Robert Burns, Club Society, and Convivial Sociability

Abstract Robert Burns’s experiences with club life were extensive, ranging from informal provincial groups like the Tarbolton Bachelors to international organizations like the Freemasons. Throughout his life, Burns was eminently clubbable, finding plenty of opportunities for intellectual and convivial fellowship with Scots of all classes. This chapter will discuss Burns’s involvement in a variety of clubs, including the Crochallan Fencibles (an Edinburgh drinking club), the Court of Equity (an impromptu club of local Scots castigated for profligacy by the Kirk), as well as those listed above. A primary goal of the chapter is to explain and elaborate upon how each club society influenced his writing, for each group to which he belonged offered him its own peculiar form of associational experience. In short, each club provided him with a different type of convivial sociability, to which Burns often responded in his writing. The chapter will include an overview of the verse that Burns produced in club settings as well as in his published work, with attention to his changing attitudes about convivial sociability.