Robert Fergusson - Death

Death

Fergusson's literary energy and active social life were latterly overshadowed by what may have been depression although there are likely to have been other factors. From around mid-1773 his surviving works appear to become more darkly melancholic. In late 1773, in his "Poem to the Memory of John Cunningham" which was written on hearing news of the death of that poet in an asylum in Newcastle, Fergusson expressed fears of a similar fate.

His fears were founded. Around the backend of the year 1774, after sustaining a head injury in circumstances that are obscure, Fergusson was submitted against his will into Edinburgh's Darien House "hospital" (close to today's eponymous Bedlam Theatre), where, after a matter of weeks, he suddenly died. He had only just turned 24. He was buried in an unmarked grave on the west side of the Canongate Kirkyard.

A memorial headstone, designed by the local architect Robert Burn, for Fergusson's grave was privately commissioned in 1787 by Robert Burns and paid for at his own expense. In the later nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson intended to renovate the stone, but died before he could do so. The epitaph that Stevenson planned to add to the stone is recorded on a plaque added to the grave by the Saltire Society on the Society's 50th anniversary in 1995.