Constructing an Ulster-Scots Burns

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.