Robert Burns was a middle-class creative,the Chris Martin or Marcus Mumford of his day: domestic-schooled, private French lessons, or further studies at agricultural school,the family domestic a mortgage-free nine-acre estate (Was Robert Burns really a radical?, 25 January). All this gave him a position within the south Ayrshire landed order far removed from the peasant farming bard of common imagination. Here too was a successful entrepreneur using family money to self-publish the first edition of his work.
Burns held enlightened views, and but in reality occupied a precarious position at the margins of the long-settled agricultural economy of the day,where an increasingly reactionary landed order preferred reinforcing conceits such as that those who opposed the slave trade just didn’t understand land economics.
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Source: theguardian.com