14 life-changing months: Burns in Edinburgh
How Rabbie's stay in the Capital helped turn him into our National Bard, celebrated throughout the world
“Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face…”
All over the world on Saturday evening, Robert Burns’ poetic tribute to the “Great chieftain o’ the puddin’ race” will be recited with passion and vigour as thousands upon thousands of Burns Suppers are held to commemorate the birth of Scotland’s National Bard.
In few places will his life be celebrated more than here in Edinburgh, where Burns lived for 14 months that was to see his life change. Where he met the great and the good of the Enlightenment, was able to pay homage to his own poetic heroes, and where, in turn, he was to inspire a teenage boy who would become one of Scotland’s greatest literary figures.
And his choice to come here, to Scotland’s Capital, saved Burns from a lesser-known and more sinister destiny. In trouble with the Kirk as a “fornicator”, legally pursued by the father of his love - and the mother of his illegitimate child - Jean Armour, he had otherwise intended to travel to Jamaica to take up a position in a plantation where wealth was generated through slavery.
How ironic and tragic if that had been the fate of the man who penned “A Man’s a Man for a’ that” with its magnificent finishing lines “That Man to Man the warld o’er/ Shall brithers be for a’ that.”
Key to success
Thankfully, he accepted the invitation of the hugely influential Blind Poet, Dr Thomas Blacklock, whose own father was a humble bricklayer and who saw the genius in the work of The Ploughman Poet. Burns first book of poetry, “Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect” had been published to acclaim earlier that year, and Blacklock told him he should come to the Capital to work on a second, and have it published.
As Burns’ Night approaches, we’re looking at Rabbie’s short but eventful sojourn in Edinburgh, which had a profound impact on his life and career. “It was key to his success as an early poet… being in Edinburgh basically takes him from being an Ayrshire bard and begins to move him towards becoming a national bard.” says Dr Ronnie Young from the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow.
Burns acknowledged the impact of the city upon him, in his autobiographical letter to Dr John Moore he said: “At Edinr (sic) I was in a new world. I mingled among many classes of men, but all of them new to me; and I was all attention ‘to catch the manners living as they rise’.”
The Edinburgh that Burns arrived in, aged 27, was defined by change and excitement. The last Jacobite invasion of the city was well within living memory, and the seismic philosophical shifts of the Scottish Enlightenment were in full swing. James Craig’s New Town plans had been approved less than twenty years earlier, and there was still a loch where Princes Street Gardens now sits. But it was the people of Edinburgh that marked Burns’ career; and whose lives he marked in return.
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