Edited by Frank R. Shaw, FSA Scot, Greater Atlanta, GA, USA
Email: jurascot@earthlink.net

Once again Professor Patrick Scott has stepped to the forefront of our contributors to offer an unusual article on a Burns Broadside at auction in Macon, Georgia, an unusual place to find an original piece of the Bard’s works for sale. It is with deep gratitude that I thank Dr. Scott for his many articles to Robert Burns Lives! and once again salute his scholarship. Over many years he has been of enormous help to this website and to me personally. With his being a member of the top echelon of Burns scholars, our readers have benefited greatly from Patrick’s contributions. It is always a joy to have him share another of his articles. Yes, as the old western saying goes, “He will do to ride the river with.” (FRS: 11.17.16)

Burns and Broadside Publication "The Chevalier's Lament" at Auction in Macon, Georgia
By Patrick Scott

A couple of weeks ago, I got emails from two different contacts about an early and possibly unique Burns item that was coming up for auction in Macon, Georgia. It was a broadside, or single sheet, printed on one side with two songs, and one was the short Burns song that begins “The small birds rejoice in the green leaves returning” (Kinsley I: 412; K 220), here titled, as in James Currie’s edition, “The Chevalier’s Lament.”  It was undated, but the auction house, Addison & Sarova, had a detailed description on their web-site, and made a cautious estimate that it was printed in or about 1799:

Lot 226: [Burns, Robert.] THE CHEVALIER'S LAMENT. N.d, n.p, circa 1799. Broadside, also featuring a poem entitled "The Maniac" by another author. 13.5" x 5". Laid paper. Toned, several creases small hole to lower blank margin, rather worn with some fraying to edges. A very scarce broadside for which we find no record. The type of paper and use of the long "s" in the text certainly suggest a date of 1800 or earlier. At the very least, it would seem that this would be the first publication of this work in broadside form.

The site also provided several images of the item, which are used here with their permission. The first image gave a close-up of the Burns song, which comes at the foot of the broadside page:

Fig. 1: “The Chevalier’s Lament,” from an undated broadside
Image courtesy of Addison & Sarova, Macon, GA.

Of the early formats in which Burns’s poetry was printed, broadsides are among the most intriguing but least understood. They were the simplest but also the most ephemeral kind of printed poetry, hawked by itinerant vendors who commonly sang the songs from the broadsheets as a way of advertising what was for sale. They were difficult to keep clean or store safely, so the survival rate is low.  But because they were cheap and quick to produce, broadsides were often used in the Burns period and the early 19^th century for improvised ballads commenting on contemporary events.  The best-known Burns broadsides are of this kind. In 1789, Burns had his satire on the Auld Licht ultra-orthodox ministers, The Ayrshire Garland, printed in Dumfries in broadside format (Egerer 15, better known as “The Kirk’s Alarm”).  In the mid-1790s, when he wrote several songs as election propaganda, they also were first published in broadside format (Egerer 31 a, b, c,).  There are fold-out facsimiles of these items in J. C. Ewing’s Burns bibliography (1909), and several have been digitized by the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum and BurnsScotland.  

But both in Burns’s lifetime and after, there were other broadsides printed independently of Burns himself, that had simply reprinted Burns poems and songs because they were popular and likely to sell. This is largely uncharted territory. Over the years, there has been recurrent interest in broadsides, as there has been in chapbooks, because they show popular interests and taste—in Ted Cowan’s phrase, they preserve “The People’s Past.” Many years ago, I did an index to one of the major Victorian broadside collections, and began to realize just how much material was out there and how many scholars have written about the broadside phenomenon (see e.g. in the reference list under Welsh and Tillinghast, Shepard, Neuberg, Roy, McNaugtan, Cowan and Paterson, Connell and Leask, Fox, Atkinson and Roud), yet there is still little directly on Burns and broadsides.  There are lots of them.  A major web-site, Bodleian Ballads Online, gives 196 hits just for broadsides that contain poems and songs by Burns, with an excellent indexing system for searching ballads, publishers, and even illustrations (http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/). The Roy Collection has a handful of Burns broadsides, but none earlier than 1810.  There is no comprehensive list or database of Burns broadsides, and only the very few broadsides believed to be the first publication of the Burns poem concerned were included in Egerer’s Burns bibliography. 

Dating a broadside like the one in the Macon auction, which carries no place, printer’s name or date, means combining research with educated guesswork about what needs researching.  Sometimes a printer can be identified when the broadside has a woodblock illustration which can be traced in other publications from the same shop (the Bodleian site has a special ImageMatch program to help with this), but the Macon broadside has no illustration. Typography is often a clue, here suggesting an early date, but it is not an exact clue. The sort of jobbing printer who printed broadsides wasn’t necessarily up-to-date and so may not have dropped the long-form “s” as promptly as his more ambitious competitors.  

One starting point is the Burns song itself, which, with just two stanzas, is the second and shorter of the two songs on the new broadside.  It is written in the voice of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in April 1746, contrasting the coming of spring (“The small birds rejoice in the green leaves returning”) with the ruin that defeat brought to the Prince’s “brave, gallant friends” (Kinsley I: 411-412).  Burns wrote the opening stanza in 1788.  As he wrote to his friend Robert Cleghorn on March 3st:

Yesterday, my dear Sir, as I was riding thro’ a parcel of damned melancholy, joyless muirs, between Galloway and Ayrshire; it being Sunday, I turned my thoughts to “Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs;” and your favourite air, Captn Okean, coming in my head, I tried these words to it—You will see that the first part of the tune must be repeated.… I am tolerably pleased with these verses, but as I have only a sketch of the tune, I leave it with you to try if they suit the measure of the music (Roy, Letters, I: 269-270).

At this point Burns had only written the first eight lines. “Song.” In his reply, Cleghorn suggested slightly mischievously that the song could be performed in the voice of the Jacobite Prince: “Suppose it should be sung after the fatal field of Culloden by the unfortunate Charles” (Currie, II: 130-131).  After all, Burns himself had Jacobite forebears, and in 1788 the song would have seemed a romantic counterpoint to the smug centenary celebrations then in progress for the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that had sent Charles’s grandfather into exile. It isn’t clear when Burns added the second stanza, which makes the song explicitly Jacobite, as the voice of Charles leaving Scotland in defeat.  In April 1703, he commented to George Thomson that his song “Banks of Dee,” which Thomson wanted for his Selection Collection, had “false imagery,” and that “If I could hit on another Stanza, equal to, “The small birds rejoice &c., I do myself honestly avow that I think it a superiour song” (Letters, II: 206).  It seems improbable, however, that if five years had passed Burns would add a stanza so closely on the lines Cleghorn had suggested in 1788, and there is a full version, with both stanzas apparently written out at the same time, in the manuscript notebook known as the Second Commonplace Book, purchased in April 1787, but used intensively from June 1788 onwards (Leask, 98-99). Many of the poems Burns copied into the notebook, such as “Written in Friar’s Carse Hermitage,” were written at Ellisland in 1788, and there seems little reason to doubt that this song was completed the same year. The 1793 letter expresses his relative dissatisfaction with the second stanza, rather than documenting its non-completion.

But Burns himself never published it.  The first publication is usually given as 1799, in George Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs, part 4, song 97 (Egerer item 28d, p. 47).  It was also issued that same year much less expensively in two small chapbooks or pamphlets, one published in Glasgow by Stewart and Meikle as the eighth of their Burns chapbooks (probably printed in the first week of September 1799: Egerer item 45, p. 64), and the other in Edinburgh as the second of the Gray Tracts, Sonnets from the Robbers, by Alex. Thomson, Esq. … (Edinburgh: George Gray, 1799), pp. 14-15 (not seen by Egerer but see his footnote 7, p. 59).  The following year, the song was also included in Dr. James Currie’s edition of Burns’s Works, volume II, and the Stewart and Meikle chapbook was included in the Poetical Miscellany (Glasgow: Chapman and Lang for Stewart and Meikle, 1800). Later, despite its recent composition, it would also be included, with attribution to Burns, in James Hogg’s Jacobite Relics of Scotland, Second Series (1821: Pittock, pp. 419-20, 434, 527).

Fig. 2,  “The Soliloquy of Charles Stuart the Pretender,” from Sonnets from the Robbers (Edinburgh: George Gray, 1799).
Image courtesy of the G. Ross Roy Collection, University of South Carolina Libraries.

Each of these publications differs in one way or another from the others in title or textual details, and these differences can be a clue to where the broadside printer got his text.  Thomson can be ruled out as source, because he heads the song with its first line, “The small birds rejoice, &c. From a MS.,” and has small variants also in lines 1 and 12.  (Carol McGuirk has recently argued that Thomson’s “noncommittal” heading for the poem, like Burns’s simple heading “Song” in the Commonplace Book, is more effective than the title that displaced them, because an explicit title gives away the speaker’s identity too early: McGuirk, p. 123.) The Gray chapbook can similarly be ruled out, because of its cover-title “The Pretender’s Soliloquy,” and its internal title “Soliloquy of Charles Stuart the Pretender, on his leaving Scotland in 1746” (and small textual variants in lines 3, 4, 4, 10, and 16). In using the title “The Chevalier’s Lament,” and in most (but not quite all) textual variants, the broadside lines up with the Stewart and Meikle chapbook, and the Currie edition, in 1800.  One crucial textual variant, however, in line 3, where the broadside has the usual reading “the primroses blow,” shows it did not get its text directly from the Currie edition, because that has “the hawthorntrees blow” (a reading shared otherwise only by the Gray chapbook); there are minor variants between the broadside and Currie also in lines 6, 15, and 16. The Currie text stays in the same in later editions of the Works, through at least 1820.  The text in Hogg’s Jacobite Relics picks up minor variants from each of these sources.    

The only remaining early printed version close to the broadside is therefore the Stewart and Meikle chapbook. The two agree not only in title, but in every textual variant. Either one depends on the other, or they both depend on a common manuscript or newspaper source.  Aside from the Commonplace Book, neither of the other recorded full-length manuscripts of “The Chevalier’s Lament” was known to or collated by Kinsley, and neither is currently accessible: of the two, one was last seen on exhibition in 1896, and the other at auction in 1930 (cf. Smith and Boumelha, pp. 167-168). No early newspaper appearance has yet been recorded.  Where Stewart got his previously-unpublished Burns material has always been murky, but once he had published the song, his text was also that used in various unauthorized editions of Burns in the succeeding years, not only in the Poetical Miscellany (1800), but also Stewart’s Edition (Glasgow, 1802).  It is clear from all this that the Burns broadside is early, and did not get its text from either of the two main published editions, Thomson in 1799 and Currie in 1800, but it isn’t clear how early, or whether it had an independent manuscript source.

Fig. 3: Edward Rushton, “The Maniac,” from an undated broadside
Image courtesy of Addison & Sarova, Macon, GA.

More clues can be picked up, however, from the other item on the broadside which is printed first, ahead of “The Chevalier’s Lament.” This is a six-stanza song titled “The Maniac,” which is not by Burns, is not Scottish, and is not described or identified by the auction house, but is still of great interest.  The first line, “As I strayed o’er the common on Cork’s rugged border,” and the refrain “Mary Le More,” identify its setting as Irish, though in fact it was written by an Englishman.  It is second of three “Mary Le More” poems written by the radical Liverpool poet Edward Rushton (1756-1814), describing the brutal reprisals after the United Irishmen’s unsuccessful rising in 1798.  Burnsians may remember that Rushton also wrote a commemorative poem about Burns included in the Currie Works (cf. Andrews, pp. 200-201).

The Rushton-Burns broadside just auctioned cannot date earlier than the composition of the Rushton poem. The first recorded publication of “The Maniac” was in the Monthly Magazine for January 1800, under the heading “Original Poetry,” and Rushton’s three Mary Le More poems were later included as a series in Rushton’s Poems (Liverpool, 1806); the 1806 collection was printed by John M’Creery, who had moved to London after he printed Currie’s edition of Burns. A recent book about Rushton, by Franca Dellarosa reproduces an early broadside version of the first Mary Le More poem, printed by W. Armstrong, Banastre Street, Liverpool, which she dates [?1799], also noting that “The Maniac” was  anthologized soon after its magazine appearance by an Irish song book, Paddy’s Resource (1803) (Dellarosa, pp. 85, 89); the Armstrong broadside is almost certainly much later, because Armstrong is only recorded as in business in Liverpool from 1815-1824, and only on Banastre Street in the years 1820-1823 (Perkin, 1987, fiche 1, p. 4; not listed in Perkin, 1981).  In addition the Amstrong broadside of the first poem (now in the New York Public Library) has been typeset with the regular “s,” which would fit better with a later date.  In her commentary on the poem itself, rather than the particular broadside, Dellarosa suggests an even earlier date thn 1799, quoting a near-contemporary history of the 1798 rising, published in 1799, that describes the United Irishmen as they went into the attack on Vinegar Hill on June 21, 1798, “singing the pathetic ballad of Ellen O Moor,” which is then footnoted as matching exactly the opening stanzas of the Rushton poem (p. 84). Frankly, it seems improbable that even the first of Rushton’s three poems would predate the 1798 rising, and “The Maniac” describes the violent government reprisals after the rising, rather than the fighting itself.  However, Dellarosa also cites a letter in the Home Office files dated January 1, 1799, from a government informer in Nottingham, reporting, and apparently enclosing, a broadside of “Mary le More” that had been circulating in that town (Emsley, pp. 541 and n. 4; Dellarosa, pp. 84-85). At least some portion of the poem had been written, and reached Nottingham, far across England from Rushton’s home city, before the end of 1798.

I had high hopes that Bodleian Ballads Online would cast more light on all this.  The Bodleian website has 249 entries for Armstrong (172 from Banastre Street), but of these 246 are dated, or have estimated dates, after 1800; none of the 249 include “The Maniac” or “Mary le More.” (For comparison, the Welsh-Tillinghast bibliography of broadsides and chapbooks at Harvard includes only one broadside printed in Liverpool, and only one item, a chapbook, printed by Armstrong).  Ten of Armstrong’s broadsides on the Bodleian site have poems by Burns, and for those the Bodleian project uniformly estimates the dates as between 1820 and 1824; this dating fits the dates already cited for Armstrong’s printing business from Liverpool trade directories (Perkin, 1987, fiche 1, p. 4). None of the Armstrong Burns broadsides in the Bodleian database use the long “s.”  The Bodleian project also lists one broadside printed in London by J. M’Creery, formerly of Liverpool; this broadside was a song from 1819 about the radical politician John Cam Hobhouse.  M’Creery was in business in Liverpool across the relevant years, appearing in directories from 1792-1805, when he moved to London (Perkin, 1981, p. 18; Perkin, 1987, fiche 3, p. 140; and cf. Barker and Isaac). As one might expect, M’Creery’s standard of printing in the 1819 broadside is much higher than that seen in the broadside that was auctioned, and he used the short “s” as early as 1795, in printing William Roscoe’s Life of Lorenzo De’ Medici, as also in the Currie Works (1800), but that perhaps would not preclude him or one of his journeymen having printed a broadside for the popular market in the common style. Giles Bergel suggested to me in an email the possibility, also, that for a printer like M’Creery, using the long “s” might be a way of making the broadside look older or more downmarket in provenance, and so deflecting or diminishing the risk of identification and legal responsibility. Aside from that possibility, the Rushton-Burns broadside must be dated significantly earlier than the Bodleian Armstrong or M’Creery broadsides, because of its rough-edged laid paper and its typography; Given the huge amount of data on the Bodleian site, the non-appearance of this example is dispiriting evidence of just how many broadsides must have been lost, and (less dispiritingly) how rare many of those that survive must be.

If one can persuade oneself that Rushton wrote all three parts of his sequence, including the second part, in 1798 or early in 1799, and that the broadside was printed immediately, this would make the Macon broadside the very first appearance in print of Burns’s song “The Chevalier’s Lament.” Perhaps it was another copy of this very broadside that the government informer in Nottingham picked up and mailed in to the Home Office in January 1799 as evidence of sedition.  His primary government handler was not impressed, docketing the letter “I don’t think this song will do much harm,” but the correspondence is still in the files (Public Record Office: Home Office papers, 42.46.1, January 1 1799), so maybe some future Burns researcher will be able to find out which “Mary le More” poem was already in print by that date. 

The real difficulty to a very early date for the Rushton-Burns broadside comes from the Burns side, not the Rushton.  The Liverpool connection makes it just possible that Rushton himself, or whoever was printing the broadside, was also friendly or in contact with James Currie or his friend William Roscoe, and got hold of the Burns song directly in manuscript, before it was published in the chapbooks or in Thomson’s Select Collection. M’Creery also provides a possible source for the Burns song.  M’Creery, born and brought up in Strathbane, County Tyrone, had been apprenticed to his father there and then tone of the leading Liverpool printers. In 1792, with Roscoe’s encouragement, he had set up his own printing-shop, working on books both for Roscoe and Currie (Barker, pp. 82-83). Like Rushton, he was known to be liberal in politics.  In his own beautifully-printed poem The Press (1803: pp. 27-28), M’Creery includes Rushton among the authors for whom he had done printing work, and in his later continuation he commemorates Rushton as “a true friend to liberty” (1820, p. 75). It is not, of course, necessary to argue that M’Creery printed the broadside, or that Rushton was directly involved in arranging the printing, or even that it was printed in Liverpool, for one or both of them to have been the channel through which the Burns poem reached the broadside printer. Whatever the channel or connection through which Rushton or M’Creery or another printer got hold of Burns’s unpublished poem for using in the broadside, the manuscript he got hold of could not be the one Currie used for the Works: it had to be exactly the same in all textual details to the text Stewart would use for his Glasgow chapbook in September 1797. Making the broadside earlier than the chapbook would probably mean that Stewart got his text from the broadside, because no two printers are likely to set even the same manuscript copy with absolutely no small differences.

That scenario, where the broadside was the first published appearance of Burns’s poem, remains a possibility, but it still seems more likely that when Rushton’s poem was printed as a broadside, Burns’s song had already appeared in print.  If so, the broadside printer was working from the Stewart & Meikle chapbook or one of its derivatives. Not only its brevity and Burns’s selling-power but the similarity of theme would have made “The Chevalier’s Lament” an appropriate selection to fill up the page below Rushton’s longer and more topical poem.   As the Victorian Irish historian of 1798 pointed out, the Jacobite songs provided an important precedent for collecting the songs of the United Irishmen: “The very fact of failure … gives an adventitious interest to all that concerns the actors in a struggle, against whom great power or great oppression has prevailed” (Madden, p. x, quoted in Dellarosa, p. 80). 

Working on this research while waiting for the auction, I came to appreciate and respect the auction house description, which is quite properly cautious in estimating the broadside’s date. It hits about the right balance between enthusiasm for it as the first recorded broadside appearance of Burns’s song (which it certainly is) and restraint over claiming it to be the first published appearance in any format (which is certainly possible). The newly-discovered broadside is an intriguing and visually attractive and highly collectible item. It highlights some significant issues for future Burns editors about the relationship among the various early printed versions of Burns’s song.  The long rows of old printed auction catalogues, like old dealer catalogues, are often a major resource for research on Burns manuscripts, or the rarest printed items, as they emerge briefly into the light of day for a sale, and then disappear again into the safety of private ownership.  The same is now increasingly true of online descriptions, but there is less certainty that they will be available to researchers fifty or a hundred years from now. I hope they will be. .

I wish I could end by reporting that the library’s auction bid had been successful. Three bidders had registered bids in the days before the auction went live, and the library had placed a bid we hoped would be competitive.  But now even auction houses in relatively small cities, well away from the major houses in New York or San Francisco, can use live on-line bidding to attract national, and even international, participation.  In the event, the broadside got away. Someone else wanted it more, estimated collector interest more accurately, and outbid us. I doubt we’ll see this same broadside for sale again anytime soon, or indeed ever, but one mustn’t have too many regrets.  Its recent appearance at the auction in Macon, Georgia, not only brought to light something important that was not previously recorded in the standard Burns reference sources: it also draws attention to a kind of early printed Burnsiana that is still virtually uncharted and that often gets overlooked.

References

I wish to thank Mr. Michael Addison of Addison and Sarova, Macon, Georgia, for permission to use images from the auction catalogue. I should like to thank also Giles Bergel, Craig Lamont, and Murray Pittock for reading this article in draft, though none of them is responsible for my conclusions.

Addison and Sarova, Sale 1014: Rare and Fine Books (Macon, Georgia, November 5, 2016), lot 226: http://addisonsauction.hibid.com/lot/27819221/robert-burns---chevaliers-lament--broadside-/?cpage=5&ref=catalog

Andrews, Corey E., The Genius of Scotland: the Cultural Production of Robert Burns, 1785-1834 [SCROLL vol. 24] (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015).

Atkinson, David, and Steven Roud, eds., Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland and North America (London: Routledge, 2014).

Barker, J.R., “John McCreery: a radical printer, 1768-1832),” The Library, 5^th ser., 16 (1961): 81-103.

Bodleian Ballads Online (Bodleian Library, Oxford): http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ or for the Burns broadsides:only: http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/search/?query=Robert%20burns&page=2

Connell, Philip, and Nigel Leask, eds,, Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 

Cowan, Edward J., ed., The People’s Past (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1993).

_______________, “Chapman Billies and their Books,” Studies in Scottish Literature, 35-36 (2007): 6-25.

       http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/ssl/vol35/iss1/3/

Currie, James, ed., Works of Robert Burns, 4 vols. (Liverpool: M’Creery; London: Cadell and Davies, 1800).

Dellarosa, Franca, Talking Revolution: Edward Rushton’s Rebellious Poetics, 1782-1814 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014).

Egerer, J.W., A Bibliography of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1964: Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965).

Emsley, Clive, “The Home Office and Its Sources of Information and Investigation, 1791-1801,” English Historical Review, 94:3 [no. 372) (July 1979): 532-561.

Ewing, J. C., Bibliography of Robert Burns, 1759-1796 (Edinburgh: privately printed, 1909).

Fox, Adam, “The Emergence of the Scottish Broadside Ballad in the Late 17^th and Early 18^th Centuries,” Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 31:2 (October 2011): 169-194.

Isaac, Peter, “M’Creery, John (1768-1832),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), consulted online.

Kinsley, James, ed., The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).

Madden, Richard Robert, ed., Literary Remains of the United Irishmen of 1798, and Selections from other popular Lyrics of their Times, with an Essay on the Authorship of ‘The Exile of Erin’ (Dublin: James Duffy and Sons, 1887)

M’Creery, John, The Press, a Poem: published as a specimen of typography [part 1] (Liverpool: M’Creery, 1803); part the second (London: Cadell and Davies, 1820).

McGuirk, Carol, Reading Robert Burns: Texts, Contexts, Transformations [Poetry and Song in the Age of Revolution, no. 6] (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014).

McNaughtan, Adam, "A Century of Saltmarket Literature, 1790-1890," in Peter Isaac, ed. Six Centuries of the Provincial Booktrade in Britain (Winchester: St. Paul's, 1990), 165-180.

Leask, Nigel, ed., Commonplace Books, Tour Journals, and Miscellaneous Prose [Oxford Edition of Robert Burns, vol. I] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 98-99

--for the relevant manuiscript page, see also:

http://www.burnsmuseum.org.uk/collections/transcript/1154

Morris, John, "Scottish Ballads and Chapbooks," in Peter Isaac and Barry McKay, eds. Images and Texts: Their Production and Distribution in the 18th and 19th Centuries (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 1997), 89-111.

Neuburg, Victor E., Popular Literature: A History and Guide (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

Perkin, M.R., ed., The Book Trade in Liverpool to 1805: A Directory [Book Trade in the North West Project Occasional Publications, 1] (Liverpool: Liverpool Bibliographical Society, 1981).

______________, The Book Trade in Liverpool 1806-1850: A Directory [Book Trade in the North West Project Occasional Publications, 2] (Liverpool: Liverpool Bibliographical Society, 1987).

Pittock, Murray, ed., The Jacobite Relics of Scotland, Second Series, Collected by James Hogg [Stirling-South Carolina Edition of James Hogg, vol.12] (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003).

Robert Burns Birthplace Museum: digital images of election ballads, at e.g.:

http://www.burnsmuseum.org.uk/collections/object_detail/3.474

Roy, G. Ross, “Some Notes on Scottish Chapbooks,” Scottish Literary Journal, 1:1 (1974): 50-60.

Rushton, Edward, Poems (London: Printed for T. Ostell .. by J M’Creery, 1806).

Scott, Patrick, An Index to Charles Hindley’s Curiosities of Street Literature (Leicester: Victorian Studies Centre, 1969).

Shepard, Leslie, The Broadside Ballad: A Study in Origins and Meaning (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1962).

_____________, John Pitts: ballad printer of Seven Dials (London: Private Libraries Association, 1969).

_____________, The History of Street Literature (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1973). 

Smith, Margaret M., and Penny Boumelha, comps., “Robert Burns,” in Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. III, Part I (London and New York: Mansell, 1986), 93-193.

Thomson, George, A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs, part 4 (London: Preston, 1799).

Welsh, Charles, & William H. Tillinghast, Catalogue of English and American Chapbooks and Broadside Ballads in Harvard College Library (Orig. Cambridge, MA, 1905; rep. with an introduction by Leslie Shepard, Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1968).

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