Abstract
In this chapter I examine the autobiographical reflections of a matriarch who, although largely remembered as a poet and essayist, also published reminiscences as part of a “people’s history” of the region in which she grew up. An avid reader who had no formal education whatsoever, Janet Hamilton possessed a remarkable memory which helped her memorialize, sometimes critically, the customs, ballads, legends, and personal ties of an “auld warld” in which she had managed to flourish. In a period when the life story of a working-class shoemaker’s wife and mother of ten might not have attracted interest, Hamilton’s essays, reprinted from the Airdre Advertiser, blended memories of a devout, rural, and preindustrial culture with the account of a bright girl’s observant and restless childhood.
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Notes
- 1.
Other later nineteenth-century Scottish autobiographers and diarists included Christian Watt and Janet Bathgate (Chaps. 5 and 8). Brief prefatory accounts of the author’s life also preceded volumes of poetry by the Scottish Ellen Johnston (Chap. 7), Elizabeth Campbell (Chap. 5), and Jane Stevenson, author of Homely Musings by a Rustic Maiden (Kilmarnock, 1870).
Recent efforts to reassess working-class Victorian Scottish poetry include Valentina Bold, “Beyond ‘The Empire of the Gentle Heart’: Scottish Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century,” in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. Douglas Clifford and Dorothy McMillan, Edinburgh University Press, 1997, 246–61; and William Findlay, “Reclaiming Local Literature: William Thom and Janet Hamilton,” The History of Scottish Literature: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Douglas Clifford, Aberdeen University Press, 1988, 353–75. A discussion of Hamilton’s poetry is found in my “Janet Hamilton,” Victorian Women Poets, ed. William Thesing, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Columbia, S. C.: Bruccoli, Clark, Layman, 1998, 149–58 and in Working -Class Women Poets of Victorian Britain: An Anthology, Peterborough: Broadview, 2008, 47–62.
- 2.
James Boswell, The Life of Dr. Johnson, London: Charles Dilly, 1791, vol. 1, 205–206.
- 3.
“Opinions,” 397.
- 4.
John Young, Pictures in Prose and Verse; or, Personal Recollections of the Late Janet Hamilton, Langloan, Glasgow: George Gallie, 1877.
- 5.
A brief account of Wallace’s life appears in P. T. Winskill, The Temperance Movement and Its Workers: A Record of Social, Moral, Religious and Political Progress, 1892, vol. 3, 19. He was the author of Poems and Sketches, Glasgow, 1862, and a collection of his temperance pamphlets was gathered as Sketches of Life and Character, titles which resemble Hamilton’s Poems of Purpose and Sketches in Prose and “Sketches of Village Life and Character.”
- 6.
A tambour frame consisted of two large interlocking hoops between which a cloth was stretched for embroidering; tambour work was outsourced domestic labor. A famous representation of such work occurs in Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott.”
- 7.
Covenanters , named for their support of the National Covenant of 1638, rejected the claims of the Stuart monarchy to exert control over the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. John Whitelaw was the subject of Hamilton’s “Lines Sacred to the Memory of Mr. John Whitelaw” and “Ballad of the New Monkland Martyr,” Poems, Essays and Sketches, 1880 (hereafter PES), 56–57, 212–15.
- 8.
PES, 13.
- 9.
Poems, 1870, ix.
- 10.
PES, 272–73.
- 11.
She inscribed the poem to one who had remained “in every change of life the same,” most likely her husband John.
- 12.
Of these, 200 were for The Working Man’s Friend, and when this inspired Cassell to commission the two supplementary volumes of The Literature of Working Men, 600 more poured in. For a fuller account of this episode in Hamilton’s publishing history, see Florence Boos, “The Homely Muse in her Diurnal Setting: The Periodical Poems of ‘Marie,’ Janet Hamilton and Fanny Forrester,” Victorian Poetry 39.2 (2001), 262–69 and 282–83.
- 13.
Cassell published “Summer Voices,” in The Working-Man’s Friend, 1853, n. s. 3., and a third poem, “Lines on the Calder,” appeared some years later in his temperance publication, The Quiver, July 18th, 1863.
- 14.
The nomenclature was often confusing. Her first (1863) volume reprinted the essay “Sketches of a Scottish Roadside Village Sixty Years Ago,” and the second volume (1865) included “Sketches of Scottish Peasant Life and Character in Days of Auld Langsyne” as a separate piece, along with three “Local Sketches” and seven “Sketches of Village Life and Character,” of which one, “Local Changes,” could be more properly characterized as an essay. In the posthumous Poems, Essays and Sketches, the category “Sketches of Village Life and Character, and other Essays” includes nineteen instances of Hamilton’s prose.
- 15.
Social Science: Being Selections from John Cassell’s Prize Essays, by Working Men, London: Cassell, 1861. In her 1863 volume the winning essay appears as “Social Science Essay—On Self-Education.” Since Cassell’s other volumes based on these competitions during the 1850s have apparently not survived, it is impossible to tell whether Hamilton won other competitions.
One of the six essays she wrote for John Cassell’s The Literature of Working Men, 2 vols., 1850–1851, “Counteracting Influences,” was never reprinted. In addition, she included ten essays in her 1863 Poems and Essays; of these, five were reprinted from LWM, and a sixth had been written for a competition sponsored by Cassell to solicit the opinions of working-class writers. Her 1865 volume included ten “sketches” (one of which had appeared in LWM) and three new essays, “Local Changes,” “Mother and Daughter,” and “Moral Perversions of Intemperance.” Two of the sketches, “Maggie Gibson” and “Legend of the Aul’ Kirk Stane,” and two essays, “Mother and Daughter” and “Local Changes,” were omitted from the posthumous Poems, Essays and Sketches.
- 16.
Benjamin Parsons, the subeditor for The Literature of Working Men, London: Cassell, 1850, vol. 1, was the author of The Mental and Moral Education of Women, London, 1842, a pioneering feminist appeal for the equal education of women at all levels.
- 17.
Reviews of her 1863 volume in the Hamilton Advertiser and Airdre and Coatbridge Advertiser spoke of her as familiar to their readers (“With the readers of the [Airdre and Coatbridge] Advertiser she has become an established favourite,” Poems, 304), thus perhaps indicating a publication venue for her poems and local sketches in the twelve years between publication of The Literature of Working Men and her first volume.
- 18.
These were:
Poems and Essays of a Miscellaneous Character on Subjects of General Interest (1863);
Poems of Purpose and Sketches in Prose of Scottish Peasant Life and Character in Auld Langsyne, Sketches of Local Scenes and Characters, with Glossary (1865) (PP);
Poems and Ballads (1868);
Poems, Essays and Sketches. A Selection from the First Two Volumes, “Poems and Essays,” and Poems and Sketches,” with Several New Pieces (1870); and
Poems, Essays and Sketches: Comprising the Principal Pieces from Her Complete Works, edited by her son James Hamilton in 1880 (PES); reprinted in 1885 as Poems, Sketches and Essays.
- 19.
Nine prose works were reprinted in the 1870 volume and seventeen in PES. The 1863 volume contained ninety-six poems, the 1865 brought forth seventy-one, the 1868 added eighty-three new ones, and the 1870 volume added thirteen more. Only one poem in the 1880 Poems, Essays and Sketches, “Verses on the Recovery of A. M. G. from a Severe Illness,” had not appeared in these early volumes. Fifty-six of the poems published in the volumes issued in her lifetime were omitted from PES; many of these were occasional poems written to individuals, temperance poems, or poems on contemporary events such as the German conquest of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864 and the American Civil War.
- 20.
Ebenezer Elliot (1781–1849), the “Corn Law Rhymer,” whose volumes were widely publicized in the working-class press, was the author of Corn Law Rhymes (1831) and The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Elliot: The Corn-Law Rhymer (1840).
- 21.
From Robert Burns, “Man Was Made to Mourn,” stanza 8, in Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Kilmarnock: Wilson, 1786.
- 22.
Cf. “Phases of Girlhood,” in which the speaker regrets that her daughter, “a workman’s child,” must leave school after four years of attendance to help her mother (PES, 149–51).
- 23.
For the temperance movement, see Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: England 1815-1872, London: Faber and Faber, 1971; and Elspeth King, Scotland Sober and Free: The Temperance Movement 1829–1979, Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries, 1979.
- 24.
For William Logan (1813–1879), see Memoirs and Portraits of One Hundred Glasgow Men Who Have Died During the Past Thirty Years, Glasgow: Maclehose, 1886, 177–78. Hamilton composed a poem “To William Logan, on the Death of His Mother” and a poem to Logan’s son, “Verses Inscribed to W. Logan, Junior, Aged 10 Years,” as well as a poem to Col. D. C. R. Carrick-Buchanan of Drumpellier, on his presenting a park for recreation to the working men of Coatbridge (now Drumpellier Country Park).
- 25.
For a list of titles and dates, see Boos, “The Homely Muse,” 282. Four of the five were later reprinted in her volumes of poetry. The 1870 version of “The Mourning Mother” is heavily revised and recast from its earlier form.
- 26.
The 1841 census listed John and Janet Hamilton’s oldest son as Archibald Hamilton , age thirty, a shoemaker then living at home, so at this time he would have been forty-two. Archibald never married and died in his early fifties, buried near the other Hamiltons in Old Monkland Churchyard. As mentioned above, in two of her temperance poems Hamilton speaks of a demonic force attacking “my sons.” The Hamilton sons were Archibald, John, Charles, William, and James; James lived with his parents and served as his mother’s amanuensis and editor; and an inscription by William in a volume of Hamilton’s Poems, Essays and Sketches would seem to attest to sober habits: “Presented to Mr. John Black On the occasion of his leaving Scotland for the Mission Field in South Africa. By his Uncle William Hamilton. With his most fervent prayers for his spiritual welfare and ministerial success. Orbiston, Bellshill, August 28th 1894.”
- 27.
Compare “Neebour Johnnie’s Complaint,” a poem in Lallands dialect in which a neighbor speaks of the distress caused by his son’s alcoholism; John was of course the name of Janet’s husband. In the “Complaint,” Johnnie mourns most for the psychological effects of his son’s addiction : “But that’s no the warst o’t: he ance had a min’ / That was mensefu’ an’ truthfu’, an’ honest an’ kin’, / But it’s drink, oh, it’s drink—a’ gudeness is gane, / An’ his heart is as caul’ an’ hard as a stane” (Poems of Purpose, 1865, 68; PES, 350).
- 28.
King, 10–12. The Scottish Temperance League, founded in 1844, advocated moral suasion, but in 1858 (in response to news of the American “Maine Laws” of 1852), the Scottish Alliance was formed to advocate for prohibition.
- 29.
King, 10.
- 30.
Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1987, 188.
- 31.
The first, “Sketches of a Scottish Roadside Village Sixty Years Since,” had, as mentioned, appeared in The Literature of Working Men (1851) ; and nine more (excluding “Legend of the Aul’ Kirk Stane,” which is more historical note than “sketch”) followed in Poems of Purpose and Sketches of Scottish Peasant Life and Character in Auld Langsyne (1865); three of these were reprinted in Poems (1870); and all but “Maggie Gibson” were included in the posthumous Poems, Essays and Sketches (1880). I am categorizing “Local Changes” as an essay rather than a sketch.
- 32.
Henry, Earl of Moreland, or the Fool of Quality (1765–1770), by the Irish writer Henry Brooke, was a digressive, picaresque, sentimental novel about a hero educated in accord with Rousseau’s principles.
- 33.
The Seceders refused to accept the 1712 Patronage Act, which permitted local landowners to choose the ministers for local congregations, as was the practice in England. The incident described in Hamilton’s essay occurred in the period of the first Secession of 1733–1740, led by Ebenezer Erskine. Patronage was finally abolished in 1874 and the several factions were mostly reunited over time.
- 34.
Despite her condemnation of slavery, Hamilton opposed the American Civil War , and at least nine of her poems from the 1863 and 1865 volumes (omitted from PES) concern this theme. Typical are her views in “America in 1863: ‘Her Voice is Still for War,’” in which she questions the alleged motives of the Union cause: “Fool who knows not this your aim, / The Union whole—unrivalled claim / To empire and the subject world / Bowing before your flag unfurled.” One of her last poems, “The Horrors of War,” (published in her 1870 volume but never reprinted), conveys her fear of a pan-European war.
Hamilton’s quasi-pacifism is an aspect of her work which has not been noted. And however distasteful any interpretation of the Civil War as a war of northern aggression may seem to many readers, her views are a reminder that in 1863 the responses of even well-intended observers could be ambivalent. Until the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, the Civil War could be viewed as fought for the cause of national unity rather than the abolition of slavery; slavery was not finally abolished throughout the United States until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment on December 6, 1865.
- 35.
MacNeill, Scottish poet (1746–1818) whose 1795 Scotland’s Skaith, or the History of Will and Jean, speedily gained him a wide reputation, with fourteen editions in its first year. A 1796 sequel, “The Waes of War,” was also popular.
- 36.
Coatbridge had become a center of the nascent steel industry, and until brought under the constraints of the Public Health Act of 1885 had become one of the most polluted areas in industrial Britain. The quotation is from Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 4.
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Boos, F.S. (2017). Memoir and People’s History in Janet Hamilton’s Sketches of Village Life . In: Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64215-4_4
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