Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Robert Burns' Sex Life

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

How did an 18th century working class farm labourer climb the social ladder to become the most beloved poet Scotland has produced?By the time he died aged just 37, he had taken the country by storm with his romantic verse and was welcomed into the bosom of Edinburgh high society gentlemen clubs.Another side of Robert Burns' work was his bawdy work, which celebrates sexuality and barbed satire, much of which wasn't properly published until the 1960s due to censorship laws.Ahead of Burns Night on 25th January - his birthday, no less - we'll be finding out all about Rabbie and his bawdy verse with Pauline Mackay, author of Burns For Every Day Of The Year, and lecturer of Robert Burns Studies at University of Glasgow.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. It was produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Don’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts.Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code BETWIXTTHESHEETS1 sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. How are you? It's so nice to see you here. I am really glad that we can make this time each week to sit down and converse about historical smut. I have an absolute whale of the time and today is no different. But before we're allowed to get going, just in case you wandered in here by mistake, in case you saw Betwixt the sheets and think that this is a podcast about soft furnishings, I have to give you your fair do's warning.

Here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and adulty way covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. Today we are getting a bit saucy today because we are talking about the erotic verse of none other than Robbie Burns. Absolute legend and smut peddler. Here we go. Keep a low profile betwixters. we have managed to infiltrate

one of the many 18th century gentleman's clubs in Scotland. Keep stung, we're going to be fine, they won't rumble us. I really hope that my disguise is up to scratch here. But this is no ordinary club, though, as it is The Bachelor's Club, founded in 1780 by hot new young poet Robert Burns

or Rabby to his pals. There are a rowdy bunch as well. Rabby, who was born and raised on a farm, is absolutely milking his working class origins for all they are worth and the upper classes are lapping it up. He is even standing there talking to the Scottish Hoypolloy in dirty boots. What a scallywag. What a rebel. At this first meeting, he is unanimously elected president for the night,

with rules drawn up. I am particularly taking note of rule number 10. Every man proper for a member of this society must have a hundred. frank, honest, open heart, above anything dirty or mean, and must be a professed lover of one or more of the female sex. Do you think they've rumbled us yet? Well, before they do, that just about sets the tone for what you're about to hear. What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society. With me, Kailister.

At this time of year, a few of you may be preparing your haggis, peeling those noops and tatties and maybe even rehearsing a verse or two. Because the 25th of January is Burns Night, an annual celebration of the most beloved Scottish Bard. I suspect most of you will know old Langs-Ine, but do you know the bawdy side of burns? A lot of women did. The sexual, provocative, barbed and satirical side of burns. It's a fascinating

aspect to his work, and it's essential to understanding who this charismatic man really was. He wasn't just being rude for rude sake. This is being rude with style. Joining me is Pauline Mackay, author of Burns for Every Day of the Year. She's also a lecturer of Robert Burns study at the University of Glasgow and a specialist on the boardy side of his work. I mean, honestly, who better to be telling us about this? I am ready to find out more if you are. So hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets.

It's only Pauline McKay. How are you doing? Well, thank you. Delighted to be here today. I am thrilled that you are here because I can't believe that we haven't covered Robbie Burns before when he is such an obvious slutty, juicy, erotic, lovely, naughty poet. And we haven't done him before. So you are the perfect person to talk to you because you have studied his naughtier poems, haven't you?

Absolutely. So I have been particularly focused for a number of years now. and Burns's suppressed works and not least those bawdy songs included in the merry muses of Caledonia. How did you come to be interested in that? I mean the obvious answer to that is because they're amazing but if you had to give like a more of an academic answer,

what was it that led you to study Robert Burns and in particular his suppressed erotic works? So one of the things that's always fascinated me about Burns was that he was just 37 years old when he died. And he lived and died young. He wrote hundreds of amazing poems, songs, letters. He enjoyed this iconic international literary fame all through the 19th, 20th into the 21st centuries.

And I loved his work, but I was keen to understand some of the material that was less well known. and when I looked into Burns' canon, it became clear to me, and this was a couple of decades ago, that the body element of his literature was really, really important because it informed some of his most famous works, but because it had been suppressed right up until the 1960s, it hadn't really been fully dealt with in scholarship, but hadn't been fully brought into the light. and that's when I began researching Burns's Bordery and made it my mission to trace just about every piece of boardry through his correspondence

and to begin the incredible jigsaw of trying to put together the really complicated textual history of his sexually explicit works. I love that. So when we're talking about something as being bawdy, I've used that word repeatedly. What is it that you mean by that? Is that sort of one of the nicer academic ways of being like the mucky stuff? Well, no, it's an interesting question and I've been asked before.

You yourself, no, Kate, the terminology around sexually explicit and erotic literature is quite contentious. And it's deployed in all sorts of fascinating ways. Baudry to me is sexually explicit verse, but it has an almost kind of comic or satirical intent in most cases. but most importantly, it's the term Burns himself used. And I can give you a really good example of that if you would like. Please. So in Burns's correspondence, in 1789, he writes to Robert Maxwell, who was the provost of Loch Mabin. And actually, what I would say is that Burns, he like to flatter people by sending them, bawdy songs and verse.

Sometimes it was, oh, you're open-minded like I am. Sometimes it's because he had this really interesting network of cronies and he was very kind of plugged into homosocial culture and to club culture. So we see him sending it to people that we might necessarily expect him to. So to the provost of Loch Mabin, he writes, To make the matter short, I shall betake myself to a subject ever fertile of themes, a subject the turtle feast of the sons of Satan and the delicious secret sugar plum of the Babes of Grace,

a subject sparkling with all the jewels that wit can find in the minds of genius and pregnant with all the stores of learning from Moses and Confucius to Franklin and Priestley. In short, may it please your lordship. I intend to write, body, exclamation mark. I love that sugar plum bit. That just sounds so rich.

He's really drawing on the senses there. That just sounds delicious. Like that's something you just want to bite into. Yeah, because he's so creative with it. He does engage with this genre in a really creative way. And as I've said, it's influential. He recognizes that it's a useful tool. It's a useful tool for satire.

He recognizes that it's an interesting way to interrogate relationships between men and women. and he enjoys it in a convivial and social space as well but I think the thing for me from that is that he also recognises that Bodry has been around for a long long time and we need to remember Burns is plugging into a sort of European tradition of bawdy song and verse and literature there would have been a huge oral tradition of this stuff

excuse the pun, is now lost, that he's lost to us completely. So I was going to ask you what were Robbie Burns' influences when it comes to this stuff? Because I'm going to assume that he didn't just randomly decide

I'm going to be the one to write Baudy stuff. He will have been influenced by other writing, but do we have any sense of who he was reading? Aha. So I've found some really interesting examples here. So, as I said, Burns is really interested in Baudry as a satirical tool. and anti-clerical and anti-monarchic bodry

was very current in the late 18th century around about the time of the French Revolution and certainly in the lead up to it and he's quite interested in this he seems to be rooting around it and he's certainly trying it out for himself so that the song that he actually sends to the provost of Loth Mabin

is a song called The Case of Conscience and it's a very explicit religious satirical song. And we discovered that in fact Burns in the days leading up to writing that had been reading a collection of songs called Chanson Joyous by the French writer Charles Colley. And it's a song whereby a woman who's experiencing uncomfortable sexual desire visits her minister in the Scottish version and expresses this. And he says, well, don't worry, here's your penance and he helps her with it. I bet he does. And of course,

in Charles Colley's version, it's called Roned. It's very similar though it's the Catholic priest. And so Burns seems to transpose and translate this into a version that's more satirical of the Scottish cook. But another one is that the first ever body song that Burns writes is a song called My Girl, She's Erie. And he enters it in his first commonplace book, 1784.

And he moves through the song and he kind of describes this woman in increasingly well, no, sorry, maybe decreasing of the complementary terms, but he begins at the top of her body and he moves his way down. Now, when I read this, I think you're going to know where the influence is. Okay.

My girl, she's Erie, she's Bucksome and gay. Her breath is as sweet as the blossoms in May, a touch of her lips that ravishes quite. She's always good-natured, good-humoured and free. She dances. she glances, she smiles with a glee, her eyes are the lightnings of joy and delight. Her slender neck, her handsome waist,

her hair well buckled or stays well laced, her taper light leg with an E-T and assy, for her A-B-E-D and her C-U-N-T, and O for the joys of a long winter's night. So we see that he's very interested in other author's body sensibility. and we see the intertasteality in some of Barnes's work. Wow.

I've been so desperate to race ahead to the bawdy stuff that I haven't even asked you who Robbie Burns was. What do people listening to this going, going, what's happening? Who is this person? So just for anyone listening to this going, I'm not sure who this person is actually. Can you give us a bit of a background to him

and how he ended up being the most famous, famous Scottish poet and I can't believe he was only 37 when he died. I was sure he was old but he packed so much in but where did he come from? So Robert Burns is the world famous Scottish National Bard. He was born in Alohaean Airshire in 1759 and he was the son of farmer William Bernice who had come down from the northeast of Scotland. Robert and his brother Gilbert adopted Barnes the southern variant of the name just in case that's confusing for people. And though the farming life was difficult, though Burns was very much, he was working hard on the family farms all through his young life. His father was very, very concerned

with his education. And he made sure that Burns did receive an education that wasn't necessarily typical of someone from his background. So he was very, very well read from a young age and exhibited, I think, a certain talent for writing and authorship also from his the early years. So by the time he gets in to his teens, early 20s, he's proven a little bit problematic already. He likes female company. He's had a few illicit extramarital affairs.

And these lead them into some problems, which we might discuss later. But in the meantime, he has pulled together a collection of poems and he himself, he's had these published in what's now referred to as the Comarnock edition. This was published in 1786. and it's called poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect. And this met with such critical acclaim.

The Edinburgh Literati loved it. Henry McKenzie, a major literary figure of the 18th century in Scotland, declared that Burns was the heaven-taught ploughman. And so Burns then went over to Edinburgh, where he was lionised by Middle-topper-class Edinburgh Society. Everybody wanted Burns at their dinner table. and he prepared for another publication of his works, the Edinburgh edition, which came out in 1787,

and it was here that he became a member of the Crocal Infercibles, and he began more earnestly to collect and compose and to circulate body song and verse. However, he couldn't quite make a living out of the poetry, and when he left Edinburgh, after taking a few tours of Scotland, he took up another farm called Ellisland in Dumfrewshire. He built the farmhouse himself.

He moved his yard. young family there. Another really difficult farm struggled to break the land. And he had made inroads with patrons that he'd met in Edinburgh to become a government excisement. And eventually he did. And he moved to Dumfrieshire. And in the latter years of his life, he was, of course, an ex-sizement. So he had a really, really varied literary career and other career. And all of this in 37 short years. I knew that he was the son of a farmer. and that he'd grown upon a farm. And that's always amazed me about this character

because class still affects us to this very day. It's still incredibly difficult. We know this for working class kids to get into the red brick institutions, your Oxford, you, you Cambridge, your Edinburgh, and all of that stuff. But in the 18th century, how a young lad working on a farm managed to break into this? I have no idea at all. How did that even happen? I think it was sheer talent in Kadesma.

He has a lot of that. Yeah, and I think the contemporary accounts of Burns and the reception of his poetry, it was the talent, it was the breadth of topics that he covered, it was his ability to use language in both English and Scots, and certainly it was people's reception of his work and of him. And he seems to have been really quite a remarkable and charismatic figure. It must have been.

So he writes in the Scots' dialect, which is absolutely gorgeous and amazing. I don't know if you've ever seen it. One of my favourite subcategories on Twitter is Scottish Twitter. And it's just amazing people still writing in the Scottish dialect about the most funny. I love it. He would have been amazing on Twitter.

But had that been done before Robbie Burns came up, were people writing in the Scott dialect? Or was he one of the first to do it? Absolutely not, no. So Robert Burns is drawing on a very, very long tradition of writing. in Scots that goes right back to the medieval era and it spans right up until now in the 21st century

so there's a huge amount of literature in Scots poetry prose. There's a huge amount of Scots song passed down as you mentioned before through the oral tradition and Burns was very very much tapped into that.

He did a huge amount also to preserve that through his own activities as a collector of Scottish song. but he certainly wasn't in a vacuum when he was writing in Scots. Wow. Do you think that the fact that he was a farmer

added to his appeal sometimes because occasionally the upper classes, they do love to kind of pretend that they're working class, there's a certain authenticity somehow to it and a kind of, especially in the 18th century when there was all this noble, savage stuff swirling around was the fact that he was, yeah,

did that play into it for them? He did. And do you know, I think he played to it as well. So he crafted such an interesting persona. And he plays a lot on his supposed sort of rusticity in the preface to his volumes of poetry. And he plays up to this idea that he's the heaven top ploughman. And there's a story that burns when he went to Edinburgh rather than completely comply with the bourgeois, you know, fashion of the middle to upper class. that he was going round all the kind of dinner parties in the drawing rooms

in his boots. I love that. Yeah. He harnessed it to really good sort of creative effect but he also used it as a sort of promotional tool. Strong work, yeah.

So he would have been hobnobbing with the elites of Edinburgh. Was he the gentleman's club, the image of the gentleman's club? They were very big in the 18th century. How was he in that world? Who was he hobnobbing it with? Yes, Burns was very clubbable.

Clubbable is a word that's been used to describe and I really love that actually. It was very clubbable. And Burns himself actually started the Turbolton Bachelor's Club in his youth. And when he goes to Edinburgh, he's introduced to the Crickal and Fenceibles which is essentially a drinking,

a gentleman's drinking club. And it's thought that he was introduced to this club by William Smelly. William Smalley was his printer and he was also the first editor of the Encyclopedia, Britannica. Now, it's believed that the Crickland Fence Bowles really had quite a remarkable middle-to- upperclass society membership, though their records are not fully intact or

discoverable, and it's believed that they were destroyed. I think that might have been the case, particularly late 18th century. The government becomes quite nervous about clubs, no matter what their kind of activities were, and we do start to see the clubs disbanding and records disappearing and so on and so forth. So we can't say for certain. But definitely he's interacting with middle to upper class society in Edinburgh, when he's there and through these gentlemen's clubs. And we can see the network of patrons and cronies that he develops through that

in his latter correspondence. I would love to have had Robbie Burns at my club. Like, I can see what you mean by clubbable. Like, just to have had him turn up and then you'd be like, well, give us a poem. Give us a song. It would have been, like, he's still got that mystique about him, doesn't he? Like, you'd love to have him turn up at your house party. It's the conviviality that he's famous for, and that's in part why we have the Byrne's Supper.

That's why the Burn's Supper becomes this worldwide annual celebration, 25th of January every year, Burns Night, the anniversary of his birth. So it's Burns's perceived conviviality, and the way that his work actually feeds into this. that's made the Byrne's supper so very popular in widespread. I'll be back with Pauline and Rabby after this short break. He's very young. He is a bit of rough, but also, you know, a diamond in the rough, this heaven-sent plow poet or whatever that was. But he's also writing very, very rude and naughty things.

Can I ask, was there a wife in this? Was there a Mrs. Burns somewhere of just like, Jesus, he's off to the clubs again in those bloody boots. It's his personal life? Burns's personal life is colourful. It's colourful from a young age. So Barnes's first child was born to a farm worker called Elizabeth Payton, who Burns had a relationship with when he was very young,

when he was living in Newshire. Around 1784, 85, so he's early 20s. She gives birth to a child called Elizabeth, and Burns refers to her as Dear Bot Bess and she inspires a poem called A Poets Welcome to His Love Begotten Daughter. And he actually comes under some quite significant censure by the Kirk Session for this. People in Scotland who had extramarital sex or who were adulterous or who committed any of these perceived moral sins were often sentenced to a spell on the cuff. where they would be publicly rebuked in church on Sunday.

And Burns and Elizabeth Peyton were publicly rebuked. But we see a real defiance because he's like, do you know what, this child is so important, it's so loved, and that's more important. And actually it's thought that that's around the time we wrote My Girl, She's Erie. And he also writes another body song at that point in time called The Fornicator. And really it's very, very fine in the face of overdetermined religious orthodoxy. and then he later meets Jean Armer and Jean Armer is the woman who would become Burns's wife

but that was not straightforward either so Burns and Jean Armer they are obviously very attracted to one another and before long she is pregnant with twins oh wow they're not married but it's believed that they contracted an irregular marriage which was quite common in Scotland in the 18th century and that Burns presented her with a paper that sort of pledged himself to her, that they exchanged

a paper pledging themselves to one another. However, when our parents discovered that she was pregnant and that Rab Moskiel was the father, they were incensed, absolutely furious. And it's believed that her father destroyed

what Burns would eventually call his unlucky paper, so destroyed it. And Burns was yet again told that he would be publicly rebuked in the kirk for this but he was permitted to stand in his own

pew because he explained the circumstances to the minister Burns was heartbroken by this he did want to be with Jean Arma and to be married she was sent away to Paisley to have her children away from the prying eyes of the locals

and this is at this point in time Burns makes plans to emigrate to the West Indies and he contemplates taking up in position as a clerk on a sugar plantation. Partly this is because Jean Arma's father has taken out a writ against him. So he's having to move around, he's transferred his belongings into other family members' names, and he's having to move around the houses of friends to avoid imprisonment.

So he doesn't want to leave the country, but it's this a way out of a very difficult situation, and he's really dejected and heartbroken, and he writes some quite powerful, letters criticising Jean's parents. Just as he's about to go, the Comarnic edition is so successful and he decides to go to Edinburgh instead. So Gene Armer, she gave birth to the twins. Many of their children sadly died in infancy.

And Burns and Jean seem to have maintained their relationship. But when it goes to Edinburgh, he strikes up this really intense correspondence with a woman called Agnes McElhose. And they write to one another user, the norms de Muir, Sylvander and Clorinda, sometimes more than once in any given day. Wow. And it's this relationship that results in one of Burns' most famous love songs, A. Fond Kiss.

Agnes McElhose was a middle-class woman. She was separated from her husband, and she was living under the care of a family member. So she was in quite a difficult position for a woman in the 18th century, and she's at pains to make sure that her and Burns' relationship is perceived as being very proper. And there are letters where she advises on them how she should visit them. God, messy, isn't it? It's messy.

And they definitely have some meetings where they're not chaperoned. And there's a lot of speculation about what might have happened in those meetings. And you do see expressions of angst or remorse in their letters following this. But there's no sense of how far

that relationship progressed physically. But they were emotionally, seemingly very, very invested in one another. However, for the time Burns leaves Edinburgh, Jean Armer is pregnant with another set of twins. His set of twins, again, in between writing these erotic letters to Agnes, he's married to, oh, Robbie.

Yes, correct. But when he leaves Edinburgh, he does marry Jean Armer. Oh, okay. In the interim, he receives communication from Edinburgh that Jenny Clow, who was Agnes McElhose's maid, is also pregnant with Barnes's child. Oh, no. And he has to send support to Edinburgh for Jenny Clow's child as well.

So he had a very, very complicated love life. Jean Armer was his wife. That was the relationship that endured. And in fact, there was another extramarital relationship later on, which results in another kind of slightly. body but unbelievable love song yesterday and I had a pint of wine but he had at least 12 children with at least five women. God, that's fertile is this man? My God. I mean, I can understand why Joan's dad would be so, if he's already been someone that was forced to stand up in church and then

everyone goes, boo, you getting wee lassies pregnant out. And then his daughter is like, oh, yeah, it was him. Did he have any sense of like personal reflection on this? Is there any poem that he wrote where he was like, I really should stop knocking women up. What we do see in Burns's poetry and his song and his correspondence is that he recognises that humanity is imperfect and that there are appetites there that make it very, very difficult to live up to the ideals of society or the church. and he seems certainly to think about it and to express his thoughts, his opinions on that

but at the same time he talks about passions that lead him astray and I think that he's just powerless to resist. Do you know what they're pulling? I'm being very judgmental about him but I think I would have shagged him to be completely honest. He was a good-looking fellow, wasn't he?

Like it's a lethal combination. He's good-looking, he's young. He'll have a nice farmer's body and he's very smart and very charismatic. That's lethal. Yeah, certainly. The portraits and contemporary accounts would have suggested that not only was he charismatic

that he was very attractive. I resist saying that. People ask me a lot, but I've so far got away with you. But good for you. So do you, he loves a lot of women. We can definitely say that. And he seems to have been loved in return.

But do you think that he generally, He was in lust with them, but was there any great love of his life, a woman for your money, that this person was the one that he really loved? I believe, actually, that Jean Armour must have been the love of his life, because there was so much difficulties surrounding that relationship, and they had so many trials, and there were these difficulties not only with parents and with society and with the local religious police, but they returned to one another time and time again, And certainly, Jean, their relationship absolutely sustained

even through Burns' dalliances is so tragic. Jean Armour wasn't at Burns' funeral because she was giving birth to his last child. Oh, that is sad. Oh, my goodness. But certainly they seem to have had a strong relationship in spite of all of this. The other mythologised figure in Burns' life was, of course, Highland Mary.

or Mary Campbell and we see Highland Mary actually more commemorated even than Jean Armour in the 19th century in statues and she really, really captures people's imagination. Burns is thought to have had a relationship with her right about just after these difficulties, the first sort of set of difficulties with Jean just after Jean's been sent to Paisley and they're believed to have exchanged Bibles again betrothing themselves to one another and He asks her supposedly to go to the West Indies with him. And there's a song, well, you go to the Indies, My Mary. Right.

And she goes to make plans to immigrate with him. She goes back to Greenock, where she contracts a fever, and she dies before he's even heard of it or before he can get to her. And he writes to Mary in heaven. And we see repeated references to her, maybe four or five in his correspondence, that show that he thinks about or, you know, on and off in the years that follow that. So he certainly seems to have been taken

with Highland Mary for a time. And that relationship was very much mythologised throughout the 19th century, but it was perceived as quite a chaste relationship. We might consider that actually this was maybe more acceptable, more sort of acceptable for bourgeois society. And we've got the Scottish National Bard and his tragic lost Highland Mary

and it was very emotive. Yes. That's much nicer, isn't it, than him just running around impregnating women? Yeah, but it was, again, it was a relatively fleeting affair. Oh, was it? It's Jean Armour for me. Gene Armour all the way.

Gene Armour all the way. Teen Jean. If we're thinking about his bawdy verses, which you study, and Lord knows that the man has got enough practice in real life to be drawing upon, how when he published this verse, How was it received at the time?

Was it edited out? Did he try and get it published, or was it just written on the slide? Absolutely not. Burns, he wrote this for a very trusted group of low cronies. This was very much part of the homo social club culture that Burns enjoyed. He never envisaged that this would be published. And we see that when he sends it to people. he says, oh, keep this under your hat.

So that's been one of the problems, actually, in terms of provenance, in terms of the attribution of some of the body song in verse. What we see in the merry muses of Caledonia is that it's probably a book that's been composed through either the records of the Crickal infantibles or through songs being passed down orally. Some of them are definitely by burns, and we can see this from his holographs from his correspondence. Some we know we collected because he refers to them.

others absolutely not by him and the uncertainty around this means that the Mary Muses of Caledonia through the 19th century becomes a vehicle for the publication of all sorts of bodry and that's one of the really interesting things about studying it but Burns doesn't help because he is very very careful in the circulation of it and you'll say read this and then send it back to me or don't let this go out your hands

Oh my God. So no, he never envisaged this being published. And actually the first time it's printed in the Mary Muses is in 1799, so it's three years after his death. It's posthumous. Wow. Is there any evidence that anyone that he sent this stuff to? Did anyone ever write back and go, Jesus, Robbie,

I didn't need that over my breakfast, keep it to yourself. Or did everyone seem to be well received? So he knew his audience. He seems to have sent it to people who he knew would receive it well. There's a really nice relationship that he has, though, with George Thompson. And George Thompson's the editor of a select collection of Scottish years. And in the latter years of his life, Burns was collecting songs and editing them and composing new songs for two major compendiums. One was Thompson's select collection.

The other was James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum. And Thompson was quite a prudish editor. And Burns seems to really enjoy goading him. So he sends Thompson Bodry, but he sends it with his tongue and his cheek. And he seems to know that it's going to embarrass him and that there's absolutely no way that Thompson's going to publish it. But he also trusts him enough.

But by and large, he wouldn't have sent it. It was potentially litigious, to be honest. There's no way he would have knowingly sent it somewhere where he wasn't guaranteed a positive or at least accepting reception. This is like the 18th century equivalent of your friend who keeps sending you filthy memes over WhatsApp and stuff that if it got out into the public

would destroy your reputation. But because it's your mates and kind of you're all in the know, it's somehow all right to do it. It's absolutely the case. And one of the things about Burns' song collecting is sometimes he's collecting body songs and he's making them beautiful or he's kind of sanitising them

or cleaning them up for publication in these volumes but it doesn't always go far enough for Thompson so we see them going back and forward to one another until Burns has cleaned the song up quite enough I think one example of that is let me in this A-night and they have an interesting conversation about whether or not the maid should in fact let the gentleman in Oh my God, I love that

just trying to sort of like bring it up because I could sit here and talk to you about this forever and ever but I'm not allowed to but Burns's reputation throughout the 19th century so the Victorians aren't known for their love of smut so Robbie Burns

becomes this kind of heralded barred this kind of emblem of Scottishness and oh he loved Highland Mary and all this stuff at what point were people ready to go and he wrote absolutely filthy mucky verses as well because I think that we've integrated these two things well-ish now, although maybe you would disagree.

But what was that process like of having to go, oh yeah, he did write old Langs-Ine and he did write Ode-Tuagis, but he also wrote this. So we actually see right the way through the 19th century that even although this is still potentially litigious, there are multiple privately printed sort of underground publications of Burns's Body Song and Versen, versions. of the Mary Muses of Caledonia. And sometimes the printers or publishers will use clever devices to distance themselves from it. So there's an addition, it's the 1827 edition,

but we're fairly certain it was printed in 1872. They use interesting techniques to make sure that the material's still there and it's still circulating among those who are interested in it, but they're doing it in such a way as they're unlikely to be prosecuted.

So it's got currency. People are interested in it. People are always interested. in it. I mean, body song and verses can be traced back again all the way through sort of Scottish cultural history to the medieval era. So it's there. It's being sustained. It's really following Lady Chatterley's lover case in the 1960s, that scholars begin to fully edit this and integrate it into scholarly editions and grapple with it more extensively. And I think that over time, people, have accepted that it is a really important part of Burns's creativity. And actually, if we don't acknowledge Burns's Baudry, if we don't research it, if we don't hear it and understand it, we lose something of what makes some of his most famous works so effective and so popular. Holy Willey's Prayer, one of Burns's, I mean, probably his most

famous religious satire is imbued with his body sensibility. Tamo Shanter is a wild ride through the Irshire countryside that's performed at Burn's suppers all over the world and is reimagined in art and material culture absolutely owes a debt to Burns's body sensibility. People recognise that now and we've discussed this colorful love life. This is something that's intrigued people for years. We need to understand the extent to wish this forms part of the 360 degrees aspect of burns in his literature. It wouldn't be the bar that people celebrate today. Were it not for these essential components,

even though people might not always contemplate them as entirely palatable or historically they might not have. I couldn't agree more because it's not just about being rude. That's not why he's done this. The poems themselves are so beautiful and so full of life and energy and movement and funny Like there's so much craft that's gone into it You wouldn't do that just to write something To get people off

There's so much more to it And there's vibrancy and life to it Yeah I think Burns's Baudry Almost exclusively has an intellectual agenda It's so smart It's almost exclusively religious or political satire And then the more erotic works Are really really bound up with his

experiences with the opposite sex and his understanding of human relationships and love. And then, as I've said, we also have this really convivial, homosocial element where there is a bit of jocularity, there is a bit of nudge, nudge, wink, wink of men entertaining themselves and one another with this material. So actually, we need to think about all of these components. And we gain a lot from understanding that. Okay, final question. This isn't going to be a fair one, but I'm going to do it anyway. What is your favourite body verse or sung by Robbie Burns? Yeah, that's a very unfair question. I love them all. It's like picking one of your children. Can we just scratch that? I definitely don't love them all. Some of them are very shocking. In terms of a love song that I see

kind of imbued with Burns's Bordery that also appears in the Mary Muses of Caledonia, I love yesterday and I had a pint of wine and there are two versions of this Burns actually described this as the best love song he ever wrote and he wrote it for a woman called Anna Park who he had an affair

with in Dumfries and she gave birth to child and actually Jean Armer raised a child with the rest of their family but he said it was probably the best love song he ever wrote but in its original version it wasn't quite a lady's song and he said Eustrine I had a pint of wine a place where bodice sona,

ye strain lay on this breast of mine, the raven lock savannah. The hungry due in wilderness, rejoicing nor is manna, was nathan to my hinnibliss upon the lips of Anna. You monarchs tack the east and west for the indus to savannah, gie me within my straining grasp,

the melting form of Anna. Then I will despise imperial charms an empress or sultana. While dying raptures in her arms, I give and take with Anna. And it goes on. So you can tell you. see, it's quite profound.

There's a lot of euphemism in there, or there's kind of double entendre. But then in the merry muses, there are two additional verses. And one of them in particular is got that defiance, and it's the deviance that leads burdens to write this material.

The Kirkland state may join in tail to do sick things I manna, the Kirk can state may gay to hell, and I shall gay to Anna. And that's actually discovered, and it's in another hand, but it's so in keeping with Burns's mode in writing Bodry and in his motivation, it's so in keeping with the sentiments that we read in his correspondence, it's highly likely, I think, that he did write that verse.

But that for me conflates the two, the love and the passion that he feels for these women and the enjoyment that he has in that element of humanity in relationships and sexuality but also the defiance that he expresses I love that Pauline you have been amazing

to talk to you've been such a treat and if people want to know more about you and your work and quite frankly they should where can they find you? So you can find me on X at Mackay P-A-G and actually we have a big project here at the University of Glasgow to edit Robert Burns for the 21st century. So we're doing the Oxford University Press Works of Robert Burns. And this month we're going to release

a collection of 42 essays, the Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns, and I have a chapter in there on Burns and Bodry. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining me today. I've loved every second of this. Oh, thank you. I'm glad we finally had this conversation. We need to have another one. I'm soon. Oh, there's more. Don't worry. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Pauline for joining me. How good was she? And if you like what you heard,

please don't forget to like review and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you've just had a wee dram or two and you fancy dropping by to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We have got episodes on everything from sex and ancient Rome to Dickens Women with none other

than Miriam Margulies, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.