Rare first edition Robert Burns book fetches more than £60k

Auctioneers Lyon & Turnbull said on Thursday that one of 88 known surviving copies of Poems Chiefly In The Scottish Dialect had sold for £62,700, which includes a buyer’s premium.

It was expected to fetch between £50,000 and £60,000 under the hammer.

It comes in stark contrast to when the book originally went on sale, as all 612 copies sold for three shillings each and sold out within a month.

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Burns, who started writing poetry at the age of 15, was 27 when the book was published.

The Kilmarnock edition includes a number of the bard’s most popular poems, much of which were written at Mossgiel farm, Mauchline, East Ayrshire, where he lived and worked alongside his brother, Gilbert, between 1784 and 1788.

To A Mouse, Address To The Deil, The Twa Dogs and Halloween all formed part of his earliest works.

Cathy Marsden, head of books and manuscripts at Lyon & Turnbull, previously said: “It is extremely exciting to come across one of the first edition copies of the single most famous volume in Scottish cultural heritage.

Head of rare books at Lyon & Turnbull, Cathy Marsden, with the first edition (Image: Stewart Attwood)“From humble Ayrshire origins, Burns was to become an international literary star. Although very confident in his own abilities, even he could not have predicted such success.”

Although Burns’s success at farming did not match the proliferation of poetry – the farm was losing money – it was during his time at Mossgiel that he met a group of six girls about whom he wrote the poem The Belles Of Mauchline.

One of them was Jean Armour, who he described in the poem as the jewel of the group and who later became his wife.

The couple had nine children, with the first two, who were twins, born out of wedlock.

Their last child was born on the day of Burns’s funeral in July 1796.

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It was Burns’s desire to marry Jean, who was pregnant, that led to the publication of this first volume of poetry.

Her father vehemently opposed the marriage and Burns planned to emigrate to Jamaica.

A local lawyer, Gavin Hamilton, suggested he funded the voyage through the publication of his poems.

The success of the work was immediate and Burns abandoned his plans to leave Scotland.