Auld Reekie’s 18th-century James Dean

IF ROBERT Burns was the Elvis of the Scots language then Robert Fergusson was its James Dean. He was a fast-living genius that died too young (24 years old) but markedly influenced all who followed. Fergusson changed the nature and range of Scots poetry with his innovative use of form and subject matter. But, like our present literary enfant terrible, Irvine Welsh, his Scots was no idealised Arcadian language. It was the language of the streets of 18th-century Edinburgh.

Before Fergusson there had been a tendency, particularly with Allan Ramsay and his hugely popular pastoral play The Gentle Shepherd, to use Scots as symbolic of sentimental innocence. It’s true that Fergusson also wrote on rural subjects - his excellent ‘Farmers Ingle’, for instance - but it is his poetry of Edinburgh that characterises the main body of his work. And although Ramsay too had written poems about Edinburgh’s taverns and debaucheries these were usually considered lighter fare.

Fergusson’s was a fresh and assured voice. He knowingly grabbed old verse and stanza forms, added some new ones of his own and took them for a lively pub crawl round 18th-century Edinburgh.

Born this week in 1750, Fergusson is to be commemorated with a statue. On September 18 a panel of judges will meet at the Scottish Parliament to choose the image that will grace the Royal Mile. A public vote (the maquettes of the statue are at Edinburgh’s Ocean Terminal along with a ballot box) will also be counted to add an extra democratic note. The project will place the winning entry as a ‘people friendly’ life-size statue outside the Canongate Kirk.

The organisers of the statue project, The Friends of Robert Fergusson, aim to

liberate his memory from the narrow confines of academia and literary circles in which it has dallied all these years.

"The statue will be about Fergusson’s spirit," says the charity’s fund raiser Bob Watt.

Fergusson has been an unheralded literary hero since the Old Town of Edinburgh was at its height of vibrancy. It was a time of enlightenment and change. Although he did not know it, Fergusson was writing the swansong of 18th-century Edinburgh with her wild pubs and oyster cellars where Scottish society rubbed shoulders. In the huddle of the Old Town, space decreed that the myriad of clubs and societies met in public venues across the town.

Clubs like Fergusson’s own, the democratic yet eccentric Cape Club, are a distant memory in their original form. Perhaps only the Speculative Society, recently attacked by Robbie the Pict, survives in any genuine way.

This Edinburgh was one brimming with philosophers such as David Hume, rogues such as Deacon Brodie and characters like James Boswell. The legal fraternity boasted eccentrics like the hanging judge Lord Braxfield ("ye’ll be nane the waur o a guid hingin") and Monboddo (who believed that we were descended from monkeys 100 years before Charles Darwin’s time). Robert Fergusson was the poet laureate of this Auld Reekie.

This verse from his poem ‘Caller Oysters’ shows his bawdiness and irreverence as well as his humour. His cure for drunkenness is so good you’ll be able to drink as much as a churchman.

A’ ye wha canna stand sae sicker,

Whan twice ye’ve toom’d the big

ars’dbicker,

Mix caller oysters wi your liquor,

And I’m your debtor

If greedy priest or drouthy vicar

Will thole it better.