The Writers’ Museum, housed in Lady Stair's House at the Lawnmarket on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, presents the lives of three of the foremost Scottish writers: Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Run by the City of Edinburgh Council, the collection includes portraits, works and personal objects. Beside the museum lies the Makars' Court, the country's emerging national literary monument.
The invitation reads:
Scottish Burns Club, Edinburgh Founded 1920, "The Heart ay's the pairt ay"
Seventy-First Annual Supper
Napier University
Craiglockhart Campus
219 Colinton Road, Edinburgh
Saturday 29th January 1994
6 for 6.30 pm
Seats to be taken by 6.15 Ticket £12.50
The menu is accompanied with a portrait of Robert Burns surrounded by drawings of poetic scenery. The seventy-first annual supper had on its menu egg mayonnaise, scotch broth, haggis, roast turkey, pear melba, and coffee. On the right of the menu is the toast list which reads as the following:
The Queen ・ ・ ・ ・ The Chairman
Interval
The Immortal Memory of Robert Burns Charles H. Johnston, M. A. , LL. B. Advocate
Our Speaker ・ ・ ・ ・ The Chairman
The Lassies ・ ・ ・ J. Gibson Kerr
Reply ・ ・ Mrs. Dorothea Sharp
Our Guests and Kindred Clubs
D. McCallum Hay Immediate Past President
Reply ・ ・ ・ John Millar, J.P. President, Colinton Burns Club
Vote for Thanks to the Artists
J. A. Hiddleston
Reply ・ ・ ・ ・ George Peat
The Chairman ・ ・ ・ G. W. Walker Vice-President
Auld Lang Syne
The soundtrack is on loop, displaying extracts from letters and poems written by Robert Burns.
Beyond childhood, Scott spent his free time learning languages instead of mastering the game of chess, as written in J. G. Lockhart's biography Life of Sir Walter Scott. He apparently thought that time was better spent on the acquiring a new language and said, "Surely, chess playing is a sad waste of brains" [2]
The slippers are woven in pink and blue wool, lined with silk, and leather soled. The slippers became part of a collection of Scott-related items owned by Sir Hugh Walpole, who, a great admirer, thought himself as Scott's reincarnation.
Louisa Cadogan attached a letter to the gift, in which she recounts her and her daughters, Lady Augusta Sarah and Lady Honoria Louisa's visit to Abbotsford. They were prompted to gift Scott new slippers upon finding uncomfortable-looking slippers in the study. Cadogan wrote that the pattern of the slippers were based on a pair worn by Ghazi Khan in the fifteenth century. [2]
Letters of Demonology and Witchcraft written by Scott took the form of ten letters addressed to Lockhart.
Scott sometimes visited his legal assistant Carmichael in the evening, in which Carmichael would play the fiddle or give Scott some tunes for recently composed verses.
The hand-press is reputed to have been used for printing the Waverley. The press was owned by James Ballantyne who printed many of Scott's works including Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in 1802, which success prompted him to move to Paul's Work, North Back of Canongate, Edinburgh. In 1957, forty years after the discontinuation of the Edinburgh print-works, the firm then called Ballantyne and Company of London, gave this hand-press to the Victoria and Albert Museum who returned it to Edinburgh in October. The soundtrack of the exhibit displays a conversation between Mr. Hughes, the printing firm's chief workman, and his young apprentice. [3]
Stevenson took the book with him on his "Travels with a Donkey", along many others. [4]
The illustration is based on the excerpt: "I lay lazily smoking and studying the colour of the sky, as we call the void of space, from where it showed a reddish-grey behind the pines to where it showed a glossy blue-black between the stars" (Travels with a Donkey).
The collection includes "The Pirate and the Apothecary", in which a respectable chemist is revealed to be a hypocrite, while the pirate turns out to be the hero. The following is an excerpt:
Come lend me an attentive ear
A startling moral tale to hear,
Of Pirate Rob and Chemist Ben,
And different destinies of men.
A paper sculpture left anonymously in the premises of several of Edinburgh's literary organisations, 10 Street Scene shows support of "libraries, books, words, and ideas" as well as an adoration for Ian Rankin and Robert Louis Stevenson. Its sides are made out of the covers of Hide and Seek , and showcases the scene in the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in which Edward Hyde attacks a woman. [5]
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child's Garden of Verses.
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish historian, novelist, poet, and playwright. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels Ivanhoe (1819), Rob Roy (1817), Waverley (1814), Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818), and The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), along with the narrative poems Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810). He had a major impact on European and American literature.
John Gibson Lockhart was a Scottish writer and editor. He is best known as the author of the seminal, and much-admired, seven-volume biography of his father-in-law Sir Walter Scott: Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart
Archibald David Constable was a Scottish publisher, bookseller and stationer.
Sir John Robert Steell was a Scottish sculptor. He modelled many of the leading figures of Scottish history and culture, and is best known for a number of sculptures displayed in Edinburgh, including the statue of Sir Walter Scott at the base of the Scott Monument.
Lady Stair's Close is a close in Edinburgh, Scotland, just off the Royal Mile, close to the entrance to Gladstone's Land. Most notably it contains the Scottish Writers' Museum.
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is an anthology of Border ballads, together with some from north-east Scotland and a few modern literary ballads, edited by Walter Scott. It was first published by Archibald Constable in Edinburgh in 1802, but was expanded in several later editions, reaching its final state in 1830, two years before Scott's death. It includes many of the most famous Scottish ballads, such as Sir Patrick Spens, The Young Tamlane, The Twa Corbies, The Douglas Tragedy, Clerk Saunders, Kempion, The Wife of Usher's Well, The Cruel Sister, The Dæmon Lover, and Thomas the Rhymer. Scott enlisted the help of several collaborators, notably John Leyden, and found his ballads both by field research of his own and by consulting the manuscript collections of others. Controversially, in the editing of his texts he preferred literary quality over scholarly rigour, but Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border nevertheless attracted high praise from the first. It was influential both in Britain and on the Continent, and helped to decide the course of Scott's later career as a poet and novelist. In recent years it has been called "the most exciting collection of ballads ever to appear."
Colinton Parish Church is a congregation of the Church of Scotland. The church building is located in Dell Road, Colinton, Edinburgh, Scotland next to the Water of Leith.
The Canongate Kirkyard stands around Canongate Kirk on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland. The churchyard was used for burials from the late 1680s until the mid-20th century.
Harold the Dauntless is a narrative poem in six short cantos by Walter Scott, published in 1817. It employs a variety of metres.
John Ballantyne (1774–1821) was a Scottish publisher notable for his work with Walter Scott, a pre-eminent author of the time.
Robert Pitcairn was a Scottish antiquary and scholar who contributed to works published by Walter Scott and the Bannatyne Club. He was the author of Criminal Trials and other Proceedings before the High Court of Justiciary in Scotland (1829-1833). He was head of the Edinburgh Printing and Publishing Company and secretary of the Calvin Translating Society Pitcairn was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and a Writer to His Majesty’s Signet, and a member of the Maitland Club.
The Journal of Sir Walter Scott is a diary which the novelist and poet Walter Scott kept between 1825 and 1832. It records the financial disaster which overtook him at the beginning of 1826, and the efforts he made over the next seven years to pay off his debts by writing bestselling books. Since its first complete publication in 1890 it has attracted high praise, being considered by many critics one of the finest diaries in the language.
Events from the year 1818 in Scotland.
Events from the year 1825 in Scotland.
Events from the year 1802 in Scotland.
Lewis Balfour (1777–1860) was a Scottish minister of the Church of Scotland. He was a pivotal figure in the family life of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft Addressed to J. G. Lockhart, Esq. (1830) was a study of witchcraft and the supernatural by Sir Walter Scott. A lifelong student of folklore, Scott was able to draw on a wide-ranging collection of primary and secondary sources. His book found many readers throughout the 19th century, and exercised a significant influence in promoting the Victorian vogue for Gothic and ghostly fiction. Though on first publication it met with mixed reviews, it is now recognised as a pioneering work of scientific anthropology, treating of its subject in an acute and analytical way which prefigures later scholarship on the subject, as well as presenting a highly readable collection of supernatural anecdotes.
The letters of Sir Walter Scott, the novelist and poet, range in date from September 1788, when he was aged 17, to June 1832, a few weeks before his death. About 7000 letters from Scott are known, and about 6500 letters addressed to him. The major repository of both is the National Library of Scotland. H. J. C. Grierson's The Letters of Sir Walter Scott (1932–1937), though it includes only about 3500, remains the standard edition.
Illustrations of Northern Antiquities (1814), or to give its full title Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, from the Earlier Teutonic and Scandinavian Romances; Being an Abstract of the Book of Heroes, and Nibelungen Lay; with Translations of Metrical Tales, from the Old German, Danish, Swedish, and Icelandic Languages; with Notes and Dissertations, was a pioneering work of comparative literature which provided translations and abstracts of various works written in medieval Germany and Scandinavia. Its three authors were Henry Weber, who précised the Nibelungenlied and Heldenbuch; Robert Jamieson, who translated Danish and other ballads, stressing their close connection with Scottish ballads; and Walter Scott, who provided an abstract of Eyrbyggja saga. It significantly extended British readers' access to early Germanic literature.
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Coordinates: 55°56′59″N3°11′37″W / 55.9497°N 3.1937°W
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