the couple communal solidarity and personal equilibrium: met and embarked upon their relationship, in Highland Mary’s case, it reassured whether or not the couple were betrothed, or generations that Burns’s place as a national icon indeed how Mary or Margaret Campbell met was justified by one relationship at least which her tragic and untimely death.2 The most could be idealised on a personal level, and which Romanticism 18.2 (2012): 191–203 DOI: 10.3366/rom.2012.0084 © Edinburgh University Press www.eupjournals.com/rom 192 Romanticism on a national one spoke to both the unity of and objects, a Highland Mary and Highland Highland and Lowland Scotland and the Mary country sustained through the provision experience of generations of emigrants.4 of monuments, images and relicware.6 The story of Highland Mary has long been Recent work by a team led by Professor seen as one which is not strongly sustained by Gerard Carruthers at the University of Glasgow archival evidence, but we will be arguing that has revealed that the short note in Burns’s hand not only is it an example of ‘cultural memory’, from the Interleaved Scottish Musical that is ‘relics and stories left as a reminder of Museum, which addressed his relationship with past experience’;5 it is also a composed memory, Highland Mary and was long thought lost, was a memory of something that never took place, in fact on display at the Birthplace Museum in or at least took place in terms so different from Alloway for many years. This note is the sole those in which it is recollected as to bear direct prose evidence for Highland Mary’s and witness in its memorialising narrative to almost Burns’s affair. The editor of the first nothing of a sustaining infrastructure of fact. posthumous edition of Burns’s Life and Works, Composure is the means by which memory is Dr James Currie, makes no mention of this note composed under the pressure of personal desire, in his account of this episode in the poet’s life. group dynamics (‘we all saw this, don’t you Currie rather vaguely places Highland Mary remember seeing it too?’) or by the among those ‘youthful passions of a still representation of experience which reinforces tenderer nature, the history of which it would certain kinds of memories, or creates them in be improper to reveal, were it even in our those who never experienced them. The myth power, and the traces of which will soon be of the Blitz, which focuses on social solidarity discoverable only in those strains of nature and rather than stealing or looting in its sensibility to which they gave birth’, stating representation of wartime London is one only that she ‘died early in life, and the example, and it can be argued that the heavy impression left on the mind of Burns seems to degree of attention paid to representation of the have been deep and lasting’.7 Whether or not Second World War through anniversaries and Currie (who was renowned for his prudent other collective solidarities, as well as through omissions) was aware of the note from the education and cultural representation, is Interleaved Scots Musical Museum is a matter designed to compose memory of the conflict in of conjecture. R. H. Cromek, however, a certain way. The ideas and sites of these reproduced this previously unseen note in memories are narrowed down, ‘encapsulating Reliques of Robert Burns (1808), claiming that multifarious experience in a limited repertoire it accompanied the song ‘The Highland Lassie of figures’, fulfilling, as Ann Rigney points out, O’, and, in doing so, disclosed the affair for the the Foucaultian dictum of ‘loi de rareté’,the first time: ‘principle of scarcity’ which ‘affects cultural memory’ through – Rigney suggests – This was a composition of mine in very early selectivity, convergence, recycling and life, before I was known at all in the world. transference. In the case of Highland Mary, a My Highland lassie was a warm-hearted, composed memory in oral transmission and charming young creature as ever blessed a wider tradition is supplemented by the creation man with generous love. After a pretty long of a ‘lieu de memoire’ in Pierre Nora’s terms, as tract of the most ardent reciprocal the monument on her grave at Greenock, attachment, we met by appointment, on the erected in 1842, heralded a new age of cultural second Sunday of May, in a sequestered spot memory composed through public monuments by the Banks of Ayr, where we spent the day Highland Mary: Objects and Memories 193 in taking a fare el [sic], before she should material culture and souvenirs, all of which embark for the West-Highlands, to arrange built up a picture of Mary or Margaret matters among her friends for our projected Campbell. She was (variously) Burns’s only change of life. At the close of Autumn true love and a guarantee of the essential following she crossed the sea to meet me at fidelity of his nature; the ‘saintly’ loved and lost Greenock, where she had scarce landed when ideal; the Highland love of a Lowland poet who she was seized with a malignant fever, which completed his claim to be a national bard; and hurried my dear girl to the grave in a few an icon of the tragedy of emigration, and the days, before I could even hear of her illness.8 promise it lost through death and displacement. Burns’s wife Jean Armour’s image was seldom The note became the evidence for the final reproduced, and if it was so often appeared in meeting of the poet and his beloved, ‘by the the unflattering guise of a middle-aged Banks of Ayr’. However, following Cromek’s housewife; but Mary Campbell was on publication the note was mysteriously lost, and postcards, statues, plaques and much else, remained lost for so long that its absence in the eternally lost and eternally young. Burns’s end cast a shadow over Cromek’s veracity. The relationship with her may have occupied six 1896 Henley and Henderson centenary edition weeks at most (more likely two or three), but it of Burns accepts Cromek’s note as being from was composed in popular memory as an eternal the interleaved Museum, but shortly afterwards verity. Jean Armour’s pregnancy was disclosed a vigorous reaction set in. In the early in Mauchline Kirk Session Minutes on 2 April; twentieth century, J. C. Dick, one of the leading on 15 April, Burns was still ‘indignant’ about experts on Burns song, cast doubt on Cromek’s Jean, and does not seem to be focussing on work altogether, and even when Davidson Cook anyone else; by 3 May, he wrote in better mood showed in the 1920s that some of the Cromek to Gavin Hamilton; on 14 May he parted from notes were based on Burns’s holograph, the Mary Campbell.

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