Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry

Poet and merchant’s clerk. Pseudonym: “W. L.” Born in Dundee. Nephew of the poet Robert Leighton. Moved to Liverpool at age seven and where he lived all his life. Worked as an office clerk from the age of thirteen in a Liverpool merchant’s business. His poems were published in periodicals and the Liverpool Mercury. Author of the posthumous Poems (1870, 1890). Died from typhoid fever. Biographical information: North Country Poets, edited by William Andrews, Simpkin, Marshall, & Co., 1888, p. 216; “Preface,” The Poems of William Leighton, Elliot Stock, 1890; Reilly, Mid-Victorian Poetry, pp. 272-3. (AC)