A battle is raging over Robert Burns's legacy and reputation that has led to threats of litigation and the kind of insults more familiar among the late-night drinkers about whom the bard so often wrote.
What started as intellectual debate has descended into name-calling and abuse, with allegations and threats appearing on the World Burns Club message board.
On one side are the fêted academics of two august universities. On the other is Patrick Scott Hogg, an amateur Burns enthusiast, who funds his studies through his landscape gardening business in Cumbernauld, outside Glasgow.
At the heart of the dispute is an edition of Burns's works - known as The Canongate Burns - edited by Mr Scott Hogg and Dr Andrew Noble. It includes a collection of ten “Lost Poems” that Mr Scott Hogg claims to have found more than a decade ago.
His discovery impressed a number of learned authorities and led to his being invited to co-edit the Canongate volume.
With their radical political sentiments, these newly discovered verses underscored a growing sense among some Burns students that the poet was not just a composer of pretty lines and songs, but a radical who was impressed by the French revolution and who, in the last years of his life, became a committed democrat in an undemocratic age.
It is a revolutionary image at odds with long-held interpretations of the bard promoted by a worldwide federation of Burns clubs. That traditional view saw the poet as a charismatic and warm-hearted figure, a master of love poetry and bawdy ballads, whose simple, primary aim was to edify and entertain. Simply put, he just wasn't interested in the politics of his day.
The Canongate Burns was scorned for a large number of alleged textual errors (though to outsiders many seem minor). Gerard Carruthers, of Glasgow University, lambasted the edition as “an obscurely constructed text of the poems”, for its “loose historical claims” and for “dubious” attribution of works. Four years later he called for the book to be pulped.
Dr Carruthers is a respected scholar and the author of The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns. Contempt from such lofty heights wins notice. This month, when Robert Crawford, a professor of literature at St Andrews University, published The Bard, his biography of Burns, he wrote of the “discredited scholarship” of Scott Hogg and Noble, which threatened “to ruin efforts to build a nuanced case for Burns's radicalism”.
Other scholars, however, have found the harsh tone of these criticisms perplexing. Over the years, Mr Scott Hogg's research has been praised by luminaries in Burns studies such as the late Professor David Daiches and Thomas Crawford, a respected literary editor.
Cairns Craig, Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies at Aberdeen University, acknowledges that there were errors in the original edition of The Canongate Burns, but says the work is now widely accepted by scholars all around the world. “To describe [it] as ‘discredited scholarship' is totally unjust, given the quality of the work. [Mr Scott Hogg and Dr Noble] have not deserved the treatment they have been getting,” he said.
The debate has entered a new dimension on the World Burns Club internet message board, where a barrage of insults and insinuations has been directed at Mr Scott Hogg, not least by a contributor identifying himself as “Gerry C”. In October, he accused Mr Scott Hogg of “planting and suppressing evidence”, adding “Paddy Hogg is at best incompetent” before claiming, “what my work clearly exposes is Hogg's methods”.
The posting went on to claim that he [Gerry C] had been subjected to a bizarre harassment campaign since “my involvement in the [Lost Poems] saga”, and that he had received 30 abusive phone calls, had been sent a computer virus and had been physically intimidated when he attended Cumbernauld Burns Club.
Mr Scott Hogg said: “My initial reaction was utter shock when I saw what had been written about me. I'd actually been toying with getting in touch with Gerry with a view to having a pint ... I even entertained the hope of working with him.”
Dr Carruthers - who was attending a Burns conference at the Royal Society of Edinburgh yesterday - said he would not comment on the material on the internet but said he had no hesitation in asserting that the editors of The Canongate Burns had “falsified evidence”. Mr Scott Hogg vehemently denied that charge. The Canongate text, he said, was used as a course textbook at Edinburgh and Aberdeen universities.
There appear to be inconsistencies in Dr Carruthers's and Professor Crawford's attitudes. Earlier this month, Mr Scott Hogg spoke at an international conference organised by the Centre for Burns Studies in Glasgow. Dr Carruthers is the head of the centre.
Professor Crawford, in a 2001 review of The Canongate Burns for the London Review of Books, praised “the thoroughgoing way it argues the case for Burns as a radical Scottish republican”, adding that although the Lost Poems might be disputed in some quarters, the editors had made “an energetic and valuable contribution to Burns scholarship”.
In his newly published biography, Crawford proposed a view of Burns as “the controversial master poet of modern democracy” which, for some scholars, such as Professor Craig, appears to have been influenced by the work of Mr Scott Hogg and Dr Noble.
Most remarkably of all, having dismissed The Canongate Burns in his introduction, Professor Crawford cites Noble and Scott Hogg's work in his chapter on Burns's radicalism.
“I am not saying that everything was rubbish, but it was a mess. It is a very old argument,” said Professor Crawford, who also attended yesterday's Burns conference. “[Mr Scott Hogg] and [Andrew Noble] have had their shot. People have picked off the Lost Poems one by one, and now there are none of them left. It is time to move on.”
After ducking criticism for many years, Mr Scott Hogg shows signs of coming out fighting. He recently turned his attention to a collection of Burns poems published by Everyman in 2007 and edited by Dr Carruthers. What he found, he said, was a surprising number of textual errors.
