Why the English Had to Invent Robert Burns

Abstract This chapter discusses the early engagement with Burns in England. Burns created special kinds of problems for English writers attempting to construct the notion of a national literature in a British context. The chapter looks first at the early positive reception of Burns among progressive Dissenters like Anna Laetitia Barbauld and John Aikin Jr, who had long-standing familial, professional, and denominational ties with Scotland that placed them aslant the British state. Their links to the area around Liverpool and Manchester provide a context for James Currie’s edition of Burns, on which he worked with William Roscoe, a close associate of the Barbauld-Aikin circle. The second context concerns the progressive English antiquarians Francis Grose and Joseph Ritson, who celebrated popular cultural for the challenge it made to elite traditions. Ritson was sometimes critical of Burns for not expressing enough of what he saw as the characteristic radicalism of Scottish ballad culture. The essay ends with a comparison of the responses of William Hazlitt and William Wordsworth, heirs of the traditions outlined above. Wordsworth’s sympathy for Burns celebrated his native fire, but with reservations that subordinated Scottish to English tradition. Hazlitt, on the other hand, although often very hostile to Scottish economists and philosophers in directly national terms, used Burns as a positive contrast to Wordsworth’s perceived egotism. Both responses suggest a need in England to reinvent Burns for English purposes in the context of the emergence of competing ideas for a national literature.