Constructing an Ulster-Scots Burns

Abstract

Through an examination of the local unionist newspapers from the middle of the nineteenth century to just before the First World War, the article shows how an ‘Ulster-Scots Burns’ was gradually pieced together and projected into the popular imagination. Burns’s work and heritage are curated in such a way as to make him compatible with the unionist and Ulster-Scots narratives which, increasingly, develop in parallel across this period. The construction of this ‘unionist-friendly’ Burns was not an end in itself. Rather, it was part and parcel of a much broader process of identity building that was on-going within the Ulster-Scots community over the course of the nineteenth century. In both cases, we find a central interaction between élite and popular culture. Given the preferences that emerge within the pro-Union community in Ulster under the pressure of Home Rule, the resulting version of Burns is one that is compatible with an increasingly conservative mind-set, one that, above all, confirms support for the constitutional status quo.