Burns s Reading of Milton, or How Big Was Burns s Pocket?

University of South Carolina - Columbia From the SelectedWorks of Patrick Scott November 30, 2018 Burns s Reading of Milton, or How Big Was Burns s Pocket? Patrick Scott, University of South Carolina - Columbia Available at: https://works.bepress.com/patrick_scott/351/

Burns s Reading of Milton, or How Big Was Burns s Pocket? 1 Patrick Scott What kind of Milton edition did Burns mean when in June 1787 he told Willie Nicol he had bought himself a pocket Milton? 2 While there have been several quite comprehensive lists of the authors and books that Burns read, it has often been more difficult to get information about which particular editions of the works he owned or used. 3 His correspondence with Peter Hill and others confirms that he bought a significant number of volumes over the years, and books with his signature have long been valued by collectors. The major Burns collections all include some of his books, and others have been included in, for example, the Memorial Catalogue for the Glasgow centenary exhibition. 4 There is no central reference point for any of these books, but books that are in private ownership or in non-burns libraries are especially difficult to track down. Burns s interest in Milton s Paradise Lost is well-known. He had read a few selected passages in his school anthology, Masson s Collection (1767 etc.), but Masson had not included the lines about Satan that introduce Burns s poem Address to the Deil (which Gilbert Burns dated 1784 and Kinsley in 1785-1786). Even before he became famous, therefore, Burns must have had access to a full edition or at least a more generous selection. 5 However the comments about Milton in Burns s letters are later in date. In December 1786, writing to William Chalmers, he wrote of Miss Burnett, Lord Monboddo s daughter, that there has not been anything near like her since Milton s Eve on the first day of her existence (Letters, I: 76). On April 30, as he tried to imagine a future life after his first celebrity winter in Edinburgh, he wrote to Mrs Dunlop, I know what I may expect from the world, by and by illiberal abuse and perhaps contemptuous neglect: but I am resolved to study the sentiments of a very respectable Personage, Milton s Satan Hail horrors! Hail, infernal world! (Letters, I: 108, quoting Paradise Lost, Bk 1, lines 250-251). Most significantly, later that summer, writing from Mauchline on June 18, 1787, to William Nicol, he again invokes a fallen and defiant Satan as a model of manly independence, though presaging a bad end, and reveals he has just bought himself that pocket Milton : I have bought a pocket Milton which I carry perpetually about with me, in order to study the sentiments the dauntless magnanimity; the intrepid, unyielding independance; the desperate daring, and noble defiance of hardship, in that great Personage, Satan. thoughtless follies and hare-brained whims, like so many Ignes fatui, eternally diverging from the right line of sober discretion, sparkle with 1 I am wish to thank Hilary Cummings, Librarian, The Kayton Library, St Paul s School, for answering my inquiry and providing photos. 2 G. Ross Roy, ed., Letters of Robert Burns, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), I: 123 (hereafter Letters). 3 See John S. Robotham, The Reading of Robert Burns, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 74:9 (November 1970), 561-576, repr. in Carol McGuirk, ed., Critical Essays on Robert Burns (Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1986), pp. 281-297; J. Walter McGinty, Robert Burns the Book Lover: From Reader to Writer (Kilkerran: Humming Earth, 2013), Appendix B, pp. 239-245. 4 Memorial Catalogue of the Burns Exhibition: held in the Galleries of the Royal Glasgow Institute 1896 (Glasgow: W. Hodge, and T. & R. Annan, 1898). 5 The epigraph comes from Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1, lines 128-129; on dating see Gilbert Burns in Currie, Works of Robert Burns, 4 vols (London: Cadell, 1800), III: 381-382; Kinsley, Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), III: 1128-1129. For another link with Milton in Burns s early poetry, see Mina Gorji, Burns s Sentiments: Gray, Milton, and To a Mountain-Daisy, in Burns and Other Poets, ed. David Sergeant and Fiona Stafford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 66-79.

step-bewitching blaze in the idly-gazing eyes of the poor heedless Bard, till, pop, he falls like Lucifer, never to hope again (Letters, I: 123). 6 For the literary historian, of course, the importance of the 1787 letters is that they show Burns making independently the kind of pro-satan reading of Milton that has more often been credited first to William Blake s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793), and then associated with Shelley and Byron as a distinctively Romantic reading of Milton. 7 But literary discussion still leaves undetermined what edition of Milton Burns bought in June 1787, and whether, in writing that he had bought a pocket edition, he implied that he also or previously had one in a less convenient format. I recently noticed that Gibson s 1881 Burns bibliography, under Burns Relics, includes the following entry: 8 Fig 1: from Gibson, A Bibliography of Robert Burns (1881) The current librarian at St. Paul s, Hilary Cummings, has confirmed that the two volumes are still in the collection. There were several Milton editions published in 1755, and she also confirmed that the one Burns owned was The poetical works of Milton: with A critic upon Paradise lost by Mr Addison; a glossary and an index; the life of Milton; and a preface, in which are inserted characters of the several pieces; in two volumes (Edinburgh: printed by Sands, Murray, and Cochran, for A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson, 1755). In addition, she sent photographs of the Burns signatures in each volume, and of the provenance inscription from the first volume, dated July 8 th 1833 [or 1838]. As the weasel-phrasing in Gibson s bibliography about from whose representatives has been obtained might suggest, the volumes were not in fact given to the library by the Cromek family, but sold by one or another of them. The donor, John Watney, 6 The quotation about Lucifer here comes, not from Burns s newly-purchased pocket Milton, but from a Shakespeare passage that Burns had learned by heart as a boy: Cardinal Wolsey s deathbed speech, in Henry VIII, III, ii, 351-373, in Arthur Masson, A Collection of Verse and Prose (Edinburgh: Bell, 1761), 141. Cf. Patrick Scott, The Twa Bards: Robert Burns s reading of William Shakespeare, Burns Chronicle, 126 (2017), 60-70. 7 Burns makes further brief mentions of Milton in March and September 1788 (Letters, II: 256 and 322). Burns s historical priority goes unnoted in, e.g. the Norton Anthology of English Literature: Norton Topics Online. The Satanic and Byronic Hero, which finds space for quotations about Satan from Blake, Hazlitt, Shelley, Coleridge, Ann Radcliffe, Byron, Caroline Lamb, Polidori, and Wordsworth: https://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_5/welcome.htm, but not from Burns. On just what Burns meant in these and related passages, see Walter McGinty, Milton's Satan and Burns's Auld Nick," Studies in Scottish Literature, 33-34 (2004), 1-14. 8 [James Gibson], The Bibliography of Robert Burns with Biographical and Bibliographical Notes, and Sketches of Burns Clubs, Monuments and Statues (Kilmarnock: James M Kie, 1881), p. 270.

(1807-1875) had been a boy at the school in 1816-1818, and master of the Mercers Company, and served as the company s Surveyor-Accountant for the school in 1853-54. 9 Fig 2: Burns copy of Milton: the first opening of volume 1 (photo courtesy of The Kayton Library, St Paul s School) As can be seen, the volume lacks the front free endpaper, and so the provenance note is written on the front pastedown. The wording differs slightly from that in Gibson s summary: These volumes were presented by Mrs Burns, the widow of the Poet, to my Father & were given to me by my Aunt, in whose possession they have been since his death. Thos. H. Cromek July 8 th 1833. 10 9 Robert Barlow Gardiner, The Admission Registers of St Paul s School from 1748-1876 (London: Bell, 1884), 10 Perhaps 1838, rather than 1833; T.H. Cromek spent much of the 1830s out of the country, in Italy and Greece, though he is known to have returned to London in 1835-1836, he may have returned also more briefly at other times: see Michael Warrington, Cromek, Thomas Hartley, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004-2005).

What is important about this inscription is that it fills in the early provenance chain, before the volumes were donated to the school. Robert Hartley Cromek, editor of the Reliques of Robert Burns (1808), died in 1812, at the age of 42. 11 At that point, his son, Thomas Hartley Cromek, had been only 3 years old. R.H. Cromek s widow Bessy lived till 1848, and the major bulk of the Burns materials R.H. Cromek had collected remained with the family till after T.H. s death in 1873, when they were auctioned at Dowell s in Edinburgh. 12 However, R.H. Cromek s sister Ann, T.H. Cromek s aunt, died in the early 1830s: for over 20 years she had lived as Mrs Black with the Scots-born journalist John Black (1783-1855), editor of the Morning Chronicle. Black was a friend of Burns s Dumfries friend and later defender James Gray, so to give Mrs Black a Burns relic would have been quite appropriate. John Black had to sell off his 30,000-volume book collection in 1843, when he was encouraged to retire. Having such early provenance information is especially important for books with Burns s ownership signature. While it is difficult to make a convincing forgery of a whole manuscript letter or poem, in part because of having to find the right kind of paper, forging a convincing signature in a book of the right period might seem relatively easy. In this case, there are two signatures, one in each volume, but Ms. Cummings found no marginal annotations in the volumes to provide further evidence. While Burns s signature evolved over time, and no one writes quite normally on the margin of a title-page, the two signatures seem convincing enough, and the date of the inscription puts the signatures safely before the big period of Burns forgeries in the late 19 th century. 11 For the information about the Cromek family in this paragraph, I have relied on Dennis M. Read, R.H.Cromek, Engraver, Editor, and Entrepreneur (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), supplemented by the articles on Robert and Thomas Cromek, and John Black, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). 12 A Collection of Burns Manuscripts and Other Documents Relating to the Poet, made by Thomas H. Cromek, (Son of the Author of the Reliques) in one volume folio, sold at Dowell s, 28 March 1877: Read, p. 5, n. 14. Earlier, as Read notes, Scott Douglas had been in touch with T.H. s daughter Mary Warrington, who had let him see one of the Burns manuscripts: W. Scott Douglas, Works of Robert Burns, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: Paterson, 1877), II: 292. Forty years later, Davidson Cook attempted to follow up by contacting Mary s son Austin Warrington: see his Burns and Stothard, The Bookman [London] (1917), 167, and Burns Chronicle, 27 (1918), 100-104.

Fig. 3: Burn s Milton: Volume 2, a close-up of the ownership signature (photo courtesy of The Kayton Library, St Paul s School) The question remains, of course, whether the two-volume Milton in the St Paul s library is the pocket edition that Burns bought in 1787. In the past I had thought, or assumed, that a pocket edition bought in Ayrshire would probably have been the neat, small-format Paradise Lost printed by John Wilson of Kilmarnock in 1785, which sold well enough to be reprinted in 1789 and then twice more after the Wilson press was moved to Ayr. The reemergence of the 1755 Edinburgh edition from Kincaid and Donaldson hardly disturbed this idea, because the Donaldson Milton that I was familiar with, going through several printings in the 1760s, was in a larger octavo format, which would require an improbably large pocket. Thinking that the 1755 edition would have the same format, I had not been thinking of it as the pocket Milton, though I once I knew Burns owned a copy I began to hope that perhaps the 1755, rather than the Donaldson editions of the 1760s, might have been the typographic model for Burns s own Kilmarnock edition. 13 However, the 1755 Edinburgh edition was not an octavo but a duodecimo, just like the 1785 Kilmarnock. Once you put them side by side, while the Kilmarnock volume is on slightly poorer quality paper and so very slightly thinner, the two editions are very much the same size, both measuring about 6 ½ in [17 cm] in height. 14 Fig. 4: (1) Two pocket Miltons compared: Edinburgh 1755 (left), Kilmarnock 1785 (right); 13 John Burnett, Kilmarnock and the Kilmarnock Edition, Burns Chronicle for 2015 (2014), 27-38, esp. p. 36; G. Ross Roy, A Prototype for Robert Burns s Kilmarnock Edition, Studies in Scottish Literature, 32 (2001), 213-216; Patrick Scott, Describing the Kilmarnock, in Allan Young and Patrick Scott, The Kilmarnock Burns: A Census (Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Libraries, 2017), xxiii-xxiv. 14 For fuller bibliographical descriptions, see Robert J. Wickenheiser, The Robert J. Wickenheiser Collection of John Milton at the University of South Carolina, A Descriptive Account (Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), p. 423 (Edinburgh 1755: items 1766 and 1767) and p. 200 (Kilmarnock 1785: item 758).

(2) The title-page of Paradise Lost (Kilmarnock: Wilson, 1785) (courtesy of the Robert J. Wickenheiser Collection of John Milton, University of South Carolina Libraries) While I expected to find cheap 18 th century reprints of Milton, or at least of Paradise Lost, in an even smaller format such as 16mo, the duodecimo format seems to have been the smallest one use for any Milton edition in the 1770s and 1780s. Certainly the date alone would not rule out the 1755 edition as the pocket Milton Burns purchased twenty-two years later, because most 18 th century bookshops stocked a mixture of new books and secondhand ones. It is not a certainty, but it seems a very high probability that the Milton edition now in the St Paul s School library is the one Burns told Willie Nicol he had purchased to carry perpetually about. The case of the pocket Milton raises some interesting issues about the study of Burns s books and reading. Earlier investigations of Burns s reading focused on the works he mentioned in his letters or the commonplace books and on those that he quoted or alluded to in his poems. The information about books he bought or owned or that carry his ownership signature remains scattered and difficult to assemble. Many books recorded in the past at auction or by bookdealers or by proud owners can no longer be located. Many library catalogues do not record copy-specific information such as signatures or prior ownership, and when this information is recorded, it is not always retrievable or searchable in public-access databases. Many relevant books once owned by Burns will still be in private collections. Despite their increasing value, the special interest of such association copies can easily be overlooked when the time comes for the collection to be dispersed or sold. I would urge that, as far as possible, both private owners and libraries share with one or another major Burns collection the basic information on any books they own that carry signs of being formerly owned by Burns, together with a photo of the inscription/signature and title-page. Probably the best place to share such information at present is the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, but the important thing is to get it on record. A record of copy-specific information not only increases our knowledge of Burns, but also acts as a security back-up in case a book goes astray and provenance and ownership need to be reestablished. At present, it seems utopian to expect that a comprehensive reference tool or database on these books will be compiled any time soon, but each book tracked down and put on record will help towards that goal.