Guest Post by Timothy Gress, MA Student of English, New York University; MSLIS Student, Palmer School of Library and Information Science

Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759. Affectionally dubbed the “Heaven-taught plowman” by an early reviewer, Burns had a profound influence on British Romanticism and his poetry continues to be read worldwide. The manuscripts of two of his most celebrated poems “A Red, Red Rose” and “To a Mouse” are preserved in the Berg and Pforzheimer Collections, respectively.

In July 1786 Burns first published his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect to enormous success. The 612 copies printed sold out within a month and made Burns a profit of over £50. Today the famed 1786 Kilmarnock edition of Burns’s poetry, so called because it was printed by John Wilson of Kilmarnock, survives in just over 80 copies. With five copies spread across three distinctive collections, the New York Public Library holds more copies of the Kilmarnock edition than any other institution in the world.

An interesting feature of the Kilmarnock edition is that Burns, especially in his more satirical poems such as “The Holy Fair,” redacted the names of certain people and places with asterisks and blank lines. While readers today may assume that the writer and publisher would have been at risk if they named names, scholar H.J. Jackson points out that “the names are so badly hidden that they might as well not have been hidden at all, and the laws were so seldom enforced that they were generally discouraged” (222). For example, in the dedication to Burns’s “friend and brother,” Gavin Hamilton, all but two letters in Hamilton’s name were provided with asterisks in place of the missing letters. By half-concealing and half-revealing the identity of his friend, Burns invites his readers to literally fill in the blanks—an interactive guessing game that many eighteenth-century readers took pleasure in.

In the Pforzheimer Collection’s unique copy of the Kilmarnock Burns, a contemporary reader actively took their pen to the margins and (correctly) provided the names of ten individuals (mostly friends and acquaintances of Burns, including Gavin Hamilton) whose identities had previously been concealed. For scholars, these identifications remain important because they provide insight into how early readers engaged with and received Burns’s poetry. While the author of this marginalia remains unknown, based on evidence left on the title page and the fact that many of the names could only have been identified by a fellow Scot, it is probable that the first owner of the Pforzheimer copy is the “---Crawford, Esq.” listed as a subscriber to the enlarged edition of Burns’s poetry released, with a newly commissioned portrait of the poet, in Edinburgh in 1787.  

The first Edinburgh edition of Burns’s poetry is sometimes referred to as the “stinking” Burns because in some copies the word “skinking” (meaning easily poured) in the “Address to a Haggis” is misprinted as “stinking.” This memorable typo was introduced after printer William Smellie, in a frantic attempt to make up for a shortage of copies, was forced to re-set each piece of type by hand and repeat the run as a partial second impression.

The Berg Collection holds Burns’s own copy of the “stinking” edition, which he likely presented to the minister William Burnside sometime after 1788. Like the Pforzheimer Collection’s copy of the Kilmarnock edition, many of the disguised names and places in this extraordinary book have been identified in the margins. Although here, according to Burnside’s inscription, “the blanks…were filled up by Burns’s own hand.” While we may never know exactly why Burns went through the process of filling in 25 of the blanks for Burnside, it is possible that Burns wanted to provide the “man whom I shall ever gratefully remember” with a certain insider knowledge about his poetry that other readers, who were unable to identify the redacted names, might not have been privy to. Burns’s choice to leave several of the obscured names unidentified is also notable. Even though he provided Burnside with a substantial head start, leaving these names blank was perhaps Burns’s attempt at inviting Burnside and others to take their pens and participate in this often highly social guessing game themselves—an invitation they never accepted.

For more information on marginalia in the Romantic Age, see H.J. Jackson’s Romantic Readers.