In February 1804 Joanna Baillie wrote to the Edinburgh clerk and musical enthusiast George Thomson, responding to a request for song lyrics. Thomson had by then been engaged in editing his Select Collection series for over a decade. These elegant volumes of national melodies featured arrangements by composers of the stature of Haydn, while Thomson drew on a variety of literary talent in an attempt to dignify a folk tradition he considered plagued by ‘doggrel’ and the ‘loose and indelicate’. The series was distinguished primarily by an extensive body of material submitted by Robert Burns before the poet's untimely death in 1796. Reflecting this pedigree, Baillie's letter strikes a patriotic chord. ‘Sir,’ she writes,

Thomson's remodelling of the native song traditions of Scotland, Wales and Ireland for a genteel audience was constituted as a labour of polite cultural reform and is thus another example of the period's improving milieu. Indeed, more remains to be learned from his collaborative literary-musical network, which was positioned on fault lines between folk and polite culture, tradition and improvement. Certainly Baillie's involvement in the coterie of authors enlisted by Thomson signals not only her prominence in the early nineteenthcentury literary field, but also her agency as a canon-maker, a distinguished virtuoso recruited to transform the cultural heritage. It also involves her recognition as a Scottish writer. More of Baillie's lyrics would end up in Thomson's Welsh than his Scottish collections, but the letter above is just one of many examples throughout Baillie's writing of the national identity that she maintained despite a permanent move to England as a young woman in 1784. That said, as a playwright writing primarily for the London stage from her home in Hampstead, she does put critical pressure on a category such as ‘Scottish Romanticism’.