Auld Reekie’s 18th-century James Dean

Before Fergusson there had been a tendency, particularly with Allan Ramsay and his hugely popular pastoral play The Gentle Shepherd, to use Scots as symbolic of sentimental innocence. It’s true that Fergusson also wrote on rural subjects - his excellent ‘Farmers Ingle’, for instance - but it is his poetry of Edinburgh that characterises the main body of his work. And although Ramsay too had written poems about Edinburgh’s taverns and debaucheries these were usually considered lighter fare.

Fergusson’s was a fresh and assured voice. He knowingly grabbed old verse and stanza forms, added some new ones of his own and took them for a lively pub crawl round 18th-century Edinburgh.

Born this week in 1750, Fergusson is to be commemorated with a statue. On September 18 a panel of judges will meet at the Scottish Parliament to choose the image that will grace the Royal Mile. A public vote (the maquettes of the statue are at Edinburgh’s Ocean Terminal along with a ballot box) will also be counted to add an extra democratic note. The project will place the winning entry as a ‘people friendly’ life-size statue outside the Canongate Kirk.

The organisers of the statue project, The Friends of Robert Fergusson, aim to

liberate his memory from the narrow confines of academia and literary circles in which it has dallied all these years.

"The statue will be about Fergusson’s spirit," says the charity’s fund raiser Bob Watt.

Fergusson has been an unheralded literary hero since the Old Town of Edinburgh was at its height of vibrancy. It was a time of enlightenment and change. Although he did not know it, Fergusson was writing the swansong of 18th-century Edinburgh with her wild pubs and oyster cellars where Scottish society rubbed shoulders. In the huddle of the Old Town, space decreed that the myriad of clubs and societies met in public venues across the town.

Clubs like Fergusson’s own, the democratic yet eccentric Cape Club, are a distant memory in their original form. Perhaps only the Speculative Society, recently attacked by Robbie the Pict, survives in any genuine way.

This Edinburgh was one brimming with philosophers such as David Hume, rogues such as Deacon Brodie and characters like James Boswell. The legal fraternity boasted eccentrics like the hanging judge Lord Braxfield ("ye’ll be nane the waur o a guid hingin") and Monboddo (who believed that we were descended from monkeys 100 years before Charles Darwin’s time). Robert Fergusson was the poet laureate of this Auld Reekie.

This verse from his poem ‘Caller Oysters’ shows his bawdiness and irreverence as well as his humour. His cure for drunkenness is so good you’ll be able to drink as much as a churchman.

A’ ye wha canna stand sae sicker,

Whan twice ye’ve toom’d the big

ars’dbicker,

Mix caller oysters wi your liquor,

And I’m your debtor

If greedy priest or drouthy vicar

Will thole it better.

Fergusson was always able to make use of his classical education, handling his references with aplomb, free from affectation as he does here in a justification for drinking whisky in ‘The King’s Birth-Day in Edinburgh’.

O muse, be kind, and dinna fash us

To flee awa beyont Parnassus,

Nor seek for Helicon to wash us

That heath’nish spring;

Wi Highland whisky scour our hawses,

(throats)

And gar us sing.

And the power of his mock solemn humour is evident also in the same poem as he gently ridicules the legendary prowess of James II’s famous cannon Mons Meg (which burst in a royal celebration in 1681).

Right seldom am I gien to bannin,

(cursing)

But, by my saul, ye was a cannon,

Could hit a man had he been stannin

In shire o’ Fife,

Sax lang Scots miles ayont Clackmannan,

An tak his life.

And though his Edinburgh has gone there is more than an echo of it in the ordinary everyday Edinburgh accent of the present. When we realise, in the following, that the rhyme is to the word ‘prepared’ we can hear that echo.

Be thou prepar’d

To hedge us from that black banditti,

The City Guard.

(From The Daft Days)

He was a fiercely patriotic man (indeed, he had started to write a play about William Wallace - though the manuscript is believed lost) and his choice of Scots as a medium was not a flippant one no matter how wittily he employed it. He had tried to write in English in the style of the age, as Burns was to try after him with roughly the same limited success.

But his true voice was always in Scots. This was an age when people in Edinburgh - even David Hume - tried to lose their Scotticisms in both speech and writing. It was a time when Edinburgh had been a capital without government for over half a century. There was a vogue for referring to Scotland as North Britain, the idea of Scottish nationhood was in sharp decline.

Fergusson was a fervent anti-unionist. In his poem ‘Dumfries’ he refers to Charles Churchill, (an English satirist and colleague of John Wilkes, the anti-Scottish publisher of weekly newspaper The North Briton) as ‘Kirkhill’. There was deliberate assertion and defiance in his style. It was a style which undeniably touched Robert Burns.

Burns had, like Fergusson, been trying to copy William Shenstone, by all accounts a fairly forgettable English poet. Then he came across the late Fergusson’s work. It showed him what could be done with the tongue in his head. The benefit to Scottish culture is immeasurable.

Fergusson’s poetry itself is a fine body of work. It is perhaps still true that, however unfairly, his most direct influence on us today is through the work of Burns. Fergusson can be seen as something of a torchbearer for Scottish consciousness when it was otherwise deeply unfashionable. He gave it an acceptance before Burns made it all the rage across the country in a way that is still true today.

Burns first read Fergusson in 1784 a decade after his death. When he came to Edinburgh he wept at Fergusson’s unmarked grave. He was so moved and upset that he bought and paid for the gravestone that is in the Canongate Kirkyard today. He called Fergusson "My elder brother in misfortune, by far my elder brother in the muse", and referred to him as "Heaven-taught Fergusson".

Fergusson was only 24 when he died in the Edinburgh Bedlam. He was suffering from a head injury and possibly manic depression. Few poets, by that age, have matured from writing outright drivel let alone poems that will be read hundreds of years later.

At one time the accepted wisdom was that his importance was chiefly his influence on Burns, but there is a growing realisation that his work is actually better than first opined.

In fact, in comparison with Burns, where they appear to have undertaken the same project - Burns’ ‘Cottar’s Saturday Night’ and Fergusson’s ‘Farmers Ingle’ - the majority of critics have a hard time championing Scotia’s bard. This is perhaps harsh on Burns, of course, who created a far deeper emotional landscape overall, but it does beg the question of what might have been had Fergusson lived. Surely the two would have met. Oh, what a tantalising idea, for Scotland and her emerging culture, that truly is.

Heaven-Taught Fergusson, a collection of 10 poems paying tribute (directly or indirectly) to Robert Fergusson, is available now, edited by Robert Crawford and published by Tuckwell Press.