Abstract
These are the opening lines the Chronicle of the Hundredth Birthday of Robert Burns, edited by James Ballantine and published in May 1859.2 Ballantine’s chronicle records a mind-boggling total of 872 celebratory events, which had taken place in city halls, corn exchanges, local meeting halls, hotels, and private houses on 25 January earlier that year. Flanked by a flurry of centenary publications, there were more than 600 of such meetings in Scotland (a list is given in McKie 1881, 185–200). The others were spread across the British Isles, the United States, and the colonies, especially Canada and Australia, with only one event mentioned in continental Europe (in Copenhagen) .3
The celebration of the hundredth birthday of Robert Burns, on the 25th day of January, in the year 1859, presented a spectacle unprecedented in the history of the world.
This chapter is a shortened and revised version of Rigney 2011.
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© 2014 Ann Rigney
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Rigney, A. (2014). Burns 1859. In: Leerssen, J., Rigney, A. (eds) Commemorating Writers in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137412140_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137412140_3
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