The Shadow Line’: James Currie’s ‘Life of Burns’ and British Romanticism

Abstract

Dr James Currie’s 1800 edition of the Works of Robert Burns, particularly the 335-page critical biography of the poet which makes up the first of its four volumes, was enormously influential in its time, going through five editions and about 10,000 copies by 1805, and reaching an 8th edition by 1820.1 By comparison, the combined sales of the three editions of Lyrical Ballads 1798–1802 amounted to little more than 2000 copies.2 Nevertheless, Currie’s Burns has long been vilified by Burns scholars and unjustly marginalized in Romantic studies. In this chapter I propose to revisit Currie’s biography of the poet, and particularly the preliminary ‘Observations on the Scottish Peasantry’, in a bid to reclaim its importance as a discursive ‘debatable land’ between the Scottish Enlightenment and that programmatic manifesto of British Romanticism, the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads.KeywordsAnalytical ReviewPopular EducationAgrarian IdealismPoor ReliefScottish DifferenceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.