The Canongate Burns Read Online Free Page A

published his poetry but, simultaneously, sought to hire him and Coleridge to work in London for his newspaper. Indeed, this was a conversational paradise lost. Politically, of course, not only Coleridge but Wordsworth knew Burns for the revolutionary spirit which, at that early stage of their lives, they themselves were. In burying their own past, they were important influences in allowing subsequent reactionary critics to deny Burns. This denial of Burns is not the least of the offences Shelley holds against Wordsworth in his parody of him, Peter Bell the Third .
    Further, if we look at the pattern of Burns’s career, we can quite clearly discern his membership of politically active groups of an increasingly radical tendency. Freemasonry at Kilwinning led to his connections with Edinburgh’s Crochallan Fencibles which, as well as being a bawdy drinking club, was an extraordinary hot-house for not only brilliantly rhetorical and theoretical, but practical radical political activity. His Dumfries years led not only to his attempt to send carronades to the French Revolutionaries but, as we now know, to his membership of the Dumfries cell of The Friends of the People. By this time he was not only under scrutiny by his masters in The Excise but by Robert Dundas’s extensive security apparatus centred in Edinburgh and reporting to London. Little wonder that after the 1793–4 Sedition Trials Burns should write:
    The shrinking Bard adown an alley sculks
    And dreads a meeting worse than Woolwich hulks
    Tho’ there his heresies in Church and State
    Might well award him Muir and Palmer’s fate …
    Given the poetry and the letters with this mass of corroborative contextual historical evidence from within and without Scotland, it is hard to understand why not only in current Scottish popular culture but, indeed, in significant elements of Scottish academic culture, there is still a persistent compulsion to downplay, even deny, the revolutionary Burns. One cannot imagine kindred spirits like Blake or Shelley being so treated. One tangible reason for thedenial is due to the fact that we will never be able to retrieve the full volume of radical writing in the 1790s. Key newspapers, such as The Glasgow Advertiser 1795–7, are irretrievably lost. Governmental scrutiny was intensive against radicals and the postal system monitored to such a degree that communication was furtive and restricted. To corroborate Burns’s radicalism further, he himself was wholly aware of this factor. As he wrote to Patrick Millar in March 1794:
    â€”Nay, if Mr Perry, whose honor, after your character of him I cannot doubt, if he will give me an Adress & channel by which anything will come safe from these spies with which he may be certain that his correspondence is beset, I will now & then send him any bagatelle that I may write.— … but against the days of Peace, which Heaven send soon, my little assistance may perhaps fill up an idle column of a Newspaper.— I have long had it in my head to try my hand in the way of Prose Essays, which I propose sending into the World through the medium of some Newspaper; and should these be worth his while, to these Mr Perry shall be welcome; & my reward shall be, his treating me with his paper, which, by the bye, to anybody who has the least relish for Wit, is a high treat indeed.
    In the general implosion of British radical writing culture under governmental pressure, the loss of Burns’s political writings was particularly severe due, as we shall see, to the panic surrounding his premature death at the darkest point of the 1790s.
    While significant, however, the denial of Burns’s radicalism is not essentially based on missing texts. The denial of Burns’s actual politics is much more multiform and historically protracted than that. As we shall see, the after-shock of the revolutionary, even insurrectionary, activities of the 1790s was so colossal that it