Allan Ramsay: Makar of Edinburgh

This first biography of the poet Allan Ramsay (1684-1758) takes the form of a historical novel set in the tumultuous world of early eighteenth-century Edinburgh. All the known facts of the Makar’s shapeshifting life are here, interwoven with the author’s original research and imaginative passages based on her extensive knowledge of the locations he inhabited.

Sales of his masterwork, The Gentle Shepherd (1725), enable Ramsay to give up wig making and open a bookshop - and Britain’s first subscription library - adjacent to St Giles Cathedral. Not content with this meteoric rise, and influenced by John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, the makar establishes his New Theatre in the High Street. But disaster soon strikes, forcing the poet ingeniously to re-invent himself with the support of family, friends and notables of the day, including the young David Hume; Clerk of Pennycuik; and the Countess of Eglintoun.

Then, as now, the thorny subject of Union divides the country, before Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s Tartan Army invades Edinburgh in 1745 and attempts to seize the castle from the garden of the Makar’s ’country villa’, the Guse-pye House on the slopes of Castlehill. There he dies, just before drainage of the Nor’ Loch makes way for the construction of Edinburgh’s New Town.

’This book is a tremendous achievement - so much research, so much information, but not only that: a seamless interweaving of fact and fiction to create an imagined life for the man which comes leaping out of every page with its authenticity intact.’ Elizabeth Adam of Blairadam

’The author vividly evokes the hustle and bustle of eighteenth-century Edinburgh and restores to his rightful place the poet Allan Ramsay, too often eclipsed by his son, the painter of the same name. A great read.’

Ray Perman, author of The Rise and Fall of the City of Money