Scotland

Burnomania

In this article Dr Gerard Carruthers of the University of Glasgow replies to the article in Frontline 6 by Patrick Scott Hogg.

I write here in response to a piece in Frontline 6 (The Radical Tradition of Robert Burns), where Patrick Scott Hogg misrepresented my views with regard to alleged ‘lost poems’ by Robert Burns which Mr. Hogg claimed to have discovered. At one point I suggested to Mr. Hogg that if Burns was sending radical poetry to the London press a possible conduit in this process was the most prolific Scottish reformist radical of the 1790s, Alexander Geddes. I did not claim this for a fact, however, as Mr. Hogg alleges, and at a debate with him at Celtic Connections in January 1999, I did not say that I believed six of the poems he had ‘discovered’ were certainly by Burns as he further claims. I said that around half a dozen warranted further investigations (though by this point it was very clear to me that Mr. Hogg’s research methods were flawed to a huge extent). Let us take an example of one of those pieces where I believed further work needed to be undertaken and where such research did indeed show how undercooked was Mr. Hogg’s approach. ‘The Dagger’ is paraded as a Burns work in both Mr. Hogg’s book, Burns: The Lost Poems (1997) and in the Canongate Burns (2001), where his co-editor is Dr Andrew Noble. This poem originally appears in the Edinburgh Gazetteer in May 1793 with the locus of ‘Airdrie’ ascribed at the bottom. In The Lost Poems Mr. Hogg claims that in this instance Burns is pretending to write from the Lanarkshire town to throw government spies off the poet’s scent. He further claims that there is no poet writing in Scots from Airdrie in the 1790s. In fact, in the midst of fervent radical activity in Airdrie from the 1790s to the 1820s, one William Yates, a flesher working in the town’s High Street, is to be found writing in Scots. Yates is a frequent contributor of poetry to the periodical press of the day and writes sometimes signing his name in full, sometimes the initials ‘W.Y’ and sometimes merely signing the locus of ‘Airdrie’. Mr. Hogg’s argument about Burns deflecting attention from himself by adopting the Airdrie ‘address’ makes absolutely no sense. If Burns is an active radical then he is likely to be aware of the radical writing scene in Airdrie, and would not attempt, then, to put another radical, Yates, in the frame for one of his political poems. One of the many acts of massaging information that the Canongate Burns perpetrates is to drop the mention of Airdrie altogether. In other words, the editors, Dr Noble and Mr. Hogg, know their evidence to be weak and conveniently edit ‘Airdrie’ out of the text (an act which flies in the face of modern textual scholarship). The only sensible conclusion that can be reached on the known facts, however, is that William Yates is the author of ‘The Dagger’.

The reason I originally incurred Mr. Hogg’s wrath was my discovery (in manuscript source) that two of his Burns ‘discoveries’ in his Lost Poems were certainly by Alexander Geddes (1737-1802), a radical Catholic priest from Aberdeenshire whose poetry was reputedly read to the revolutionary Assembly of Deputies in France to assure them of international reformist solidarity. Geddes, then, like a number of writers of the 1790s is a part of Scotland’s politically radical heritage awaiting proper recovery. Apart from numerous errors of fact and understanding apparent in both books mentioned above, it is with regard to radical heritage that I would point the finger at Mr. Hogg. I believe he actually plays a part in obscuring this heritage. His ‘Burnomania’ (a word coined by William Peebles in 1811 to describe being blinded to all else but ‘the bard’) seeks to appropriate utterance to Burns in all too facile a fashion when there is a much wider hinterland of radical writing in Scotland during the 1790s. Rather than truly engage with this reality, however, Mr. Hogg claims that those critical of his work are motivated by something other than finding the truth. So it is that he makes noises about establishment conservatives seeking to depoliticise Burns. No-one, in fact, has operated on such an agenda since the 1930s at least. Let us have both a Burns of radical iconoclastic energies and acknowledgement of a whole raft of writers: Geddes, Yates, Alexander Wilson, James Thomson Callendar and others contributing poetry and prose to the reforming causes of the 1790s.

I am happy to debate the poetry of Scotland (and of England) produced during the 1790s with anyone. I can claim to speak from a position of knowledge, which has increased in my debates with Mr Hogg. The more I learn, however, the more I see how unscholarly his work is with its omissions, misrepresentation and poor reasoning. There have been attempts to portray Hogg’s work as assaulted by a conservative establishment (a charge that plays all too well in bourgeois Scotland which likes to see itself as essentially leftist). In fact Mr Hogg’s windy ramblings are designed to do anything but debate the particulars of his case. I think that he started out from a position of sincerely believing that he was on to something; soon, however, he lapsed into the ‘Burnomania’ of seeing nothing but Burns. Since, then, his ‘discoveries have increasingly unravelled (see the Burns Chronicle from winter 2002 to the present), and he has had no response. The garbling of the true heritage of the Scottish radical left (including Burns’s undoubted part in this) in both The Lost Poems and the Canongate Burns will be rectified in time, but for now people should be warned of the dangerous ineptitude of these publications.

Dr Gerard Carruthers, University of Glasgow