Reformers and Radicals: A Man's a Man
Novelist and presenter of the Writing Scotland television series, Carl MacDougall,
introduces an online learning journey on reformers and radicals in Scottish literature.
Is there for honest poverty
That hings his head, an' a' that'
The coward slave, we pass him by
We dare be poor for a' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Our toils obscure, an' a' that
The rank is but the guinea stamp
The man's the gowd for a' that.
From A Man's a Man by Robert Burns
When Burns sent the song to his publisher in January 1795 he said he thought
there were two or three pretty good prose thoughts, inverted into rhyme.
'A Man's a Man' reflects what Burns believed. Similar sentiments occur time
and again in his poems, songs and letters. The song expresses a political feeling
that is native to Scottish writing; it's rather an indirect politics, which stems
from the self-respect many Scots feel is their birthright and as such crosses
party political boundaries.
The effect on Scottish writing has been absolute. In Annals of the Parish
John Galt observes how a small rural community develops into a complex town. The
story covers half a century and the action is seen through the eyes of a Presbyterian
minister, for whom his parish is the world in microcosm. Galt was the first writer
to show the effects of the burgeoning industrial revolution, making him the first
political novelist in the English language, and though his reputation has been
overshadowed by Scott and Hogg, he is now recognised as one of the great writers
of the age.
Throughout the 19th century many writers carried Burns's message to what they
saw as a logical, political conclusion, but it took a new century for an assessment
of the hatred and exploitation, which for many typified the rise of industrialisation,
to spring from an unlikely setting.
George Douglas Brown's The House With The Green Shutters was published
in 1901. It traces the fall of a self-made man with vaulting ambitions, and was
specifically written as a reaction to the most popular fiction of the time in
Scotland- the kailyard novel. Using the ingredients of a Kailyard novel, Brown
reveals the antithesis of couthie, idealized, small town domesticity.
No writer embraces the spirit of the Burns's song more than Hugh MacDiarmid;
and from the 1930s onward there was no shortage of writers anxious to reflect
the dominant political issues of the time. But it wasn't till the arrival of Edward
Gaitens that Scottish working class literature found its true voice. His work
has had a profound effect on Glasgow writers in particular and Scottish writing
in general, though the influence may not have been obvious.
William McIlvanney's third novel, Doherty is about a man who believes
in the values of working class life. It is the story of a tough and uncompromising
father, Tam Doherty, who struggles through the present while dreaming of and fighting
for a better future.
The disintegration of working communities made their traditional values and
certainties redundant. And writers like James Kelman and later Irvine Welsh identified
a new underclass of people who had become marginalised to the point of invisibility.
Kelman's Booker Prize winning novel, How Late It Was, How Late, exposes
a character enthused with courage and humanity whose stature rises as his isolation
increases. And though their inflections may be different, Ronald Frame and Allan
Massie belong to a growing body of contemporary writers whose work embraces the
Burns sentiment. It's been our first principle of social justice that has permeated
our writing since its publication.
