Burns was born and brought up on an Ayrshire farm. The family was not poor, but at 16, Burns was his father’s principal labourer. While working on the farm, he ‘listened to the birds, and frequently turned out of my path lest I should disturb their little songs or frighten them to another station’. As the 1911 DNB poetically puts it, ‘Auroral visions were gilding his horizon as he walked in glory, if not in joy, "behind his plough upon the mountain side”; but the swarm of his many-coloured fancies was again made grey by the atra cura [‘dark care’] of unsuccessful toils’ (Burns has always attracted this kind of commentary; and there are few mountains in Ayrshire).
Burns was on the point of departing for Jamaica, there to work as a slave overseer in one of the horrendous Scottish slave plantations, when he achieved instant success in 1786 with the publication of his great ‘Kilmarnock’ edition of verse. Burns imagined his new popularity not reaching him in Jamaica thus: ‘twas a delicious idea that I would be called a clever fellow, even though it should never reach my ears a poor Negro-driver’. (Note that it is the ‘Negro-driver’ who is poor, not the Negro).
In Edinburgh, Burns was patronised (in every sense) by the aristocracy, notably the Earl of Glencairn, who introduced the brilliant young poet to his circle of friends. One shy young boy present at one of these gatherings was Walter Scott, then aged 15, who later remembered the scene thus: ‘I was a lad of fifteen when he came to Edinburgh, but had sense enough to be interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him. I saw him one day with several gentlemen of literary reputation. . . Of course we youngsters sat silent, looked, and listened.. .. I remember. .. his shedding tears over a print representing a soldier lying dead in the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, on the other his widow with a child in her arms. His person was robust, his manners rustic, not clownish.. .. His countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. There was a strong expression of shrewdness in his lineaments; the eye alone indicated the poetic character and temperament. It was large and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the least intrusive forwardness. . .having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Fergusson he talked of them with too much humility as his models. He was much caressed in Edinburgh, but the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling’.
What Happened Next
The success of his poems persuaded Burns to stay in Scotland. He later wrote a much-quoted poem on the horrors of slavery in 1792, ‘The Slave’s Lament’, which may not be a great poem but is certainly an effective piece of ant-slavery propaganda. Yet the blunt truth is that Burns was only a few years previously on the verge of becoming a slave boss, and he rarely touched on the subject of slavery at any other time (in comparison, William Creech, the publisher of the Edinburgh edition of his poems, was an active anti-slavery campaigner; the horrors of the Scottish salve plantations were well-known in Scotland). Scott’s description of Burns makes it clear that he was highly sentimental, but we know that slavemasters could weep over verse and still flog slaves. The truth is that until the novelist James Robertson began writing about the subject – see Joseph Knight (2004) – the existence of the Scottish slave plantations had been largely undiscussed, indeed largely unknown in Scotland.