G. Carruthers

Minimally-destructive atmospheric ionisation mass spectrometry authenticates authorship of historical manuscripts

Authentic historic manuscripts fetch high sums, but establishing their authenticity is challenging, relies on a host of stylistic clues and requires expert knowledge. High resolution mass spectrometry has not, until now, been applied to guide the authentication of historic manuscripts. Robert Burns is a well-known Scottish poet, whose fame, and the eponymous ‘Burns Night’ are celebrated world-wide. Authenticity of his works is complicated by the ‘industrial’ production of fakes by Alexander Smith in the 1890s, many of which were of good quality and capable of fooling experts. This study represents the first analysis of the inks and paper used in Burns poetry, in a minimally destructive manner that could find application in many areas. Applying direct infusion mass spectrometry to a panel of selected authenticated Burns and Smith manuscripts, we have produced a Support Vector Machine classifier that distinguishes Burns from Smith with a 0.77 AUC. Using contemporary recipes for inks, we were also able to match features of each to the inks used to produce some of Burns’ original manuscripts. We anticipate the method and classifier having broad application in authentication of manuscripts, and our analysis of contemporary inks to provide insights into the production of written works of art.

Postscript: the strange death of literary Unionism

The interwar period marked a major turning point in the history of Scottish literature. The story of Scots before MacDiarmid’s recasting of it as synthetic Lallans was happily enmeshed in the experience of Britishness and of Britain’s imperial expansion overseas. As far back as the eighteenth century, Scots and English were viewed by Scots philologists as Saxon–British cognates. The emergence of an antithetical relationship of Scots and English was largely a twentieth-century phenomenon. Indeed, MacDiarmid entirely reconceptualized the relationship of Scottish literature to the post-1707 British state. A partner nation of enthusiastic imperialists was reimagined as an oppressed colony. Scottish literature, both its practitioners and its critics, embarked on a process of forgetting Scotland’s complicity in Britishness and Empire.

Ironic Mythology: Reading the Fictiveness of The Cone-Gatherers

The Cone-Gatherers (1955) is a text of large symbolic import featuring an Edenic Argyllshire landscape. Into this setting pollution is poured in the form of an incipient evil agency which might either affirm the Calvinist world-view, or alternatively, could be its bleak, morbid, self-prophesying result. A wider than Scottish )Calvinist_ context also pertains, the novel clearly riffing upon John Steinbecks Of Mice and Men (1937), with writ-large allusions to folk legend (especially the Green Man), the life of Francis of Assisi, and the classical theories of western tragedy as well as the Bible. In retrospect the alert reader might see this inter-textual exchange as proof of the profound fictiveness, the suspicious heaping up of symbolism and story, in Jenkins novel, something that this essay will principally elaborate upon.