The poet Robert Burns suffered greatly from his early biographers who, while attesting his greatness as a poet and song-writer, were merciless in condemning him as a gifted but flawed peasant who lived in penury, serially abused women – and died of drink. These facts became well known – but like many facts which are well known, they were also untrue. It was left to Peebles’ great son Robert Chambers to produce the first truly factually objective biography of the poet in 1851. This he did with his usual assiduity by ransacking Edinburgh and then going down to Ayrshire and Dumfries to hunt down and then interview men and women who had known Burns in life.

Robert Chambers’s four-volume biography stands to this day as a major resource for scholars, not least for Professors Purdie and Gerald Carruthers, the latter of Glasgow University, who are preparing a new Edition of the Burns Encyclopaedia, dealing with all aspect of the poet’s life and times.

This Talk will be illustrated with images from our National Archives and will tell the story of Burns’s life – and how his poems and songs, first laid before his family and friends in the farmlands of Ayrshire, were to become the property and the patrimony of Mankind.