General Editor’s Preface

Summary

The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay is an international project which brings the works of this foundationally important poet, dramatist, song collector, theatre owner, cultural leader in art and music, and innovative cultural entrepreneur in many spheres from language to libraries, into print as a whole for the first time. There has only ever been one previous edition of Ramsay's work, produced for the Scottish Text Society (STS) in six volumes. Volumes I (1944) and II (1953) were edited by Burns Martin and John Walter Oliver; Volume III (1961), IV (1970), V (1972) and VI (1974) were all edited by Alexander Kinghorn and Alexander Law. The STS edition thus lacked a consistent editorial team; it also lacks consistency in editorial policy and teamwork: for example, Martin and Oliver ‘never met’ and both died in the 1950s (STS VI: vii). As has long been recognized, the STS edition lacks the fidelity and scrutiny appropriate to a textual edition. The Index for English Literary Manuscripts entry on Ramsay, published in 1992, notes the serious limitations and inadequacy of STS as a scholarly text in uncompromising terms: ‘…deeply flawed as a scholarly edition. It is badly organised; its transcription of MSS…is unacceptably inaccurate; its contents pages, titling, indexes and apparatus are variously inadequate, inconsistent and error-ridden’ (IELM II: 3, 172). Moreover, the STS edition is extremely rare (even the British Library lacks two volumes) and large areas of Ramsay's oeuvre (including the critically important Ever Green and Tea-Table Miscellany) were simply not included in it at all, despite its claim to incorporate his ‘entire writings’ (STS VI: vii). On the other hand, some work transparently not by Ramsay, such as The Journal of the Easy Club, was included, despite the original MS of the Journal not being available. Other than this edition, the only Ramsay in print was a 1985 anthology based on STS done for Scottish Academic Press, which has been unavailable for many years.

Ramsay has undoubtedly been short-changed by British literary history, suffering from the triple disadvantage of being a patriotically Scottish literary figure, a perceived avatar of Burns and - perhaps most seriously - a fox rather than a hedgehog: someone good at many things, not known above all for one, and thus a source of the mixture of egalitarianism and jealousy which leads human beings to be reluctant to countenance giving anyone credit in multiple spheres.