Robert Fergusson: Scotia’s Bard

On 17 October 1774 the Scots poet Robert Fergusson died. Fergusson’s achievements are often overshadowed by his early death: at 24, following a brain injury and a spell in Edinburgh’s Bedlam asylum. His legacy has also been complicated by Robert Burns, who referred to Fergusson as his ‘elder brother in the muse’. While Burns’ admiration was undoubtedly genuine, his early construction of Fergusson has led to his predecessor being regarded as, in the words of the Scottish poet Robert Crawford, ‘Burns’s John the Baptist, his role forever a supporting one’. When we look beyond Fergusson’s death and the towering presence of Burns, we find a misunderstood poet whose career was remarkable. Despite writing for only six years, he was impressively prolific, with an output of over 100 poems written in both Scots and English, more than 80 of which were published in his lifetime.

Many were first printed in an Edinburgh periodical, The Weekly Magazine; or Edinburgh Amusement. Fergusson formed a strong working relationship with its proprietor Walter Ruddiman and effectively became the magazine’s ‘house poet’: throughout 1773, for instance, Fergusson’s poems appeared in almost every issue. Ruddiman wanted his magazine to be a miscellany, variously showcasing new creative works, essays, reviews, news and letters from readers. With a distribution of 3,000 copies, it was the first and most successful magazine in Edinburgh to be circulated weekly. This gave Fergusson a nationwide literary platform.

Most of Fergusson’s poems respond to the topics published in the Magazine, its regular publication cycle allowing Fergusson to react to, and comment on, events and ongoing debates quickly. His frequent responses to topical political, historical and social events in Edinburgh and beyond demonstrate his unique place in Scotland’s public sphere in the early 1770s.

Take, for example, the seemingly innocuous ‘On the Cold Month of April, A Poem’, published on 16 May 1771. It was written as a response to the anonymous poem ‘April’, which appeared in the Magazine a week before. Fergusson’s work refutes the poem’s description of an idyllic spring with his account of ‘torrents of dissolving snow’. Rather than poetic fancy, further investigation of the news reports of the Magazine shows that Fergusson was revealing the truth: the spring of 1771 was severe, with snowfall, storms and shipwrecks causing havoc across Scotland. This was typical of Fergusson, who frequently sought to deflate literary pretension and injected a vivacious reality into his poems.

Fergusson writes practically and satirically in ‘The King’s Birth-Day in Edinburgh’, in the Magazine of 4 June 1772. While the title implies that its subject is the festivities for the birthday of George III, the poem instead details the exploits of the ordinary working people of Edinburgh, who are not invited to the select assembly in the monarch’s honour in their city. Fergusson focuses on their celebrations, including a ridiculous fireworks display that sets a fop’s wig on fire ‘wi’ hair-devouring bizz’. The poem goes on to state that a ‘dead pussie, draggled thro’ the pond’ is the only solution to extinguish the hairy inferno. Folly and festivity soon turn sober, however, as Fergusson closes the poem by warning against the City Guard, an early police force, who leave in their wake ‘crackit crowns and broken brows’.

The Guard’s brutality was often recounted in the Magazine, including reports on the chaos of the king’s birthday revelries once again the following year: ‘Several of the guard were wounded, and they in turn dealt their blows pretty liberally, by which, in the confusion, some innocent persons suffered along with the guilty.’

Fergusson also used his pen scathingly to comment on key political debates. Published on 27 May 1773, ‘The Ghaists: A Kirk-yard Eclogue’, is a graveyard conversation between the ghosts of two prominent deceased Edinburgh benefactors. Although the poem has often been seen as a contemptuous condemnation of the perceived general harms of the 1707 Union of Parliaments – ‘Black be the day that e’er to England’s ground / Scotland was eikit [added] by the UNION’s bond’ – its concerns are specific. Fergusson’s topic is the much-hated Mortmain Bill, and he resurrects real historical figures to illustrate his argument. Using the characters of George Herriot and George Watson, local luminaries whose estates had financed the establishment of two ‘hospital’ schools in Edinburgh, Fergusson demonstrates that laws emerging from Britain were not always fair in Scotland.

In 1773 the British government decreed that charitable trusts across Britain would be pooled, at the paltry interest rate of three per cent. This meant that Scottish charities, including those of Herriot and Watson, would no longer control their own finances and might be forced to close. As the poem wryly puts it, three per cent is:

A doughty sum indeed, when now-a-days
They raise provisions as the stents they raise,
Yoke hard the poor, and lat the rich chiels be,
Pamper’d at ease by ither’s industry.

In this unusually angry poem, Fergusson is at his most scathingly satirical. Using the voice of dead Edinburgh notables to imagine the present-day effects of the Mortmain Bill, Fergusson reflects with clarity his readers’ feelings. The Bill was so glaringly unjust to Scottish interests that the Scots petitioned successfully against its passing: it was dropped, and George Heriot’s School and George Watson’s College continue to educate Edinburgh’s young people today.

Fergusson’s death was another topical Edinburgh event covered by the Magazine that elicited responses in poetic form, much like those which he had supplied for the publication. A chain reaction of poetry eulogising Fergusson was set in motion by Ruddiman. He wrote in Fergusson’s obituary, published three days after his death, that Fergusson’s poems were ‘master-pieces’, and that his talent was ‘exceeded by none, equalled by few’. In the same issue, a poem describes Fergusson as ‘Scotia’s bard’.

Robert Fergusson took his role as ‘Scotia’s bard’ seriously. He made it his business to reflect the realities of life in Edinburgh, warts and all, and transformed the day-to-day lives, conflicts and furies of  the city into the stuff of poetry. As such, Fergusson’s voice, as heard in the pages of the Magazine, was the voice of 18th-century Scotland.

Rhona Brown is Professor of Scottish Textual Cultures and Amy Wilcockson is a Research Assistant at the University of Glasgow. The Works of Robert Fergusson is online at robert-fergusson.glasgow.ac.uk.