Edward Everett, Transatlantic Publishing Connections, and an Unrecorded Early American Burns

Abstract

The 1808 American Burns ‘edition’, unrecorded in earlier Burns scholarship, which is described here from the copy in Mr Todd’s collection. is significant both for its nineteenth century owner, the American politician and orator Edward Everett (1794–1865), and for its strange printing history. Everett’s bookplate and a manuscript inscription show that the Todd copy was presented to Everett by a young American poet Epes Sargent (1813–1880), and together these suggest an under-documented interest in Burns in America outside the Scottish diaspora before the 1840s, when Burns’s work would be championed by Emerson, Frederick Douglass and others. The title page states the edition was published in Boston, Massachusetts, but the book’s irregular pagination shows that it was printed in Scotland, not Boston, and was made up of sheets of an 1807 Scottish edition. The American title page (a close but not exact match with the Scottish one), whether printed in Edinburgh or Boston, disguised its Scottish origin during a period of strong protectionism in the American book-trade; if the title page were printed in Scotland, the 1808 Boston Burns would seem to be the only known early nineteenth century example of such an arrangement.