Kilmarnock

Photo: Kilmarnock. Image Wiki Commons

The Kilmarnock Edition of Burns’s ‘Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect’ changed Robert’s life. He became famous as the ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ poet.

Robert Burns's first book, ‘Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect’, became known as the Kilmarnock Edition because it was published in Kilmarnock by John Wilson.

Six hundred and twelve copies of the Kilmarnock Edition were printed. They cost three shillings each. The book was published on 31 July 1786. Within a few weeks all of the copies had been sold.

The collection included ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’, 'Address to the Deil', ‘The Twa Dogs’, ‘To a Mountain Daisy’, ‘To a Mouse’, 'The Holy Fair' and 'Hallowe'en'.

The success of the Kilmarnock Edition changed Robert’s life.

Burns had decided to emigrate to Jamaica that year. He booked passage on a ship and planned to take a job as a book-keeper on a sugar plantation near Port Antonio. Burns himself said he would have become ‘a poor negro-driver’. Scottish-owned plantations in the Caribbean were worked by slaves.

Many of Scotland’s finest 18th-century buildings were built with the profits of the slave trade as sugar, tobacco, guns and slaves criss-crossed the oceans. Auchencruive House in Ayrshire was the home of Richard Oswald, one of Scotland's most successful slave traders. His wife, Mary, was the daughter of the richest Scottish planter in Jamaica. Burns criticised her in his poem ‘Ode, sacred to the memory of Mrs Oswald of Auchencruive’.

As the Kilmarnock Edition sold out Burns decided to stay in Scotland and try to make a living as a poet. He travelled to Edinburgh to seek a patron and to find a publisher for a new edition of his Poems.