Clan Burns · 1786
Burns and the Kilmarnock edition
On the morning of Monday the thirty-first of July 1786, at the small printing-shop of John Wilson in the Star Inn Close at Kilmarnock in central Ayrshire, the twenty-seven-year-old Alloway-born tenant-farmer and would-be Jamaican-emigrant Robert Burns took delivery of the first printed copies of his small octavo volume Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, the publication universally remembered ever since as the Kilmarnock edition. The print-run was six hundred and twelve copies on the standard Scots-printer subscriber-and-retail arrangement at the three-shillings cover-price; the subscription-list had been collected by Burns across the previous five months from the Ayrshire-and-Kilmarnock literary-and-Masonic network on the strength of the manuscript-circulation of the Burns Mossgiel-farm verse. The Kilmarnock edition contained forty-five poems and songs including The Twa Dogs, To a Mouse, To a Mountain Daisy, The Cotter's Saturday Night, Address to the Deil, Hallowe'en, and the satirical-and-religious verse-corpus of his Mossgiel-farm years 1783-86. The edition sold out the entire six-hundred-and-twelve-copy print-run within five weeks of the publication, brought Burns the substantial sum of twenty pounds in the first month, established the Burns Ayrshire-tenant-farmer reputation as the national-Scots literary voice of his generation, and persuaded him to abandon the planned Jamaican-emigration arrangement (the Burns-Hamilton-Greenock booking on the Bell brig Nancy for the Port-Antonio Jamaican passage, departing the eleventh of September 1786, that he had been committed to since the April 1786 emigration-decision under the Mossgiel-farm-failure-and-Mauchline-illegitimate-child-disgrace personal-crisis of the spring) and to take up the Edinburgh-literary-and-publishing engagement of November 1786 instead.
A national literature is rarely founded by the third son of an Ayrshire tenant-farmer in the second-floor printing-shop of a small Kilmarnock inn on a Monday morning in late July. Burns had committed in April 1786 to emigrate to Jamaica, had spent the spring-and-early-summer preparing his Mossgiel-farm affairs for the departure, and had decided in early June 1786 to publish a small volume of his verse to raise the emigration-passage-cost. The Kilmarnock edition was the fund-raising scheme. It was instead the founding moment of modern Scottish literature.
THE ALLOWAY BIRTHRIGHT
Robert Burns was born at Alloway in southern Ayrshire on the twenty-fifth of January 1759, eldest son of William Burnes (the Kincardineshire Burness spelling that he carried as the paternal-family form), a small tenant-gardener-and-tenant-farmer of north-east Scottish-Episcopalian small-tenant-farmer stock, and Agnes Broun, a Ayrshire-farm-servant daughter from the south-Ayrshire Brown-family pool. He was raised in the Alloway clay-cottage that his father had built for the family in 1757 (the Burns Cottage preserved continuously since the 1801 first-Burns-Night observance), was schooled at the small Alloway school under the John-Murdoch dominie from his sixth year, and learned the English-literary-and-classical syllabus alongside the Scots-vernacular tradition he absorbed from his mother-and-Ayrshire-farmhand environment.
He worked across his teens and early twenties on the series of failing-tenant-farms his father took up across the Mount-Oliphant-and-Lochlea farm-rotation of the 1766-to-1784 Ayrshire-farm-failure cycle, became the effective-head-of-household on his father's death in February 1784 in his twenty-fifth year, took the Mossgiel-farm tenancy near Mauchline with his younger-brother Gilbert in March 1784 on the four-year-lease arrangement, and through the 1784-to-1786 Mossgiel-farm period produced the bulk of the Kilmarnock-edition-verse corpus (the political-and-religious-and-rural-and-vernacular Mossgiel verse that the Edinburgh literary-and-clerical-establishment would universally judge as the foundational Scots-literary-modern moment).
THE JAMAICAN DECISION
By March 1786 in his twenty-seventh year the Mossgiel-farm was failing on the rent-and-crop arrears, Burns had got the Mossgiel-farm-servant Jean Armour pregnant in the late-1785 affair, the Armour-family had refused the marriage on the Burns-financial-and-character-grounds objection, Jean was carrying twins, and the Kirk Session of Mauchline had begun the public-fornication-discipline proceedings against Burns. He decided in early April 1786 to emigrate to Jamaica on the British-West-Indian-bookkeeper offer from Charles Douglas of the Ayr-merchant Springbank Jamaica-plantation operation, and committed to the departure-date of the eleventh of September 1786 on the Greenock-Bell-brig Nancy passage to Port Antonio Jamaica.
THE PUBLICATION DECISION
He decided in early June 1786 to publish a small volume of his Mossgiel verse to raise the emigration-passage-cost (the Jamaican-passage was approximately nine pounds for the Greenock-to-Port-Antonio merchant-trade-ship arrangement, and Burns's Mossgiel-farm-share was insufficient to fund the passage). He approached the Kilmarnock printer John Wilson (the Star-Inn-Close printer who held the largest printer-of-the-Ayrshire-region commission on the 1780s-printer-circuit), proposed the subscription-publication arrangement on the three-shillings-cover-price subscriber-and-retail basis, and assembled the subscription-list across the June-and-July-1786 period from the Ayrshire-and-Kilmarnock literary-and-Masonic network on the strength of the manuscript-circulation of his Mossgiel-farm verse.
Wilson printed the six-hundred-and-twelve-copy print-run across the late-July-1786 printing-period on the Wilson Star-Inn-Close printing-shop press. Burns took delivery of the first-bound-copies on the morning of Monday the thirty-first of July 1786 at the Wilson-printing-shop, opened the subscriber-distribution arrangement on the same morning to the Ayrshire-Kilmarnock-and-Edinburgh subscription-list, and saw the edition sell out the entire-six-hundred-and-twelve-copy print-run within the five-weeks-of-publication-period to the substantial-twenty-pound first-month net-return.
THE ABANDONED EMIGRATION
The Kilmarnock-edition success transformed the Burns Jamaican-emigration-decision. By the early-September-1786 period (the eleventh-of-September Nancy-departure-date), Burns had received the Edinburgh-literary-and-Caledonian-Hunt invitation from the Edinburgh-literary-establishment (the Edinburgh-Caledonian-Hunt patron Lord Glencairn's Edinburgh-invitation through the Mauchline-clerical-friend Reverend George Lawrie's correspondence-introduction). He cancelled the Nancy-passage on the September-fourth 1786 cancellation, took the Edinburgh-coach to the Edinburgh literary-society period of November-1786-to-March-1788 (the Burns Edinburgh-period that produced the Edinburgh-edition of April 1787, the 2,800-copy Edinburgh-print-run that established the Burns national-and-international literary reputation), and committed the remainder of his life to the Scottish-Lowland-poet-and-folk-song-collector career on the strength of the July-1786 Kilmarnock-edition foundation.
THE LASTING EFFECT
He took the Ellisland-farm in Dumfriesshire in June 1788 on the six-year-lease arrangement, worked the Ellisland-farm-and-Excise-officer career across 1788-to-1791, and produced across the Ellisland-period the Auld-Lang-Syne adaptation (December 1788), the Tam-o'-Shanter narrative (1790), and the John-Anderson-my-Jo-and-A-Red-Red-Rose lyrics. He moved to Dumfries in November 1791 on the Excise-officer Dumfries-post arrangement, worked across 1791-to-1796 on the Scots-Musical-Museum and Select-Scottish-Airs folk-song-collection-and-editing programme that the Edinburgh-publisher James Johnson and the London-publisher George Thomson had commissioned, and produced across the Dumfries-period the bulk of the Burns-folk-song-and-editorial corpus that has carried the Scottish-traditional-music tradition into the modern-era.
He died at his Dumfries-Bank-Street-house on the twenty-first of July 1796 in his thirty-seventh year of rheumatic-heart-disease and streptococcal-infection complications. The first Burns Night supper at Alloway in 1801 (the five-year-anniversary-of-Burns's death observance by nine of his Ayrshire-friends) opened the Burns-Night global tradition that has been continuously observed annually on his birthday of the twenty-fifth of January for over two hundred and twenty years. The Burns Federation at Kilmarnock from 1885 coordinates the over-three-hundred Burns Clubs across the world; the Auld Lang Syne adaptation of 1788 has been the universal Anglophone New Year's Eve anthem since the 1929 Guy-Lombardo BBC-and-American-radio broadcast tradition. The Burns name in modern Scottish-and-world literature carries the weight of the morning at the Wilson printing-shop on the thirty-first of July 1786.