Allan Ramsay

(1686-1758)
Poet and bookseller

Wig-maker, bookseller, poet, and father of Allan Ramsay the painter, Allan
Ramsay senior is best remembered for his pastoral ballad-opera "The Gentle Shepherd" (1725) and his compilations of Scots poems "The Ever Green"
(2 volumes, Edinburgh: 1724) and Scots songs"The Tea-Table Miscellany"
(3 volumes, Edinburgh: 1724-27).

Born in Leadhills, Lanarkshire and educated at the village school in Crawford, Ramsay moved to Edinburgh in 1701 when his widowed mother apprenticed him
to an Edinburgh wig-maker. While still a wig-maker he became known as a poet, issuing his first poems as broadside sheets which were sold on the street:
children were regularly sent out with a penny to buy 'Mr Ramsay's latest piece'.
He abandoned wig-making for bookselling in about 1716, first in the High Street, Edinburgh and later in the Luckenbooths which surrounded the High Kirk of St Giles and the Tolbooth.

In 1721 he presented to the University Library a copy of his own published Poems (1721). The Library was later to acquire, among the MSS bequeathed by David Laing, significant numbers of Ramsay's MSS, including drafts of "The Gentle Shepherd" and an anthology of 17th-century verse said to have been used by him when compiling "The Tea-Table Miscellany".

(Photograph: Jane V. Freshwater)