Genius Fan

Have you read any of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels? They’re about the grown-up bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays who rogers his way through the political flashpoints of the Victorian age. Bedroom antics aside, the cowardly Harry Flashman rubbed shoulders with famous men and women of his age…not unlike my favourite Eighteenth century tuft-hunter, James Boswell, who listed among his acquaintances: Samuel Johnson, David Hume, Joshua Reynolds, John Wilkes and many…many more. Then I started to ask if he’d met certain characters: Benjamin Franklin? Yes. Captain Cook, No, but Joseph Banks? Yes. And so on. And then I learned he’d met Jean Jacques Rousseau (whose mistress he rogered), and then Voltaire…the headmaster of Enlightenment Europe. All students of Boswell get to that stage. They assume he met everyone who was anyone in that age. And then they discover…he didn’t. So disappointing.

Boswell (1740-95) never met Robert Burns (1759-96), Scotland’s national bard, despite some considerable overlaps. Both were from Ayrshire, in south west Scotland. And when Burns travelled to Edinburgh, where he might have met Boswell, he borrowed a pony from his friend George Reid, a farmer at Ochiltree, just four miles from Boswell’s Auchinleck estate. He made the journey in November 1786 to find a publisher and follow up on the enormous success of his Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, but two months earlier Boswell had moved his family from Auchinleck to a house in Great Queen Street, London. While Burns was feted in Edinburgh over the next fourteen months, Boswell fretted over his career (as well as the the health of his wife Margaret and his growing debts). During his time in Edinburgh Burns visited many places and met many people known to Boswell. For example, in 1759 Boswell became a member of the Masonic Lodge Canongate Kilwinning No.2. Nearly thirty years later, in February 1787, Burns made his first visit to the lodge. Among Boswell’s friends, Burns met James Burnett (Lord Monboddo) and the blind poet Thomas Blacklock. If you know Boswell’s journals, you’ll know the kind of insight we might have had of the great Robert Burns.