page_title: Glenriddell Manuscripts
section_title: History of the manuscripts
hierarchical_section_title: Glenriddell Manuscripts / History of the manuscripts
caption_attribution_description: English: The Frontispiece by John Beugo 1791 In the 1914 Glenriddel Manuscript facsimile.
context_page_description: The Glenriddell Manuscripts is an extensive collection written in holograph by Robert Burns and an amanuensis of his letters, poems and a few songs in two volumes produced for his then friend Captain Robert Riddell, Laird of what is now Friars Carse in the Nith Valley, Dumfries and Galloway. The two volumes of the manuscript were handsomely bound in calf leather. The first volume of poems and songs was completed by April 1791 and was presented to Robert Riddell, however their friendship ceased due to the unfortunate 'The Rape of the Sabine Women' incident and Robert Riddell died shortly after before any reconciliation could take place. The first volume is partly in Burns's hand with one main amanuensis contributing much of the text in a far neater hand than the author himself and a possible third person contributing to the text. The second volume is entirely in Burns's hand.
context_section_description: Robert Riddell provided Burns with two attractive quarto sized volumes embossed with his armorial crest and bound in calf leather. They were slightly different sizes. Work started in May 1789 on adding the poems and songs. The 'stock and horn' of Burns's armorial bearing is placed on the frontispiece of the second volume.
  Burns went to considerable efforts to get the first volume returned after Robert Riddell's death on 20 April 1794 and added extra material once it was back in his hands. The second volume had not been ready in time to be presented to Riddell. Burns wrote in 1794 to Robert Riddell's unmarried sister Eleanor, asking that she and her married sister Elizabeth would either return or destroy the manuscripts, saying that "I made a collection of all my trifles in verse which I had ever written. They are many of them local, some puerile and silly, and all of them unfit for the public eye. As I have some little fame at stake ... I am uneasy now for the fate of those manuscripts. ... As a pledge of friendship they were bestowed; and that circumstance, indeed, was all their merit." Burns was still working on the second volume in late 1793.
  One of the additions he made to Volume One upon its return was the blunt and angry epigram upon Maria Riddell on page 161 "If you rattle along like your mistress's tongue."
  After Burns's death the manuscripts were put into the hands of James Currie at Liverpool, his biographer, however they were not automatically returned to the Burns family after his biography of Burns was published and he died before he could publish an improved biography. After Currie's death they passed into the possession of his son William Wallace Currie. In 1853 when William died his widow, without permission, offered them to a private gentlemen's club known as the Liverpool Athenaeum where they resided, forgotten in a box for circa twenty years, until in 1873 Mr. Henry A. Bright, uncovered them, wrote an account of them and put on display for 6 months. The club eventually decided to sell the manuscripts in what is likely to have been an illegal transaction, despite vociferous objections and the establishment of a 'Scots Committee' under the chairmanship of Lord Rosebery who intended to take action in the courts. The Liverpool Athenaeum added 'insult to injury' by revealing that they would use the proceeds of the sale to establish a 'Currie Memorial Fund'.
  Dr. James Currie had however signed a letter in 1797 that stated "..that whatever was done as to the returning any letters, papers, etc., should be considered as the act of the widow and transacted in her name."
  Messrs. Sotheby & Co. exercised their option to purchase the manuscripts on 3 June 1913 and paid £5000. Miss Annie Burns Burns of Cheltenham, the poet's only surviving grandchild, was appointed the Executrix Dative of Robert Burns with a strong legal case for the manuscripts return to the family, however the Liverpool Athenaeum refused. Sotheby's agreed however to abide with any court decision. Joseph W. Hornstein, a London bookdealer, purchased the manuscripts for £5000 by private treaty from Sotheby's and sold them to an American client, who was not however as is sometimes stated, J. Pierpoint Morgan. Hornstein reportedly tried to have them returned however he died very soon after the sale.
  Another reference gives J. Pierpoint Morgan being involved in a proposed purchase in 1903 that fell through due to adverse publicity, explaining the extreme secrecy of the 1913 affair. Additionally it is said that Hornstein's agent approached several prospective purchasers in America without success due to the adverse reaction in Scotland. Some clarity to the confusion comes from the fact that the Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury reminded its readers that circa 10 years before the paper had taken the lead in preventing the Athenaneum from selling the manuscripts on that occasion, probably to J.P.Morgan.
  In late 1913 the businessman and antiquarian collector John Gribbel was approached with a view to a sale to him of the Glenriddell Manuscripts. On 21 Novembe
caption: John Beugo engraving of Robert Burns.
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