The truth was that he was already wavering. The enthusiastic reception of his poems, the interest which influential gentlemen began to take in his welfare, were changing his opinion of himself and his prospects in Scotland. Moreover, the Armours were calming down; friends had promised to help him should Jean’s father renew the effort to execute his warrant. Nevertheless he did not immediately abandon the Jamaica plan. Though the Bell in her turn sailed without him, he still watched the shipping news as he collected his subscriptions and set his affairs in order. Jean’s twins, born on September 3rd, increased the need for settled livelihood, but increased also his reluctance to leave Scotland.
Most of his letters of the autumn of 1786 have perished. As late as October he was still talking of emigration, though he had again postponed it after actually packing his trunk and starting for Greenock at the end of September. He still feared, he told Robert Aiken, that ‘the consequences of his follies’ might banish him; in other words, Betty Paton was threatening to sue him. The Armour affair had already been compromised by dividing the responsibility for the care of the twins between the two families. When the extant correspondence resumes a month later, Jamaica had been discarded. By November 1st the poet had decided to try his luck in Edinburgh. For this reversal the Kilmarnock volume was directly responsible.
When Burns had begun in April to solicit subscriptions for a volume of his poems he had had no idea of making it a commercial success. The book was intended as a memento of himself—a souvenir for his friends and a final and unanswerable fling at his enemies. He probably hoped for no more material return than would cover the expenses of publication. Its success therefore was all the more intoxicating. Six hundred and twelve copies were printed, of which about half were subscribed for in advance, thanks mainly to Robert Aiken. When the book came out at the beginning of August it furnished the first literary sensation Ayrshire had ever known. The subscribers’ copies were passed from reader to reader, creating such a demand that the entire edition was sold within three months. When Mrs. Dunlop ordered six copies in mid-November only five were left. At the end of July Burns had been a fugitive with a warrant out against him, to escape which he was shifting from one friend’s house to another. Two weeks later he was a celebrity. His journeys through the country as he collected his subscriptions became a sort of royal progress. The fact that he was making a profit out of the book meant far less to him than the applause of all sorts and conditions of men. People of influence assured him that something could be done for him at home, though they were vague as to precisely what. After the printer’s bills were paid the volume showed a profit of more than £50, though forfeited deposits on passage money and a substantial payment to Betty Paton reduced his net gain to about twenty. But Burns still had no wish to write poetry for money. He considered that ‘downright Sodomy of Soul’. Poetry was his calling, but he refused to think of it as his livelihood.
Another man for other reasons doubted the commercial prospects of poetry. In spite of the handsome balance-sheet of the first edition, John Wilson, the Kilmarnock printer, declined to undertake a second without advance payment for all labour and materials. He felt that the first had glutted the market. His timidity helped to transform Burns from a local celebrity into a national figure. When friends in Mauchline and Ayr suggested republishing the poems in Edinburgh Burns thought it an attractive but impractical dream. But when copies of the book reached people of influence in the capital and they repeated the suggestion it wore a different look. By October the hope of a favourable reception in the city had come to Burns from at least three different sources. His friend, the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudoun, had sent a copy of the book to Thomas Blacklock, the blind poet; Blacklock had commended it warmly and had even promised—not so warmly—to bring it to the attention of Hugh Blair. The famous professor of rhetoric, Blacklock thought, was too refined in his taste to relish it. Another eminent professor was not so finicky. Dugald Stewart, whose country home was at Catrine a few miles from Mauchline, read and enjoyed the poems, invited the poet to dinner, and added his personal encouragement to the Edinburgh venture. Finally the book reached even the peerage.
On November 1st Alexander Dalziel, steward of the Earl of Glencairn’s estates, wrote that he had showed the poems to the Earl and that the Earl had expressed his pleasure in them and his desire to befriend their author. This approbation was heartening as Blacklock’s and even Dugald Stewart’s could not be. The Earl had a reputation for generosity and for keeping his word; he was one of the most popular and influential peers in Scotland and his endorsement would have weight with the people of wealth and fashion on whom the success of a subscription would have to depend. But the Earl had nothing to do with the abandonment of Jamaica. The same letter which brought the news of the Earl’s interest also brought Dalziel’s congratulations on Burns’s giving up his plans for leaving the country. What Glencairn really did was to confirm the poet in his determination to offer his poems to a larger audience.
Undoubtedly Burns realized before he went to Edinburgh that he was setting out on the old and painful quest of patronage—a quest which had broken the hearts of more poets than it had ever freed from penury. But it was still fame more than money that he looked for from his poems. He continued to hope for some means of modest livelihood independent of his writing; if his subscription brought a little capital to help him on his way, so much the better. When he reached Edinburgh he made no effort to appear more than he was; he even sought deliberately to appear less. He dressed as a plain young farmer, and finding that the metropolitan critics were praising his work as that of an unlettered ploughman who wrote from pure inspiration he did his best to act the part. When Robert Anderson pointed out in private conversation some evidence of extensive knowledge of other poets Burns readily admitted his indebtedness, but in public he would not permit his claims to pure inspiration to be challenged. If an unlettered bard was what his patrons wanted he would do his best to be one. Many times, however, his role was trying, especially when stupider people than himself condescended, and gave him good advice.
Undoubtedly there were matters in which he needed good advice, but he did not get it even from the patrons who did not condescend. Among all his new friends there was no one to take his part as Sir Walter Scott later took Southey’s in seeing that he got a fair contract with his publisher. Glencairn had been as good as his word in securing fashionable subscriptions. The Countess of Eglinton made the Earl subscribe ten guineas; the entire membership of the aristocratic Caledonian Hunt put down their names, but altered the first proposal that they give two guineas each to a mere subscription at the regular price. But Glencairn knew nothing about the business end of publishing. In introducing Burns to William Creech, his brother’s former tutor and the best-known publisher in the city, Glencairn no doubt felt that he had done his best. He had, up to that point, but at that point a good contract lawyer was needed. Unfortunately Henry Mackenzie and the other men of letters in the city still adhered to the convention of the writing gentleman who was supposed to disdain pecuniary rewards. A few years earlier, when David Hume was alive, Burns might have been secured better terms; a few years later under the leadership of Scott he would certainly have secured them. Burns’s perverse pride would not allow him to haggle over a contract which in any case offered more ready money than he had handled in all his previous life. What he needed and did not have was a hard-boiled business friend to do his haggling for him.
As it was, Creech made an agreement which left Burns to bear all the immediate risks and perhaps to receive a modest immediate profit, but which reserved the long-term earnings for the publisher alone. As was often the case with books published by subscription, the man whose name appeared on the title-page was not the publisher in the modern sense, but merely the author’s agent. He provided the facilities for collecting the subscriptions and distributing the books, but took none of the financial responsibility. The author received the entire payment for the subscribers’ copies, but out of these receipts had to pay the printer, the bookbinder, and also, presumably, the transportation charges on copies delivered out-of-town. Furthermore, the agents who distributed the books naturally expected to be paid. Hence Burns, wherever possible, enlisted his friends for this service—Alexander Pattison at Paisley, for instance, and Robert Muir at Kilmarnock—and when that was not feasible still sought to avoid the regular booksellers because they took ‘no less than the unconscionable, Jewish tax of 25 pr Cent. by way of agency’.
The price to subscribers was set at the modest sum of five shillings, and close to three thousand subscriptions were obtained. Burns objected to printing the names of the subscribers—quite naturally, for the thirty-eight pages meant money out of his pocket merely to gratify the vanity of people yearning to see their names in print as patrons of literature—but was overborne by some friends whom he did not ‘chuse to thwart’. Professor Snyder calculates Burns’s utmost possible gross receipts from the subscription at £750. But after all charges were paid the net profit cannot have been more than half that sum. He told Mrs. Dunlop that he cleared about £540, but there, as in a similar statement to John Moore, he was reckoning in Creech’s payment of 100 guineas for the copyright.
That was the sum agreed on when, just as his book was ready for delivery, Burns decided, ‘by advice of friends’ to dispose of his copyright. Once more he had sought the advice of others, and once more they told him the wrong thing. In this instance, the person most at fault was Henry Mackenzie, to whom Burns and Creech referred the question. Mackenzie was a lawyer, and ought to have warned Burns against the absolute sale of his rights in a potentially valuable piece of property. Instead Mackenzie contented himself with naming one hundred guineas as his idea of a fair price. That was on April 17. Creech delayed his acceptance until the 23rd, on the pretence of waiting to hear if Cadell and Davies would buy a share for their London trade, but finally consented to ‘take the whole matter upon himself, that Mr. Burns might be at no uncertainty in the matter.’ Thereupon Creech left town, without either paying the money or giving his note for it. A few days later Burns himself started on his Border tour, still without any legal contract with Creech, but with his hands full for the time being with the task of arranging deliveries, collecting subscriptions, and paying the printer and the binder. Had not Peter Hill, then Creech’s chief clerk, taken a good part of the burden on himself, Burns would have been swamped under the worry of larger transactions than he had known in all his life before.