Allan Ramsay (15 October 16867 January 1758) was a Scottish poet (or makar), playwright, publisher, librarian and impresario of early Enlightenment Edinburgh. Ramsay's influence extended to England, foreshadowing the reaction that followed the publication of Percy's Reliques. He was on close terms with the leading men of letters in Scotland and England. He corresponded with William Hamilton of Bangour, William Somervile, John Gay and Alexander Pope.
He began writing poetry as a member of the Easy Club and in 1715 became Club Laureate. Ramsay published verses and turned bookseller in 1718, selling poetry collections like Wealth and the Woody, a satire on the South Sea Company. In 1720, he collected and published his poems, establishing a circulating library in 1726. Ramsay edited The Tea-Table Miscellany and The Ever Green and is considered as a pastoral writer and editor who revived interest in vernacular literature.
Leigh Hunt sees Allan as a major contributor to the early naturalistic literary reaction of the 18th century. His The Gentle Shepherd, showed an appreciation of country life and anticipates the attitude of Romanticism with a neo-classical tradition. He is viewed as the connecting-link between the greater "Makars" of the 15th and 16th centuries and later Scottish writers like Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns.
Life and career
Allan Ramsay was born at Leadhills, Lanarkshire, to John Ramsay, superintendent of Lord Hopetoun's lead-mines and his wife, Alice Bower, a native of Derbyshire.
Allan Ramsay and his elder brother Robert probably attended the parish school at Crawfordjohn. In 1701 Allan was apprenticed to a wig-maker in Edinburgh and received his indentures back by 1709. He married Christian Ross in 1712; a few years after he had established himself as a wig-maker (not as a barber, as has been often said) in the High Street, and soon found himself in comfortable circumstances. They had six children. His eldest child was Allan Ramsay, the portrait painter.
Ramsay's first efforts in verse-making were inspired by the meetings of the Easy Club (founded in 1712) of which he was an original member, and in 1715, he became the Club Laureate. In the society of the members he assumed the name of Isaac Bickerstaff, and later of Gawin Douglas, the latter partly in memory of his maternal grandfather Douglas of Muthill (Perthshire), and partly to give point to his boast that he was a "poet sprung from a Douglas loin". The choice of the two names has some significance, when we consider his later literary life as the associate of the Queen Anne poets and as a collector of old Lowland Scots poetry.
By 1718 he had made some reputation as a writer of occasional verse, which he published in broadsheets, and then (or a year earlier) he turned bookseller in the premises where he had hitherto plied his craft of wig-making. In 1716 he had published a rough transcript of "Christ's Kirk on the Green" from the Bannatyne Manuscript, with some additions of his own. In 1718 he republished the piece with more supplementary verses. In the following year he printed a collection of Scots Songs. He published Wealth and the Woody in 1720, a satire on the South Sea Company, describing its fortunes as shifting sands. The success of these ventures prompted him to collect his poems in 1720 and publish a volume in 1721. The volume was issued by subscription, and brought in the sum of four hundred guineas. Four years later he removed to another shop, in the neighbouring Luckenbooths, where he opened a circulating library and extended his business as a bookseller. Ramsay is considered to have created the first circulating library in Britain when he rented books from his shop in 1726.
Between the publication of the collected edition of his poems and his settling down in the Luckenbooths, he had published a few shorter poems and had issued the first instalments of The Tea-Table Miscellany (1723–37) and The Ever Green (1724). The Tea-Table Miscellany is "A Collection of Choice Songs Scots and English", containing some of Ramsay's own, some by his friends, several well-known ballads and songs, and some Caroline verse. Its title was suggested by the programme of The Spectator: as Addison had sought for his speculations the hour set apart "for tea and bread and butter", so Ramsay laid claim to that place for his songs "e'en while the tea's fill'd reeking round".