Insight into lives of Scotland’s ‘forgotten’ poets

AN i nsight i nto the life of Victorian Scotland’s “forgotten” poets published in Dundee has been brought back for a modern audience.

The People’s Journal, printed by John Leng & Co and then DC Thomson in the city between 1858 and 1986, was billed in the 19th Century as “a penny Saturday paper devoted to the interests of the working classes”.

Each edition included poems by people from all walks of life across Tayside, who used the format to talk about strikes, trade unions and politics, among many other topics.

Strathclyde University academic Kirstie Blair has collected more than 100 of these poems from 1858 to 1883, in a volume entitled Poets of the People’s Journal: Newspaper Poetry in Victorian Scotland.

Publishers the Association for Scottish Literary Studies hope the book will give modern readers “vivid portraits of their writers’ lives”.

The collection also illustrates how the infamous poet William McGonagall, represented by An Address to Thee Tay Bridge from September 15 1877, was part of a wider culture of “bad” verse in papers.

Professor Blair said: “It was a popular practice for many people in the 19th Century to go home after work and write a poem.

“A lot of them had extremely hard lives but it was an aspirational and highly-regarded pursuit,” he said. “People in Scotland in this period were very proud of the idea Scotland had more ‘people’s poets’ than any other nation.”