Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry

Working-class poet, journalist, and Chartist. Born in Calton, Glasgow. Limited schooling. Learned English and Latin. Worked as a cotton factory operative. Destitute and abandoned by his family due to his alcoholism in the 1840s. Married Mary Wallace in 1825. Contributed to the Liberator. Emigrated to the United States but returned after sixteen months. Author of Lays of the Covenanters (published as a series in a Glasgow newspaper, and then as a volume) and nursery songs for the Whistle Binkie. Worked for the newspaper Glasgow Examiner. Biographical information: D. H. Edwards, Modern Scottish Poets, second series, D. H. Edwards, 1881, p. 72; Robert Brown, Paisley Poets, with Brief Memoirs of them, and Selections from their Poetry, vol. 2, J. & J. Cook, 1890, pp. 229-30; Charles Rogers, The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Adam and Charles Black, vol. 6, 1857, pp. 35-6; Kirstie Blair, Working Verse in Victorian Scotland, Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 81-2; Whistle-Binkie: Or, the Piper of the Party; Being a Collection of Songs for the Social Circle, vols. 1-2, David Robertson, 1878. (AC, CC)