Burns Abroad: Suppers, Statues and the "Most Statues" Claim

Each major claim carries one of three labels. established means supported by primary records, official bodies or several independent reliable sources. shared means the core fact is sound but sources disagree on details, dates or interpretation. traditional means widely repeated but not traceable to a primary or independent source.

Dates of statues and the first supper are documented. The claim about the number of Burns statues is repeated by tourism bodies and journalists but is not based on any published count.

For Burns's early American reception this card relies mainly on Andrew Hook's Scotland and America: A Study of Cultural Relations, 1750–1835 (1975), a scholarly study built on American editions, magazines and travel books. His lists of editions and his quotations from periodicals are treated here as Established. His larger argument, that Burns showed Americans how a provincial nation could write a literature of its own, is an interpretation and is labelled Shared. Hook's counts come from the bibliographies available to him in the early 1970s; later research may have found more editions.

The Burns Supper

established In July 1801, five years after Burns's death, nine of his friends gathered at Burns Cottage in Alloway for a dinner in his memory. Burns clubs soon formed, and suppers came to be held on or near his birthday, 25 January. The format, with the piping in of the haggis, the "Address to a Haggis", the "Immortal Memory" speech and the "Toast to the Lassies", spread wherever Scots went.

Statues around the world

established In the second half of the nineteenth century, Scots abroad commissioned statues of Burns. A statue by Sir John Steell was unveiled in Central Park, New York, in 1880, and copies were made for Dundee, London and Dunedin. Statues stand in Australia, including Adelaide and Ballarat, in Canada, including Montreal and Vancouver, and across the United States. Dunedin's has a family link: the Free Church colony there had been founded under the poet's nephew, the Rev. Thomas Burns.

shared One of the most striking is the granite Burns Memorial in Barre, Vermont, dedicated on 21 July 1899 and paid for largely by the town's Scottish granite workers. The historian Marjory Harper, in Adventurers and Exiles (2003), calls it the largest Burns statue and says it was crafted by Barre's Aberdeen granite masons. Other accounts credit the design to J. Massey Rhind and the carving to the Italian-born carvers Sam Novelli and Elia Corti, working at the Barclay Brothers' granite firm, so it is fairest to call it a Scottish community's commission, carved by Italian craftsmen.

The "most statues" claim

shared It is often said that Burns has more statues worldwide than any other non-religious figure apart from Queen Victoria and Christopher Columbus. The claim appears frequently in tourism material and journalism, but no published survey has counted statues systematically, and the result would depend on how statues, busts and memorials are defined. It should be treated as an unverified claim.

Burns and the emigrant Scots

established Burns travelled with the emigrants. Harper notes that his Poems were on sale in the United States by July 1787, a year after the Kilmarnock edition, and "snapped up like hot cakes", with two American editions in 1788. Burns clubs, like piping and sporting clubs, were usually purely social, and dinners often ended with songs and recitations about a Scotland many members had never seen or could barely remember. In New Zealand, where settlers were slower to form Scottish societies, Burns clubs appeared mainly from the 1890s. Even Scottish Mormons in Utah, who were urged to give up national feeling, kept Hogmanay and Burns Night.

shared Harper quotes the historian Edward J. Cowan's view that "one or two annual wallowings in Scottish culture, bathos and nostalgia" let emigrants live as ordinary members of their new societies for the rest of the year. On this reading the Burns supper abroad was less a sign of a people clinging to the old country than a safe, occasional way of remembering it.

established The anthropologist Celeste Ray, in her chapter of Transatlantic Scots (2005), shows how early the American suppers were established. By the centenary of 1859 there were sixty-one across the United States, and New York's drew close to three thousand people. Monuments followed, from the statue in Denver's City Park to a reconstruction of the Alloway cottage built in Atlanta in 1910. In the modern Scottish-American community, Ray places Burns societies below St Andrew's and Caledonian societies in an unspoken pecking order, notes that Burns clubs are more often all-male, and observes that 25 January is a major date for almost every Scottish heritage society, with the haggis piped in, the "Address to a Haggis" and the "Immortal Memory" following a set order around the world.

The first American Burns, 1787–1835

Edition after edition. established The literary historian Andrew Hook, in Scotland and America (1975), shows how steadily American printers kept Burns in print. After the Philadelphia and New York editions of 1788, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect appeared at Philadelphia (1798), Boston (1801), Wilmington, Delaware (1804) and Baltimore (1812 and 1815). The Works of Robert Burns came out at Philadelphia eight times between 1801 and 1823, and at New York, Baltimore, Alexandria in Virginia and Salem, New York. There were American printings of the Reliques (1809, 1815), of the letters to "Clarinda" (1809, 1818) and of a volume of letters (Boston, 1820). Burns was a commercial certainty, not a curiosity.

What American critics made of him. established The first view Americans read was British. Henry Mackenzie's essay in The Lounger, calling Burns a "Heaven-taught ploughman", was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1789, and the New York Magazine in 1797 agreed with British critics that he had been wrong to write in Scots. Within a few years the tone changed. In 1804 Charles Brockden Brown's Literary Magazine noticed that Burns sang of Ayrshire rivers and used his own speech, with no Chloes, Phyllises or Parnassus. In 1807 a writer in the same magazine called Burns "my idol". In 1811 the Philadelphia critic Robert Walsh claimed that Burns and James Beattie, "and even Mr. Scott", were "more widely circulated, more generally read" in the United States than in England, and that the Scots dialect was "more familiar and more grateful" to American ears (both as quoted by Hook).

Burns's American imitators. established The surest sign of Burns's hold was that people wrote like him. Hook found a run of new poems in Scots and in the Burns stanza in American magazines: "Verses Addressed to Robert Burns, the Air-shire Poet" by "a lady in Gorham", Maine, in the New York Magazine (1790); poems in the Philadelphia Port Folio (1805–06) by Henry Clow, an Ayrshire man who was baker at Nassau Hall in Princeton, and by an "unlettered" farmer whom Clow had inspired to lament Burns; and William Ingram's "To My Auld Coat" in the Analectic Magazine (1813). Two groups went further:

• David Bruce and Hugh Henry Brackenridge. Bruce, a Caithness man who reached Maryland in 1784, wrote Federalist satires in Scots in western Pennsylvania under the name "the Scots-Irishman", collected as Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Washington, Pennsylvania, 1801). After the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 he wrote "To Whiskey", in the Burns stanza, and was answered in Scots by "Aqua Vitae", in fact Hugh Henry Brackenridge, the Campbeltown-born judge and author of Modern Chivalry. In one reply Bruce complained that America, with "great lang trees" and no Forth, Tweed or Tay, gave a poet nothing to sing about.
• Robert Dinsmoor and his circle. Dinsmoor (born 1757), a New Hampshire farmer of Ulster-Scots descent who fought against the British and was present at Burgoyne's surrender in 1777, called himself "A Yankee born—true Scottish breed". His verse epistles and animal poems, mostly in the Burns stanza, circulated in manuscript and local newspapers and were collected at Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1828, with poems by friends such as the Rev. David M'Gregore. The young John Greenleaf Whittier addressed him in Scots as the "Rustic Bard" and later wrote a sketch of him.

shared Hook is candid that, as poetry, this verse is "a rather bizarre footnote" to American literary history. Its interest, he argues, is that it shows Scots working as a literary language in the New World, and that Burns, a celebrated poet who wrote of his own district in his own tongue, showed Americans the way to a national literature. That second point is his interpretation.

Songs, taverns and societies. established Burns's songs travelled further than his books. A Philadelphia Scots Musical Museum appeared in 1797 and The Scottish Minstrel, a collection of his songs, in 1818. The traveller John Melish found settlers on Lake Erie for whom "Burns's songs were highly relished" (as quoted by Hook). Around 1830 the Scottish traveller James Stuart saw a tavern in Nassau Street, New York, kept by an old Scotswoman, Mrs Mackay, where Scots met over Scottish dishes under a sign painted with Burns's portrait and two lines from "Tam o' Shanter". In 1829, at the centenary of the St Andrew's Society of Charleston, the Rev. Mitchell King told members that Scotland was "full of song and poetry", made immortal by Ramsay, Burns and Hector Macneill (as quoted by Hook). By 1833 the Knickerbocker Magazine was urging every "lover of the plaid and the tartan" to buy a new edition; Hook sees in this the start of the sentimental Burns of later celebrations.

Pilgrims to Burns country. established Americans also came to Scotland looking for him. Washington Irving ended his 1817 tour in Ayr, where he met a stonemason who had drunk with the poet. In 1825 Nathaniel Carter of the New York Statesman read "The Cotter's Saturday Night" aloud as a bedtime homily on his first night in Scotland, met Burns's friends Dr John Mackenzie and the poet David Sillar in Ayrshire, visited the cottage and Alloway Kirk, and in Dumfries wrote to Jean Armour, introducing himself and a friend as "among the transatlantic admirers of the Scottish bard" (as quoted by Hook). She received them for half an hour.

shared Burns also had a political meaning in America. The historian Edward J. Cowan, in his chapter of the same book, notes that Burns rejoiced that the "Tree of Liberty" had been planted in America and France, believed it had first taken root in Scotland in the days of Wallace and Bruce, and compared George Washington to both, which Cowan calls the highest accolade Burns could give a non-Scot. Cowan adds that interest in Burns's songs seems to have been particularly strong in the American South. established The comparison is in Burns's "Ode for General Washington's Birthday" (1794), one of only two poems he wrote directly about America; the other is the "Ballad on the American War" (1784). Hook found no sign that either attracted notice in America at the time. Americans took to the Scots poems and the songs, not to Burns's verses about them.

Burns in Russia

established Burns's poetry of democratic sentiment and the dignity of ordinary people made him popular in Russia. The translations of Samuil Marshak, published from the 1920s onward, made Burns one of the best-known foreign poets in the Soviet Union. In 1956 the USSR issued a stamp for the 160th anniversary of his death, the first country to honour him on a stamp.

Auld Lang Syne

established Burns's version of "Auld Lang Syne", based on an older song, is sung at New Year and at partings around the world, from Japan to Brazil, often in translation.

• The first Burns Supper was held in 1801.
• A statue of Burns stands in Central Park, New York.
• The Soviet Union issued a Burns stamp before Britain did.
• "Auld Lang Syne" is sung at New Year around the world.
• The "most statues" claim has never been systematically checked.
• Burns's poems were on sale in America within a year of the Kilmarnock edition.
• Barre's granite Burns was paid for by Scottish quarry workers but carved by Italians.
• Atlanta has a reconstruction of Burns's Alloway cottage, built in 1910.
• Burns compared George Washington to Wallace and Bruce.
• A New Hampshire farmer, Robert Dinsmoor, was writing Burns-style verse in Scots and corresponding in rhyme with the young John Greenleaf Whittier.
• In the 1790s the Pennsylvania poet David Bruce and the lawyer and future judge Hugh Henry Brackenridge argued about whiskey and its tax in Scots verse.
• In 1825 two American visitors wrote to Jean Armour in Dumfries as "transatlantic admirers" of her husband, and she received them.

• Disputed: Burns has more statues than any non-religious figure except Victoria and Columbus. The claim is widely repeated in tourism material and journalism, but no published survey has counted statues systematically, and the result would depend on how statues, busts and memorials are defined. It is unverified.
• Myth: The Burns Supper began abroad. The first supper was held in 1801 by friends of the poet at Burns Cottage in Alloway. It then spread wherever Scots emigrated.
• Disputed: Who made the Barre Burns memorial. Marjory Harper says it was crafted by Barre's Aberdeen granite masons. Other accounts credit the design to J. Massey Rhind and the carving to the Italian-born carvers Sam Novelli and Elia Corti, so it is fairest to call it a Scottish community's commission, carved by Italian craftsmen.
• Myth: Americans first met Burns through the Burns Supper. His poems were on sale in the United States by July 1787, reprinted from 1788 and imitated in Scots from 1790, long before American suppers became common.
• Disputed: Whether Americans read Burns more than the English did. The Philadelphia critic Robert Walsh claimed this in 1811. It was a critic's claim, not a measured count.
• Disputed: How much the American Scots poets matter. Andrew Hook calls their verse "a rather bizarre footnote" to American literary history, of interest as evidence of Burns's influence. His wider argument that Burns showed Americans the way to a national literature is an interpretation.