Description
Autograph manuscript poem "Jessie - A Scots Song - Tune, Bonie Dundee". Autograph poem, two stanzas each of eight lines each, with title line above, [c.1793], one leaf, 23 by 18.6cm., folds, short marginal tear at centre fold, with "This is Burns's handwriting, J.D. Johnstone 1803, Dumfries" added in another hand at foot
Footnote
Note: "Jessie" was sent by Burns to his friend, the musician and editor George Thomson, in April 1793. The present text is identical, apart from the title, to the Dalhousie copy quoted by James Kinsley in Burns, Poems and Songs (1971) (Kinsley 404). In his letter to Thomson Burns wrote "These verses suit the tune exactly... There is a syllable wanting at the beginning of [l.9[ but I suppose it will make little odds" [Letter 554]. Thomson made up the line with "Oh!" in Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice and suggested some other alteration; Burns wrote to him in September 1793 that "your objection of the stiff line, is just; but mending my colouring would spoil my likeness; so the Picture must stand as it is" [Letter 586]
Although Burns sent him the manuscript in 1793, the poem was not published until 1798, and despite Burns's request Thomson substituted "Scotland" for "Scotia in line five.
The poem was inspired by Miss Jessie Staig, daughter of Provost Staig of Dumfries, who became the wife of Major William Miller of Dalswinton and died at age of twenty-six. Two autograph manuscript copies of "Jessie" are listed as extant in the Index of English Literary Manuscripts, volume III, part 1 (1986): one at the Burns Cottage Museum, entitled "Song" and headed "Tune, Bonie Dundee. Composed on Miss Jessie Staig, Dumfries" [c.1793] [Alloway MS 3.6184], the other, headed "Song - Tune Bonie Dundee", in a letter to George Thomson, April 1793, in the Pierpont Morgan library. [Pierpont Morgan, MA47, f.23]
Paper with watermark partly visible: possibly "G. Taylor." On the verso, in ink, is the inscription "Burns' own hand" in a near contemporary hand.
The present version differs from the Burns Cottage Museum manuscript in the first stanza. The present copy reads "Grace, Beauty & Elegance fetter her lover" while the Burns Cottage Museum copy reads as "Youth, Beauty & Elegance fetter her lover". The second stanza also differs. Line one of the present version reads "Fresh is the rose in the gay, dewy morning" while the Burns Cottage Museum copy reads "Fair is the rose in the gay dewy morning". The second line of the present version reads "And sweet is the lily at evening close" whereas the Burns Cottage Museum copy reads "And sweet is the lily in evening close"
Provenance: From the estate of Admiral The Hon Charles Elphinstone-Fleeming of Cumbernauld (1774-1840) who was prominent in the Colombian and Venezuelan wars of liberation and married Dona Catalina Paulina Alessandro de Jimenez, 26 years his junior. Their daughter Clementina married Cornwallis Maude, 4th Viscount Hawarden, and, as Lady Clementina Hawarden, became one of the earliest portrait photographers. The poem was given to the present owner's grandfather, along with other Fleeming family papers, by Lady Hawarden's grand-daughter, Lady Eveline Maude.