The Letters: I. 1780-1789

The Letters of Robert Burns is a complete revision of the earlier text established by J. De Lancey Ferguson. A number of new letters have been added and completed from manuscripts that have come to light since the Ferguson edition–there are letters to twenty-five new correspondents–and footnotes have been expanded to indicate the source of all Burns’s quotations where these can be identified. The endnotes have been expanded to indicate letters to which Burns’s are answers as well as answers received by Burns to the letters he sent. An appendix contains Currie’s List of Letters to Burns, a document of major importance as it represents a selection of letters that were in the poet’s possession at the time of his death.