‘We’ll ne’er forget the people’

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the ways that Burns has been appropriated for a variety of political causes in the two centuries after his death. Sometimes these were divergent in the extreme, as in the contest between Scotland’s Tories and radicals in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet Burns could also be a consensus-inducing figure. The values he espoused had enormous appeal for Liberals in the second half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, too, he was heralded as the voice of Scotland—the savior of the nation’s language and identity. In this respect he was a key figurehead as hesitant steps towards statehood were retraced, from the Home Rulers of the 1880s to the rise of nationalism in the 1920s and beyond. Evidence from contemporary literary works, biographical and critical sources, and political treatises will ground an assessment of the extent to which attempts to ‘own’ Burns galvanized a variety of contradictory cultural and political agendas. Such evidence confirms that essentializing tendencies in traditional Burns criticism underestimate the malleability of Burns scholarship when employed in the pursuit of both overt and covert political causes and cultural agendas.