Read The Canongate Burns Online
Authors: Robert Burns
Patrick Scott Hogg would like to thank Dumfries and Galloway Council's Burns Bicentenary Committee, especially Shirley Bell and John Dowson, for its grant in 1995 to initiate the archival research programme. Two subsequent grants from The Carnegie Trust were also of invaluable assistance. Scott Hogg would like to repeat his gratitude expressed in
Robert Burns: The Lost Poems
(1997) to everybody who helped him. Particular thanks are due to Bobby Dalziel, John Manson and Peter Westwood. Albert Calder and Norry Paton were also sources of encouragement and Scott Hogg has said that he owes a great debt to Robert Pate, Jack Hunter and Lord Singh of Lesmahagow.
Andrew Noble would like to thank The Leverhulme Trust for a major grant, which allowed him to employ his co-editor in 1998â9 as a Research Assistant at Strathclyde University. He would also like to record his gratitude to The Institute for Advanced Studies at Edinburgh University, whose award of a Visiting Research Fellowship in 2000 gave him invaluable time and space to complete this project.
We would also record our thanks to librarians all over Britain; the most harassed were Donald Nelson and Harzara Singh of Glasgow's Mitchell Library's world-famous Burns Collection. For keying in various parts of the manuscript we received sterling help from Jordana Brown, John McLeish, Martin Ogg and David Exley.
From the academic community Carol McGuirk, Tom Crawford, and David Daiches were consistently supportive in their sympathetic and objective scholarship. Thanks are also due to Rory Watson for his assistance and, with Cairns Craig, his editorial acceptance of the project. Of signal help was Liam McIlvanney's scholarship. His forthcoming book from Tuckwell (
The Radical Burns: Poetry and Politics in the Late
Eighteenth Century
) complements and compliments this edition.
Last, but by no means least, Andrew Noble would like to thank his wife Jennifer, and Patrick Scott Hogg and his partner Helen for the patience shown in the face of this mammoth task. The last words, as always, should be the Bard's:
Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet,
To think how many counsels sweet,
How mony lengthen'd sage advices,
The husband frae the wife despises!
âTo select and arrange what ought to be published of Burns's will be no easy task, when you consider the variety of taste and opinions which obtain among men and the necessity there is for the strictest delicacy being ever kept in view. His poetry and letters were so often blended with Religion, Politics, Love, and Bawdry that the greatest care must be taken to render his thoughts and opinions consistent.'
Alexander Cunningham: The Syme-Cunningham Correspondence,
The Burns Chronicle
, 1938, XIII, p. 43.
â⦠the editing of his works was, for a full century after his death, in the hands of men temperamentally unfitted to sympathise with certain phases of his character, and incapable of frank and objective presentation of facts of which they disapproved.'
Professor J. De Lancey Ferguson,
The Letters of Robert
Burns
, p. xxxix, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1931.