Ian MacLaren

The Days of Auld Langsyne - The Kailyard authors Ian MacLaren

irst published in 1895, The Days of Auld Langsyne was Ian Maclaren's second collection of sketches from 'Drumtochty'. Following in the wake of the enormous success of Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894), the volume established the Rev. John Watson as one of the most widely-read authors in Britain and America. Based on memories of life as a minister of the Free Kirk in Logiealmond, Perthshire, the stories, with their skilful use of local dialect, offer a nostalgic evocation of rural Scottish life in the 1860s and 1870s. A new introduction places Maclaren's work in the context of Scottish fiction at the end of the nineteenth century and addresses the style of his writing and his representation of community values and religious life in Scotland. Ian Campbell is Professor of Scottish and Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where he has been since 1964. His Kailyard was published in 1981, and a re-issue of J. M. Barrie's A Window in Thrums in 2005. He has wide interests in Scottish fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is one of the editors of the Duke-Edinburgh edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle.