Comparing Versions of Burns' "Dedication" and "The Vision"
Burns was born into a small west Scotland community in 1759. This rural community spoke Scots and had strong local vernacular culture, but it was also influenced by English culture through education and church, among other places. This bicultural presence is evident through much of Burns’ body of work.
Some of Burns’ earliest poetic creations took the form of songs he often gifted to girls and for celebrations. With the help of John Wilson of Kilmarnock, Burns published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786. It was 240 pages in length and contained 44 poems, including “The Vision,” one of the texts that will be examined for this project. The near-600 copies sold out in a month, and Burns devised plans to publish a second edition. In 1787, this second edition was published by subscription with the “Dedication” to “the Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt.” Ostensibly, this dedication — the other text this project will be examining — arose as a result of approximately a hundred members of the Caledonian Hunt, an aristocratic sporting club in Edinburgh*, agreeing to subscribe to the new edition before publication.**
For this project, I will be comparing two versions of the “Dedication” and two versions of “The Vision.” In addition, I will be comparing one version of both texts with each other to highlight interesting parallels between a seemingly more autobiographical text of Burns’ — the dedication — and a text written in prose that, therefore, is arguably less autobiographical — “The Vision.” Throughout the following pages of this presentation, there are scans of both an original copy of the “Dedication” and “The Vision” from Burns’ 1787 edition of Poems as well as scans of both from a 2009 compilation of Burns’ work titled The Best Laid Schemes: Selected Poetry and Prose of Robert Burns, edited by Robert Crawford and Christopher MacLachlan.**
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* See Edson, Michael, pp. 105.
** With the exception of the Edson citation, all information in the paragraphs above is from Robert Crawford's “Burns, Robert.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Background photo, a handwritten copy of Burns' "For a' that & a' that," recorded in the beginning pages of a 1787 copy of Poems, courtesy of MU Libraries Special Collections and Rare Books
Photo of Scotland's Cuillin Mountains courtesy of Wikimedia Commons