The Canongate Burns by Robert Burns Page B

Greenshields (of the stamps fame) may not have been the last instance of genteel Scotland deciding to save the poet’s reputation from himself.
    The two men immediately involved in dealing with the manuscripts were the poet’s Dumfries friend John Syme who enlisted a mutual friend, Alexander Cunningham, to help in dealing with the papers and to make an appeal for funds to aid the truly impoverished family. In Edinburgh, enthusiasm had ‘cooled with the corpse’ and Ayrshire proved equally miserly. For such virulent Scotophobes as Hazlitt and Coleridge, this treatment of the nation’s bard gave further evidence, if evidence were needed, of the treacherous, mean-spiritedness of the Scots. As Coleridge wrote in 1796:
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  Is thy Burns dead?
    And shall he die unwept, and sink to earth
    â€˜Without the meed of one melodious tear’?
    Thy Burns, and Nature’s own beloved bard,
    Who to the ‘Illustrious of his native Land
    So properly did look for patronage’
    Ghost of Macenas! Hide thy blushing face!
    They snatched him from the sickle and the plough—
    To gauge ale-firkins.
    To be fair to the committee of executors set up in Dumfries, the situation was not only complex but carried real danger with it. Also given the political spirit of the age, much of the material could not be made public far less profitably so. As Ian Hamilton has written:
    The Dumfries executors’ committee had already done some preliminary sifting and, fearing piracies, had advertised for any Burns material that was in private hands. The mass of the papers they found at the poet’s house was in ‘utter confusion’but it took no more than a glance to determine that much of the collection ought probably to be destroyed: ‘viz. Such as may touch on the most private and delicate matters relative to female individuals’. When, in August, a bonfire was arranged, Syme was more hesitant: ‘Avaunt the sacrilege of destroying them and shutting them forever from the light: But on the other hand, can we bring them into the light?’ On this occasion, only a few ‘unimportant’ notes and cards were burnt. 43
    As well as sexually intimate indiscretions, went political ones. Such were safer out of Scotland given that, comparatively, it was a more politically controlled environment than England.
    Establishment Scots were even more zealous than their English masters in hunting down treason in a more demographically controlled environment. The radical English connection that Burns most prided himself on, indeed his intention had been to visit him, was William Roscoe of Liverpool. Roscoe, the centre of a vast web of radical connections was poet, historian and financier. His friend was a Scottish doctor and part-time scholar, Dr James Currie. Currie’s initial response to receiving the papers is replete with the personal and textual terrible harm of which he was to be both initiator and chief agent:
    My dear Syme: Your letter of the 6th January reached me on the 12 th , and along with it came the remains of poor Burns. I viewed the large and shapeless mass with astonishment! Instead of finding … a selection of his papers, with such annotations as might clear up any obscurities … I received the complete sweepings of his drawers and of his desk … even to the copy book on which his little boy had been practising writing. No one had given these papers a perusal, or even an inspection … the manuscripts of a man of genius … were sent, with all their sins on their head, to meet the eye of an entire stranger. 44
    Why Currie, a man of allegedly radical political persuasion quite at odds with Heron’s toadying Toryism was, indeed, complicit with Heron’s account of Burns will probably remain not fully explicable. The most generous explanation is that Currie, given the spirit of the times, produced a work designed to sell to