On 17 October 1774 the Scots poet Robert Fergusson died. Fergusson’s achievements are sometimes overshadowed by his early dying: at 24, following a mind damage and a spell in Edinburgh’s Bedlam asylum. His legacy has additionally been difficult by Robert Burns, who referred to Fergusson as his ‘elder brother within the muse’. Whereas Burns’ admiration was undoubtedly real, his early development of Fergusson has led to his predecessor being considered, within the phrases of the Scottish poet Robert Crawford, ‘Burns’s John the Baptist, his position eternally a supporting one’. After we look past Fergusson’s dying and the towering presence of Burns, we discover a misunderstood poet whose profession was exceptional. Regardless of writing for under six years, he was impressively prolific, with an output of over 100 poems written in each Scots and English, greater than 80 of which had been printed in his lifetime.
Many had been first printed in an Edinburgh periodical, The Weekly Journal; or Edinburgh Amusement. Fergusson shaped a robust working relationship with its proprietor Walter Ruddiman and successfully grew to become the journal’s ‘home poet’: all through 1773, as an illustration, Fergusson’s poems appeared in virtually each concern. Ruddiman wished his journal to be a miscellany, variously showcasing new inventive works, essays, opinions, information and letters from readers. With a distribution of three,000 copies, it was the primary and most profitable journal in Edinburgh to be circulated weekly. This gave Fergusson a nationwide literary platform.
Most of Fergusson’s poems reply to the matters printed within the Journal, its common publication cycle permitting Fergusson to react to, and touch upon, occasions and ongoing debates rapidly. His frequent responses to topical political, historic and social occasions in Edinburgh and past show his distinctive place in Scotland’s public sphere within the early 1770s.
Take, for instance, the seemingly innocuous ‘On the Chilly Month of April, A Poem’, printed on 16 Could 1771. It was written as a response to the nameless poem ‘April’, which appeared within the Journal every week earlier than. Fergusson’s work refutes the poem’s description of an idyllic spring along with his account of ‘torrents of dissolving snow’. Reasonably than poetic fancy, additional investigation of the information studies of the Journal reveals that Fergusson was revealing the reality: the spring of 1771 was extreme, with snowfall, storms and shipwrecks inflicting havoc throughout Scotland. This was typical of Fergusson, who incessantly sought to deflate literary pretension and injected a vivacious actuality into his poems.
Fergusson writes virtually and satirically in ‘The King’s Start-Day in Edinburgh’, within the Journal of 4 June 1772. Whereas the title implies that its topic is the festivities for the birthday of George III, the poem as a substitute particulars the exploits of the odd working folks of Edinburgh, who should not invited to the choose meeting within the monarch’s honour of their metropolis. Fergusson focuses on their celebrations, together with a ridiculous fireworks show that units a fop’s wig on hearth ‘wi’ hair-devouring bizz’. The poem goes on to state {that a} ‘lifeless pussie, draggled thro’ the pond’ is the one answer to extinguish the furry inferno. Folly and festivity quickly flip sober, nevertheless, as Fergusson closes the poem by warning towards the Metropolis Guard, an early police power, who depart of their wake ‘crackit crowns and damaged brows’.
The Guard’s brutality was usually recounted within the Journal, together with studies on the chaos of the king’s birthday revelries as soon as once more the next yr: ‘A number of of the guard had been wounded, and so they in flip dealt their blows fairly liberally, by which, within the confusion, some harmless individuals suffered together with the responsible.’
Fergusson additionally used his pen scathingly to touch upon key political debates. Printed on 27 Could 1773, ‘The Ghaists: A Kirk-yard Eclogue’, is a graveyard dialog between the ghosts of two distinguished deceased Edinburgh benefactors. Though the poem has usually been seen as a contemptuous condemnation of the perceived basic harms of the 1707 Union of Parliaments – ‘Black be the day that e’er to England’s floor / Scotland was eikit [added] by the UNION’s bond’ – its issues are particular. Fergusson’s subject is the much-hated Mortmain Invoice, and he resurrects actual historic figures as an instance his argument. Utilizing the characters of George Herriot and George Watson, native luminaries whose estates had financed the institution of two ‘hospital’ colleges in Edinburgh, Fergusson demonstrates that legal guidelines rising from Britain weren’t all the time honest in Scotland.
In 1773 the British authorities decreed that charitable trusts throughout Britain could be pooled, on the paltry rate of interest of three per cent. This meant that Scottish charities, together with these of Herriot and Watson, would not management their very own funds and could be compelled to shut. Because the poem wryly places it, three per cent is:
A doughty sum certainly, when now-a-days
They increase provisions because the stents they increase,
Yoke arduous the poor, and lat the wealthy chiels be,
Pamper’d relaxed by ither’s business.
On this unusually offended poem, Fergusson is at his most scathingly satirical. Utilizing the voice of lifeless Edinburgh notables to think about the present-day results of the Mortmain Invoice, Fergusson displays with readability his readers’ emotions. The Invoice was so obviously unjust to Scottish pursuits that the Scots petitioned efficiently towards its passing: it was dropped, and George Heriot’s Faculty and George Watson’s School proceed to coach Edinburgh’s younger folks at present.
Fergusson’s dying was one other topical Edinburgh occasion lined by the Journal that elicited responses in poetic type, very like these which he had provided for the publication. A sequence response of poetry eulogising Fergusson was set in movement by Ruddiman. He wrote in Fergusson’s obituary, printed three days after his dying, that Fergusson’s poems had been ‘master-pieces’, and that his expertise was ‘exceeded by none, equalled by few’. In the identical concern, a poem describes Fergusson as ‘Scotia’s bard’.
Robert Fergusson took his position as ‘Scotia’s bard’ significantly. He made it his enterprise to mirror the realities of life in Edinburgh, warts and all, and reworked the day-to-day lives, conflicts and furies of the town into the stuff of poetry. As such, Fergusson’s voice, as heard within the pages of the Journal, was the voice of 18th-century Scotland.
Rhona Brown is Professor of Scottish Textual Cultures and Amy Wilcockson is a Analysis Assistant on the College of Glasgow. The Works of Robert Fergusson is on-line at robert-fergusson.glasgow.ac.uk.
