Contribution to Book
The Imprint of His Origin: Robert Burns, John Wilson, and the Print Culture of Late Eighteenth-Century Ayrshire
Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns
(2024)
Abstract
After briefly discussing Burns’s comments about books, and scholarship on his reading, this essay examines the changing book culture of Burns’s Ayrshire through the books printed in the 1780s by Burns’s own printer John Wilson of Kilmarnock. This approach confirms the importance for book history of Burns’s Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), though modifying romanticized accounts of its publication; stresses the variety and continuities in regional readership, rather than simply a local time-lag in the impact of Enlightenment; summarizes the list of books Burns owned at his death; and suggests that late 18th century Scottish provincial book culture was less hub-and-spoke, the dissemination of books published in Edinburgh (and London), than nodes-and-network, printing and reprinting books on local presses for booksellers in other towns and even in the two capitals.
Keywords
- John Wilson,
- Kilmarnock,
- provincial publishing,
- Gavin Turnbull,
- John Howie,
- subscription lists,
- Burns’s reading,
- Burns’s library,
- Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect
Disciplines
Publication Date
March 25, 2024
Editor
Gerard Carruthers
Publisher
Oxford University Press
ISBN
9780198846246
Citation Information
Patrick Scott. "The Imprint of His Origin: Robert Burns, John Wilson, and the Print Culture of Late Eighteenth-Century Ayrshire" OxfordOxford Handbook of Robert Burns (2024) p. 13 - 29 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/patrick_scott/406/