Ha! Where ye gaun, ye crowlan ferlie! - Scotch literature from Burns and before

My Scottish reading lists are not meant to include every Scottish writer who ever lived, or every book by the writers I have mentioned, but only those books that I think someone might actually want to read.  My judgment on that subject could be quite wrong.  Corrections very welcome.  Scotland’s Books: A History of Scottish Literature (2009, Oxford University Press) by Robert Crawford has been most helpful.

I have read exactly one pre-18th century Scottish writer, the great early modern poet William Dunbar (c. 1460- c. 1513).  His “Lament for the Makaris” is a landmark poem.  The one with the flying machine is a hoot.  Dunbar's language is like Chaucer's, but Scottish, so rather more challenging.

Thomas Urquhart's translation of the first two books of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) is most tempting.  The excerpts I have seen are just wild.

The Scottish ballad tradition is rich, but I don’t know much about it.  Pick out an anthology for me.

I count three major 18th century novelists and poets.  Tobias Smollett was, with Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, one of the first important English novelists.  Smollett was a disciple of Fielding, and of Cervantes.  He is great fun.  The three most famous novels are:

Roderick Random (1748) – a true Spanish-style picaresque, with some classic naval scenes.
Peregrine Pickle (1751) – this one is by far the longest.
Humphrey Clinker (1771) – the cleverest epistolary novel of its age.  See bibliographing for samples.

James Boswell should not have been a major writer, but, somehow, he wrote one of the best books in the English language, and left behind a lengthy journal that is itself a delight.  Some highlights:

The London Journal , published 1950, but covering 1762-63.  Twelve additional volumes follow.  The best title is Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766-1769.
A Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1785).  Read Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland first, then Boswell's rather different account of the same trip.  They’re typically published together now.
The Life of Johnson (1791). A monument, a masterpiece. Enormously long.

The quintessential Scotch author is Robert Burns. You want a nice, thick Selected Poems, like the Penguin Classics edition. Don’t skimp. Much of his best work was composed in a shocking six months of unmatched creativity in 1786.  This post's title is from "To a Louse: On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church."

There were plenty of other Scottish poets – anyone up for Allan Ramsay? – but no one close to Burns in quality. One, James Macpherson aka Ossian, I refuse to read. You can tell me about him, if you like.

David Hume and Adam Smith and other Scottish Enlightenment figures seem like fair game, although I’m not sure how literary they are.  Enjoy the "Digression on Silver"!

If I were more serious about the 18th century, I would have already read the long poem The Seasons (1726+) by James Thomson, and the novels The Man of Feeling (1771) by Henry Mackenzie and The Female Quixote (1752) by Charlotte Lennox. Meh. Well, you can change my mind.

A couple of great travel books.  Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799) is a classic of Scotch persistence, a high-spirited solo journey through present-day Senegal and Mali.  He ends the trip with nothing but rags and his enormous hat, stuffed with his notes.  I have actually crossed paths with Park’s disastrous second expedition.

Alexander Mackenzie and his companions were the first men to cross the breadth of the North American continent.  His canoe trip into and across the Rockies (as well as an earlier trip to the Arctic sea) is described in Journal of the Voyage to the Pacific (1801).  These explorers were all a little nuts.

What should you read?  Burns, if you haven’t.  And Humphrey Clinker, certainly.  But I want to really plug Boswell.  The bulky Life of Johnson is a challenge all its own, so set that aside for a moment.  Instead, I want to advocate for Boswell’s journals.  The first volume, The London Journal, is one of the great books of the century, really.  Boswell is such a rich character, vain, weak-willed, ambitious, self-pitying, and foolish, but somehow so amazingly alive.  I’ve read all twelve volumes of the journal, and would love to read them again.  The account of the Scottish trip with Dr. Johnson is another fine way to get to know Boswell at his best without committing to the entire Life of Johnson.  Having said that, yes, Life of Johnson, absolutely!