Scottish Authors > Allan Ramsay Poet 1685-1758

Allan Ramsay was born in the remote Lanarkshire village of Leadhills in 1685. Around 1704 he moved to Edinburgh and became an apprentice wigmaker. Completing his apprenticeship in 1709, Ramsay became a Burgess the following year and opened a shop in the Grassmarket.

During this period Scotland was in a sad state of decline. Politically weakened by the Act of Union (1707) she was also in danger of cultural domination by England. Ramsay, a strong nationalist, became increasingly involved in Edinburgh intellectual and literary circles from 1710 on. In 1712 he co-founded the Easy Club a society with strong Jacobite leanings which met to discuss literature and politics. Many of Ramsay's early poems received their first public airing when read aloud to club members. Although sympathetic to the cause, Ramsay had no involvement in either the 1715 or 1745 Jacobite uprisings.

By 1720 Ramsay's interest in literature was such that he abandoned wigmaking and became a bookseller. In 1725 he moved to premises in the High Street where he opened what is generally regarded as Britain's first circulating library.

By this time he had become a successful poet, publishing his first collection of verse in 1721 and second in 1728. Ramsay wrote in both Scots and English but with markedly more success in the former. His English poems owe too obvious a debt to Alexander Pope, whereas his verse in Scots did much to initiate the eighteenth century revival of Scottish vernacular poetry - later continued by Fergusson and Burns.

Ramsay also deserves credit for his rediscovery of an earlier Scottish tradition. As the editor of The Evergreen (1724) he anthologised the work of long neglected poets including Dunbar and Henryson. The Tea table miscellany (5 volumes 1724-37) resurrected many traditional songs and ballads. He has, with some justice, been criticised for bowdlerising and altering the texts of these poems and songs but he performed a vital service in rescuing Scotland's forgotten literary legacy.

In 1736 Ramsay opened the New Theatre in Carruber's Close. Unfortunately, it soon fell foul of the 1737 Licensing Act and was closed, losing him a lot of money. Thereafter he retired to his house on the Castlehill until his death in 1758.

Ramsay frequently spent time at the home of his friends the Forbes of Newhall. Newhall House has been identified as the setting of his greatest triumph, the pastoral comedy The Gentle shepherd (1725). It concerns rustic life and courtship amongst the Pentland Hills. A huge popular success, it also received extravagant praise from, amongst others, Fergusson, Burns and James Boswell who spoke of its real picture of manners "and beautiful rural imagery":

Gae far'er up the burn to Habbie's How,

Where a'the sweets o spring and summer grow:

There 'tween twa birks, out ower a little lin,

The water fa's and maks a singin'din;

A pool breast-deep, beneath as clear as glass,

Kisses, wi' easy whirls, the bord'ring grass.

Sandy Winton

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