The Prose of Allan Ramsay

by Rhona Brown (Editor), Craig Lamont (Editor)

Overview

Transforming academic and popular understanding of this pivotal but, until now, largely under-researched literary figure, this volume offers the first full and consistent edition of Allan Ramsay’s prose. The volume contains all extant prose writings, from both manuscript and print sources. As well as all known letters, the volume includes prefaces, dedications and advertisements for Ramsay’s major collections. It also contains Ramsay’s anonymously-published Some Few Hints in Defence of Dramatical Entertainments, the full text of his influential collection of Scots Proverbs and significant prose from manuscript sources, including Ramsay’s account of Edinburgh’s Porteous Riots in April 1736 and notes on contemporary plays. In these works, we see Ramsay’s consistent and steadfast commitment to preserving Scottish literary culture, and gain a privileged insight into Ramsay’s personality, his priorities, ambitions and core beliefs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399506977
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	03/01/2024
Series:	The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Allan Ramsay
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Rhona Brown is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature and the Periodical Press at the University of Glasgow. She specialises in eighteenth-century Scots language poetry and the history of the periodical press in Scotland, as well as in eighteenth-century club culture. Brown is author of Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press (2012) and co-editor of Before Blackwood’s: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment (2015), and she has published widely on eighteenth-century Scottish literature and journalism. In the Collected Works of Allan Ramsay series, Brown is editor of a two-volume edition of Ramsay’s Poems (2023), and she is co-editor of the Oxford UniversityPress edition of Robert Burns’s Correspondence.

Craig Lamont is Lecturer in Scottish Studies at the University of Glasgow. He specialises in print culture, textual editing, and memory studies across a range of Scottish subjects and writers. Lamont is author of The Cultural Memory of Georgian Glasgow (2021), co-editor of The Scottish Rebellion: Insurrection 1820 (2022), and co-editor of Allan Ramsay’s Future: Studies in Scottish Literature (2020). He has published on Scottish literature, bibliography, and memory studies, and he is co-editor of the Oxford UniversityPress edition of Robert Burns’s Correspondence.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements AbbreviationsGeneral Editor’s Preface Biography of Allan Ramsay

Introduction to Prose

TEXT

List of Letters Letters Miscellaneous Prose Advertisement, The Battel (1716) Preface, Tartana (1718) Dedication and Advertisement, Christ’s Kirk on the Green (Edinburgh: William Adams, 1718) Advertisement, Christ’s Kirk on the Green (Edinburgh: Ruddiman, 1718) Dedication, Robert, Richy and Sandy (1721) Advertisement, Poems (1721) Advertisement 2, Poems (1721) Dedication and Preface, Poems (1721) List of Fables (c.1722) Advertisement, Fables and Tales (1722) Preface, The Fair Assembly (1723) Dedication, ‘The Pleasures of Improvments in Agriculture Plant Gard’ (1723) Dedication and Preface, The Ever Green (1724) Preface, The Gentle Shepherd (1725) Some Few Hints In Defence of Dramatical Entertainments (c.1728) Dedication, Poems (1728) Preface, Tea-Table Miscellany (Dublin, 1729) A Collection of Scots Proverbs, More Complete and Correct than Any Heretofore Published (1737) Notes on Sir David Lindsay’s Language (1724–43) Notes on Theatre in Edinburgh (c. early 1730s)

Undated Prose The Court

Notes on The Fair Quaker of Deal Notes on The Doating Lovers Notes on The Basset Table Notes on The Artful Husband Notes on The Apparition

Appendix 1: Habberdashery account of Allan Ramsay to Sir Robert Menzies (1718) Appendix 2: Deed of Corporation of the Edinburgh Academy of St. Luke (1729) Appendix 3: The Ramsay and Cooper Rebus (c.1725–38)

NOTES

Letters Miscellaneous Prose Undated Prose

Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Appendix 3Glossary Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

In this valuable scholarly resource, Brown and Lamont have carefully gathered and edited a variety of materials (prefaces, dedications, pamphlets, unpublished letters, business accounts and even a rebus) to shed new light on Ramsay’s central role as a complex cultural figure and entrepreneur in the newly created nation of Great Britain.

Leith Davis