Featured Image: Cover of a 19th Chapbook printed in Newton Stewart, Galloway (author’s own photograph)
This is the last of this series of posts on Soundyngs visit to the Hornel library in Broughton House, Kirkcudbright.
The Hornel library catalogue is not yet available online, although the staff are very happy to let researchers browse this on the premises, but in this last post on the topic of this collection of material relevant to Burns and balladry more generally, I’m highlighting a few entries that looked intriguing, to give you a sample of treasures that could be more widely known and researched. I didn’t have time to read these – I only have catalogue listings to share – but here they are, if any reader gets there before me, good luck!
Those interested in the connection between songs and Scottish politics could find a lot of value in the collection, as Hornel collected writings reacting to important events such as the Darien adventure and the Act of Union of 1707, as well as poetry and songs. Burns, of course, was also interested in politics, although some of his most radical songs – such as “A Man’s A Man for a’ that” – were published anonymously, to avoid attracting official disapproval (he was, after all, a government employee in Customs and Excise).
- Caledonia, or The Pedlar Turn’d Merchant, outed by his Majesties Subjects of Scotland of the King of Spain’s province of Darien (1700) – ‘a tragicomedy’
The collection has a good sampling of pre-Burns Scottish poetry and music, including both those with Jacobite leanings, and those that reflects the strong Presbyterian allegiances of this part of the Borders e.g.
- A 1776 edition of the collected works of David Lyndsay of the Mount
- Multiple editions of Alexander Montgomerie’s late 16th century Catholic allegory The Cherrie and the Slae
- A 1725 edition of Allan Ramsay’s pastoral play, The Gentle Shepherd
- John Duncan’s Collection of Psalm Tunes for the Use of the Church of Scotland Compos’d in Four Parts (Dumfries: John Duncan, 1727)
- A 1762 edition of James MacPherson’s Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem in Six books together with several other poems, composed by Ossian the Son of Fingal
- Ancient Scottish Poems, from the MS of George Bannatyne (1776)
- Thomas Evans Old Ballads, historical and narrative, with some of modern date (1784)
Works particular to Burns himself are inevitably extremely well represented, including a copy of the 1786 Kilmarnock Poems, and of the 1788 Edinburgh-published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. Burn’s near contemporary, St Andrews graduate Robert Ferguson, is also present in the form of his Poems on Various Subjects (1789). Editions of Burns’ publisher friend and collaborator in the Scots Musical Museum, James Johnson, include Johnson’s New Music for the Pianoforte or harpsichord composed by a Gentleman, consisting of a collection of reels, minuets, hornpipes, marches and two songs in the old Scots taste, with variation to five favourite tunes (1787) – the year when Burns first visited Edinburgh and showing the primed market for the two men’s subsequent anthologising. Many, many subsequent editions of Burns’s works sit in the collection.
19th century writers, collectors and arrangers coming after Burns, and sitting in his long shadow, are numerous. The 19th century saw an explosion of anthologies prepared for drawing room amateur performance. Given here chronologically, you can see both the influence of the kind of antiquarianism that fuelled Macmath’s song hunting sitting alongside a burgeoning use for leisure entertainment. As a whole, you can see Burns inspiring a century of Scottish poetry and song writing: it is interesting to think about how this shaped and informed developing ideas about local Galloway as well as wider Scottish national identity.
Some writers are well-known and highly-regarded cultural figures e.g.
- James Hogg’s The Mountain Bard (1807); The Forest Minstrel (1810); The Jacobite Relics of Scotland (1819 and 1821 editions)
But many are below the mountain peaks. Together, they show the lowlands of Scotland to be fuelled by a drive to write poetry and songs in the century after Burns.
- R H Cromek, Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway (1810) and also his Select Scotish [sic] Songs, Ancient and Modern (1810)
- John Gilchrist, A Collection of Ancient and Modern Scottish Ballads, Tales and Songs (1815)
- Richard Gall, Poems and Songs (1819)
- Alan Cunningham, The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern, 4 vols (1825) and Poems and Songs (1847)
- Robert McBurne, The Peasant’s Posy: Poems, Sonnets and Songs (1832)
- Robert Allan, The Poet and Songster: A choice of assembled songs (1833)
- John Fleming, Poems and Songs of Whithorn (1838)
- James Kenney of Sanquhar, Miscellaneous Poems and Songs (Dumfries: J McDiarmid, 1843) and by the same, Tales, Poems and Songs (1843)
- Anon, Ballads and Songs of Ayrshire (1847)
- John Halliday, The Rustic Bard, or, A Voice from the People being miscellaneous poems and songs (1847)
- James Hughan, Poems and Songs (Dumfries: D.Halliday, 1848)
One name jumped out at me by repeated listings, who definitely needs a further look. Susannah Hawkins, poetess of Dumfries, had 10 volumes of poems and songs published by McDiarmid of Dumfries between 1838 and 1867. Hawkins was a domestic servant – a local women of little formal education – and probably her poems are of doubtful poetic quality, but the fact that she was doing this, and being printed and read, must say something about local identity and interest in female writing topics.
Alongside more formally printed books, the Hornel library also has chapbooks of ballads and songs, printed on cheap paper in small formats, that appeared from small local printers in places like Newton Stewart, Dumfries and Falkirk. These would have cost much less than full books and would have given working class people access to songs in print. The contents are a mix of tradition material and contemporary, often political, ballads.
Image: Newton Stewart Chapbook of ‘National Songs’
Gradually, books start to appear that begin to write social history through the lens of these anthologies, and that show a growing realisation that different regions of Scotland have distinct groupings of local writings e.g.
- James Paterson, The Ballads and Songs of Ayrshire (1847)
- John Stuart Blackie, Scottish Song: its wealth, wisdom and social significance (1889)
- Malcolm McLachlan Harper (ed.), The Bards of Galloway: A Collection of Poems, songs, ballads etc by natives of Galloway (1889)
- Robert Murray, Hawick Songs and Song Writers (2nd, 1889) and (3rd ed., 1897)
- S Baring Gould and Rev. H Fleetwood Sheppard, Songs and Ballads of the West: a collection made from the mouths of the people (1891)
- Robert McLean Calder, A Berwickshire Bard (1897)
- Thomas Murray, Frae the Heather: Poems and Songs (1897 and 1898)
- Jeannie Morison, Sabbath Songs and Sonnets and by-way ballads (1899)
- Thomas Grierson Gracie, Songs and Rhymes of a Lead Miner (1921)
All this activity suggests poetry and songs are sustaining the growth of a self-aware local cultural identity. The value of a collection like this is that the combined contents allow us to see all of this activity in terms of patterns and trend – a whole cultural context. It is remarkable, and good luck to the National Trust of Scotland in maintaining it.
Further Reading and Listening
- Broughton House and the Hornel Library – National Trust for Scotland Visitors Website
- Kathryn Stewart Meehan, Maternity, Self-Representation, and Critique in Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Scottish Woman’s Poetry, PhD Florida State, 2008 – more on Susannah Hawkins and other working class Scottish female writers.
- Frank Miller, The Poets of Dumfriesshire (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1910)
To read Soundyngs post 1 of 3 on Broughton House (Macmath M/S) see here
To read Soundyngs post 2 of 3 on Broughton House (Mansfield M/S) see here