James Dawson Burn, The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy

Abstract

James Dawson Burn’s (c. 1806–1889) beginnings were a mystery even to himself. He was born out of wedlock in Ulster to parents of Scottish ancestry, but exactly where or when he couldn’t be sure: ‘Where or how I came into the world I have no very definite idea.’ After his parents parted his mother migrated to Dumfries, where she married a Catholic Irishman named William McNamee, an alcoholic ex-soldier who took young James with him on his begging and peddling expeditions around Northumberland and the Scottish lowlands. His travels with his profligate step-father were the prelude to his own years of vagrancy as a beggar and casual labourer in northern England and southern Scotland in the period after 1816. Burn’s desire for self-betterment eventually led to his becoming apprenticed to a Hexham hatmaker in the 1820s, after which he settled to the trade in Glasgow in the early 1830s. There he become involved in trade union and radical politics, including Chartism, and played a leading role in the establishment of the Oddfellows movement, on which subject he published a book in 1845. After leaving Glasgow in 1850 Burn fell back into the grip of poverty and it was during this time that he wrote his picaresque autobiography, over the course of a year, while travelling from Aberdeen to London. Burn later spent three years plying his trade in New York in the early 1860s, after which he worked as an inspector for the Great Eastern Railway from 1871 until his retirement in 1881.

(London: William Tweedie, 1855). 200pp.; pp. 46–50.