The Canongate Burns (141 page)

This song is a work Burns probably wrote for newspaper publication. There is, as yet, no evidence that it was actually printed, but given the two missing years of
The Glasgow Advertiser
(1795–6), it may have been printed in that radical broadsheet anonymously after composition in January 1796.
The Glasgow Magazine
, which first printed
A Man's a Man
, is also missing for this period.

On 12th January, 1796, Henry Erskine (the ‘Hal' of l. 7), a friend of Burns's, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in Scotland, lost his electoral office to the Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas (1758–1819), nephew of Henry Dundas. Robert is colloquially referred to as ‘Bob' (l. 7). Henry Erskine was a leading radical Whig, brother to the brilliant lawyer Thomas Erskine (See
Here's a Health Tae Them
That's Awa
). Henry Erskine was effectively voted out by the majority of Tory loyalists including Walter Scott because of his known sympathies for the radical cause. Old Harlaw (l. 1) was a battle fought near Aberdeen in 1411. Mary Queen of Scots was defeated at Langside (l. 3) in 1568. Pisgah (l. 25) is a Biblical mountain, Deuteronomy, iii, v. 27. The ‘heretic Eight-and-Thirty' were those who voted for Henry Erskine.

Cromek's edition of this late radical song is missing the final stanza which he probably censored. Scott Douglas comments that the final verse appeared, courtesy of Allan Cunningham's son, in 1842 (See Vol. II, footnote, p. 285). It is entirely in keeping with editorial censorship during the 19th century that the slight on the Tory administration and King George, in the final lines, would be
cut. Despite the jocular use of diminutives and of Scottish historical and Biblical allusions, this poem records a brutal and terminal defeat for the forces of reform. Ll. 21–4 record the failure of optimistic, progressive hope that had grown through the eighteenth century that talent, not birth, independence not sycophancy, would be the basis of the new (republican) society.

If the politics of Burns were completely unpalatable to some contemporaries and subsequent generations of nineteenth-century critics, the story of his involvement in bawdy lyrics is one of parallel hypocritical censorship and private smoking-room laughter.
The
Merry Muses of Caledonia
(the title is not Burns's) originated from the poet's private collection of bawdy lyrics within which the majority of texts are simply that, songs
collected
by Burns. Professor De Lancey Ferguson, still the key authority in this area, wrote in ‘They Censored Burns' (
Scotland's Magazine
, Vol. 51, 1955, p. 38):

Almost all of the published editions that have appeared since the poet's death were printed exclusively for ‘gentlemen', to be kept out of view of women, clerics and the young. Even as late as the 1920s Duncan McNaught of the Burns Federation printed another largely private edition, to which, in the wake of the
Lady Chatterley
fracas, he would not append his name to as editor. It is now generally accepted that the first genuinely public version appeared in 1959, edited by Sidney Goodsir Smith and James Barke, introduced by Professor De Lancey Ferguson. This is a part truth. The more public edition was the 1965 reprint by W.H. Allen. The 1959 edition, which is still the best, was meant mainly for an exclusive group in Edinburgh who termed themselves the Auk Society. Sidney Goodsir Smith was a leading member of that society. The 1959 edition was a semi-private edition, though copies were eventually placed in most university libraries. It was after the 1965
re-issue that Kinsley included most of the Ferguson-ascribed texts in his edition of Burns. Subsequent editors of the poet's works have concurred with the selection of bawdy lyrics, particularly those marked by De Lancey Ferguson, as by Burns, or, probably traditional, but re-written by him.

During the eighteenth century bawdy songs performed two key roles: partly a psychological release from the harsh, brutal physical world of manual work and a form of self-exculpation from the rigid clerical strictures imposed on sexual activity outside marriage. Unsurprisingly, Dr Currie attempted to airbrush out Burns's interest in this genre. It led him, as De Lancey Ferguson has shown, to insert a sentence in a letter by Burns to John McMurdo, which the poet never wrote: ‘A very
few
of them are my own' (See
MMC
, 1959, p. 12). The letter to McMurdo, of February 1792, actually read:

A select group of friends were privy to the poet's collection. Robert Cleghorn, the farmer and radical activist who lived near Edinburgh, was one of the circle. Burns admitted to Cleghorn in October 1793:

Moreover, in writing to Robert Maxwell of Lochmaben, 20th December, 1789, Burns refers to his interest in bawdy song and its long tradition:

The first song in this genre copied by Burns into his
First Common
place Book
in 1784 was a version of
My Girl She's Airy
. Other lyrics
by him are scattered among his letters. Hence, while his involvement in writing bawdy song is not in doubt, a clear distinction is required between what he wrote himself and what he collected.

Despite the existence of the original small book
The Merry Muses
of Caledonia
where and when it was actually printed is still not absolutely certain. It first appeared as a posthumous, clandestine publication. It was a pocket-size volume printed
around
1800. The publication date is assumed to correspond with the watermark on the printed paper, ‘1800'. The place of publication was either Dumfries or Edinburgh, probably Edinburgh. Even the poet's original manuscript collection has not survived. De Lancey Ferguson argues cogently that there are textual differences between the extant manuscripts by Burns and the printed texts in
The Merry
Muses
. In the 1959 edition, he urges caution:

The manuscripts mentioned by Ferguson are the texts retrieved from among the poet's letters.

Accordingly, following the definitive edition of
The Merry Muses
, we have not relied upon the original texts printed in the ‘1800' edition. That early volume does not contain a few of the known Burns works in the bawdy genre, such as
My Girl She's Airy
,
There Was Twa Wives
and
Why Should Na Poor Folk Mowe
. Instead, we have relied upon manuscript texts or those transcribed from such sources. Printed here, then, is Burns's contribution to the texts of
The Merry Muses of
Caledonia,
where the majority of bawdy lyrics are not by Burns.

There is little of critical quality on the bawdy Burns of
The Merry
Muses
. The invariably erudite Professor R.D.S. Jack has a stimulating essay, ‘Burns and Bawdy', in
The Art of Robert Burns
(London, New York, 1982), pp. 98–126. Also, as Liam McIlvanney's doctoral work has shown, Bakhtin's notions of the implicit dissidence in the carnivalesque world of common people (see
Rabelais and his World
(Indiana U.P., 1984)) has peculiar relevance to Burns. He is much closer to the real language of men than the sanitised Wordsworth.

This is dated sometime in 1784 when the poet courted Elizabeth Paton, mother of his first child. The song was included in a letter to Robert Ainslie, 29th July, 1787, from Mauchline (Letter 122). A transcript of the original manuscript letter, containing the song, did not appear in public until November 1934, when it was sold at Sotheby's. It was printed by Professor J. De Lancey Ferguson in the P.M.L.A. journal two years later. Barke's edition gave the song a wider audience, with the ‘naughty' lines omitted. The letter to Ainslie congratulates him on becoming a father: ‘Give you joy. Give you joy, my dear Brother. May your child be as strong a man as Samson, as wise a Man as Solomon & as honest a man as his father. – I have double health & spirits at the news. – Welcome, Sir, to the Society, the venerable Society of fathers!!!!' (Letter 122). Regarding l. 9, Kinsley notes that the following appears in
Romeo and Juliet
, II. i. 37–8: ‘O that she were an open et cætera, thou a poperin pear'.

This lyric was included in a letter by Burns to Robert Maxwell of Lochmaben, on 20th December, 1789.
The Merry Muses
text is deficient of verses 3, 6 and 7; suggesting that the printed volume was either transcribed from an early draft collection by Burns, or not from his manuscripts at all. The final stanza, in brackets, quoted in a letter of 29th July 1787 to Robert Ainslie, is assumed to be an alternative ending. It may have merely been dropped from the song by Burns.