The most recent biographical treatment of Burns is Robert Burns: A Documentary Volume (2019) in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series. This review by Carol Baraniuk appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns, Oxford University Press, pp. 591-592.
Authored and compiled by Burns scholar, editor, and manuscript expert Patrick Scott, this work differs markedly, due to its scale and depth of treatment, from biographies discussed above which also incorporate documents and illustrations. Five chapters are ‘built around the places Burns lived’, and a sixth documents ‘the process through which the posthumous biographers, editors, and publishers of Burns’s work shaped the image of Burns and his achievement’ (Scott 2019: xxviii). Scott acknowledged that several of the great Scottish Victorian Burns editor-biographers had employed documentary material, but he pointed out that they could take for granted their audience’s grasp of Burns’s cultural context. An important purpose of his volume, therefore, is to inform the reader about history and society in the Burns era, which it does using extracts from texts such as Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland. In this respect, but with more and better images, it follows on from the approach of Snyder in 1932, with his maps of Ayr and Irvine, particulars about the layout of buildings, and details of Kirk constitution and procedure.
Manuscript and printed source material by Burns in addition to ‘relevant non-Burnsian documents from the same time and place’ are incorporated (Scott 2019: xxviii). Diagrams, such as that of the cottage at Alloway, are laid out on the pages, along with reproduced engravings and paintings. Though inevitably these resources represent a selection, from them the reader infers the vastness and breadth of the Burns archive. The celebrity status he acquired in his own lifetime is confirmed, for example, by an extract from the Boston Columbian Centinel, located halfway across the globe, which on 6 November 1790 reported:
Burns, the poet, is now a farmer in Dumfriesshire. A small place, which he has in the excise, makes an addition to his income. He has a wife and two children. The cares which these several relations demand, would, one might suppose, leave him but little leisure for the pursuits of poetry; yet we are told that he occasionly [sic] sacrifices to the Muse.(Qtd in Scott 2019: 231)
Scott’s meticulous chapters on Ellisland and Dumfries further clarify the course of the poet’s career and activities in these locations. Particularly illuminating are extracts from Charles Leadbetter’s The Royal Gauger, a manual that explains the practical tasks and scientific processes, such as determining ‘the different Gravity of Liquors’, at which Burns had to be adept in his Excise role (Scott 2019: 240–3). This section, with its delineation of the duties of a supervisor, a position that Burns sought and briefly attained in an acting capacity, additionally features minutely itemized directives about bookkeeping and acceptable standards of conduct. It allows fresh insight into the poet’s professional ambitions and reveals something of his competencies outwith the spheres of literature and agriculture.
The Dumfries period involved Burns in a potentially damaging scandal concerning his politics. Many biographers cover the ‘Ça ira’ incident in the Dumfries theatre in October 1792 and the poet’s attempt at damage limitation addressed to his superiors in a letter of 5 January 1792 (Mackay 1992: 518–22; L II: 172–5). Scott augments the story with details of Burns’s relationship with the radical newspaper editor William Johnston of the Edinburgh Gazetteer, whose correspondence was under government surveillance; he further sets the context by including a 1795 summary of the popular melodrama Oscar and Malvina, which played in Dumfries in November 1793. The play and its performance history reveal the authorities’ suspicions of drama and its potential for delivering a political message. The plot concerns a people’s revolt against a tyrant, and when the Dumfries company performed it in Whitehaven the male actors were arrested and sent for trial (Scott 2019: 304–8).
This most recent entry in the long tradition of Burns biography does not offer a dramatic or controversial new version of Burns. Its merit lies in the rich detail laid before the reader in a compendium of often rare, inaccessible sources. Some of these, though by no means all, have been summarized or partially quoted by previous biographers, but the reader, lacking direct access to the texts, cannot easily challenge or affirm the writers’ interpretations. Scott introduces each section and the items presented with spare, telling commentary, alerting his audience to still unexplained elements within the Burns story, and to issues that continue to provoke scholarly debate. Thus, the reader may feel encouraged to participate with the biographer in pondering these source documents, searching for evidence-based truths.
A plethora of Burns biographies has gone to press since the poet’s untimely demise in 1796, surely confirming the enduring veracity of F. B. Snyder’s evaluation that ‘there is a perplexing quality, or combination of qualities, about him, which is still baffling’ (Snyder 1932: 454–5). Despite the seminal investigations of Snyder, Ferguson, and Hecht, and notwithstanding superb recent studies by Sprott, Crawford, and Scott in particular, however much more we know about Burns, we still may not feel we truly know him. The genuinely definitive biography of Robert Burns remains to be written, and may never be.
Baraniuk, Carol, ‘Burns Biography, 1949–2019’, in Gerard Carruthers (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns, Oxford Handbooks (2024; online edn, Oxford Academic, 22 Feb. 2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198846246.013.43, accessed 28 May 2024.Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/56005/chapter/440999822 by OUP-Reference Gratis Access user on 28 May 2024DLB on pp. 591-592