ENSPIRE, Kilmarnock’s first Festival of Ideas, will take place this Sunday at St Joseph’s Academy, 11 – 4. The event has been organised by St Joseph’s pupils and features a cast of speakers covering architecture, culture and creativity, science, disability and education. Here’s the poster -
Here at the Burns Monument Centre we’re interested in the local history of ideas and how they can be relevant today. Our collections of Kilmarnock’s printed heritage give us an insight into the ideas that shaped the town in the past. Poetic, religious, political and philosophical musings were often published in cheap pamphlet editions for local booksellers to punt for a shilling or sixpence. There were numerous printers, booksellers and stationers in business in the town throughout the 19th century.
Some pamphlets have had a lasting significance, for example this account of the ‘Public Meeting held at Kilmarnock, on the 7th December 1816′. The pamphlet records the speeches of local people who wanted parliamentary reform. At the time only one person in all of Kilmarnock was eligble to vote.
Two of the men involved in the meeting and in the printing of the pamphlet, Alexander McLaren and Thomas Baird, were arrested and accused of “wickedly and feloniously printing, selling, publishing and circulating the said tract or statement.” They were imprisoned in the Tollbooth in Edinburgh for 6 months and both died soon after their release. These events and the people involved are remembered at the Reformer’s Monument in the Kay Park.
Other pamphlets have become (almost) lost in obscurity. We know very little about the pamphlet below, written by ‘John Lawrie, Kilmarnock’ and printed and sold in Kilmarnock, Glasgow, Edinburgh and London in the 1830s. The only other record we can find of this pamphlet’s existence is at Yale Universtiy in their holdings on phenomenology. We’d love to know more about the author.
Hopefully the ENSPIRE festival will be spoken of in 200 years time. In the meantime, we’ll keep a copy of the poster in the archive!