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23 Bard Behaviour: Imitating, Mistaking, and Faking Burns
Get accessGerard Carruthers is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow and general editor of the ongoing multivolume edition of the collected works of Robert Burns, for which he is co-editing Correspondence (three volumes) and editing Poetry (two volumes). Recent publications as editor include The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Scottish Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003); and, as co-editor, Performing Robert Burns: Enactments and Representation of the National Bard (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts (Oxford University Press, 2018).
George Smith is a retired community education worker, as well as a published writer and playwright. He is currently writing a book of working-class short stories set in late twentieth- and early twenty-first–century Scotland. He is co-editor of 1820 Scottish Rebellion: Essays on a Nineteenth-Century Insurrection (Birlinn, 2022).
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Published:22 February 2024
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Abstract
This essay outlines a brief history and modus operandi of Alexander Howland Smith, ‘Antique Smith’, the prolific nineteenth-century forger of poet Robert Burns. Its ultimate focus is the examination of a forensic multi-evidential approach employed by the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow, to detect Smith fabrications of the Scottish Bard. Building on the earlier work of Professor J. DeLancey Ferguson and drawing upon primary source material, poet and forger, and secondary sources, the research explores macroscopic and microscopic tests and scientific analysis employed for the detection of Smith forgeries. Internal document evidence and aspects of the poet’s and forger’s hand writing have been scrutinized. Signature standards of both men have been collected and examined, utilizing juxtaposition photography as a methodology for detection. An Antique Smith and Robert Burns alphabet, upper and lower case, encompassing the four major periods of the poet’s handwriting, has been created for comparative purposes. Source materials have undergone scientific analysis, including investigations utilizing Raman microscopy, to determine the organic make-up of inks used by Burns and Smith. Employing this approach has enabled us to confidently differentiate an authentic Burns manuscript from a spurious Smith production.
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