Abstract
This chapter examines a rare memoir by a Victorian woman factory worker, the preface to Johnston’s Autobiography, Poems and Songs. A resident of Glasgow and Dundee whose verses attracted the aid of Alexander Campbell, editor of the Glasgow Sentinel, Johnston used her memoir and autobiographical poems to narrate her years of childhood abuse, unwed motherhood, factory labor, and stubborn pride in authorship. “Factory girls” had lower standing in the Victorian class hierarchy than servants, and Johnston’s pointed use of the epithet and self-designation of the “Queen of the Penny Post” reflected pride not only in her verse, but also in her ability to reach a working-class audience against enormous odds.
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Notes
- 1.
See the “Memoir of Robert Blincoe, an Orphan Boy” by John Brown, William Dodd’s “A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd, A Factory Cripple. Written by Himself,” and the semi-fictional “Chapters in the Life of a Dundee Factory Boy,” by James Myles, in Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiographies, ed. James R. Simmons, Jr., Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2007. These male factory workers offer a more detailed account of their work lives and factory conditions, whereas Johnston recalls her earlier emotional and domestic wrongs.
- 2.
Ruth Wills (1826–1908) of Leicester, employed in a hose factory, also published two editions of her poems in 1861 and 1868, and she seems a similar exception among English working-class women poets. In her case, she was aided by patronage from the editor of the Leicestershire Mercury, an enlightened factory proprietor, and the support of her fellow church members. See Boos, Working-Class Women Poets of Victorian Britain, 219–37.
- 3.
Similar groups of readers formed in the Northern Star and Ben Brierley’s Journal, though the contributions to the Penny Post are distinguished by the personal nature of the responses to Johnston’s poetry; Johnston also seems the only woman to receive such sustained attention from members of her class.
- 4.
H. Gustav Klaus, “New Light on Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl,’” Notes and Queries, December 2008, 430–31. Elizabeth Dobbs (Chap. 9) claimed to have spent a brief period in the workhouse, though this has not been documented.
- 5.
Ibid., 431.
- 6.
Johnston, Ellen. Autobiography, Poems and Songs. Glasgow: W. Love, 1867; 2nd ed. Glasgow: W. Love, 1869. The second edition preface was seventeen pages.
- 7.
Florence Boos, “Class and the ‘Spasmodics’: W. E. Aytoun, George Gilfillan and Alexander Smith,” special issue on Spasmodic Poetry and Poetics, eds. Jason Rudy and Charles La Porte, Victorian Poetry 42.4 (2005): 553–83. As noted in Chaps. 3 and 5, Gilfillan also contributed prefaces to the volumes of Campbell and Hamilton; of the more than a dozen women memoirists discussed here, he had written on behalf of three—nearly half of the Scottish writers represented. Clearly he preferred the poetry of Campbell and Hamilton to that of Johnston, for he also expressed the tempered hope that publication would help the latter “cultivate her mind, [and] read to correct the faults in her style—arising from her limited opportunities,” suggestions he had not felt necessary for the others. As noted later in the chapter, Gustav Klaus has determined that Johnston’s daughter lived quite near the School Wynd Presbyterian church of which Gilfillan was pastor, and that he had served as a witness at her wedding, so his patronage may have reflected (or resulted in) some personal tie.
- 8.
Judith Rosen, “Class and Poetic Communities: The Works of Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl’”, Victorian Poetry, 39.2 (2001), 211.
- 9.
Page references are to the first edition, unless otherwise noted.
Discussions of Johnston appear in Susan Zlotnik, “’A Thousand Times I’d Rather Be a Factory Girl’: Dialect, Domesticity, and Working-Class Women’s Poetry in Victorian Britain,” Victorian Studies (1991), and Women, Writing and the Industrial Revolution, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1997; Florence Boos, “Cauld Engle-Cheek: Working Class Women Poets in Victorian Scotland, Victorian Poetry 33 (1995): 53–74, “Ellen Johnston,” Nineteenth Century Women Writers, ed. Abigail Bloom, Greenwood Press, 2000, 231–34, and “Queen of the Far-Famed Penny Post: Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl,’ and Her Audience, Women’s Writing, ed. Dorothy McMillan, 10:3 (2003): 503–26; Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds, Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995; Susan Alves, “A Thousand Times I’d Rather Be a Factory Girl: The Politics of Reading American and British Female Factory Workers’ Poetry, 1840–1914,” Diss., Northeastern University, 1996; H. Gustav Klaus, Ellen Johnston and Working-Class Poetry in Victorian Scotland, Frankfurt am Main Peter Lang, 1997; Valentina Bold, “Beyond ‘The Empire of the Gentle Heart’: Scottish Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century,” A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, ed. Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997; Judith Rosen, “The Working-Class Poetry of Ellen Johnston,” Victorian Poetry 39.2 (2001); and Monica Hart, “The Factory Exile: Ellen Johnston’s Autobiography, Poems and Songs,” Victorian Poetry 53.1 (2015), 77–99. See also Christopher A. Whatley, “Ellen Johnston,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com.
- 10.
Klaus, “New Light on Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl,’” 432. In Ellen Johnston and Working-Class Poetry in Victorian Scotland, Klaus notes that her grandparents, James Bilsland and his wife, with whom according to her autobiography she was living at the time, appear in the 1841 census in a block called Somers Land in Muslin Street, Bridgeton, but there is no mention of Ellen’s presence in their home (79).
- 11.
Klaus, “New Light,” 433. Klaus observes that this date would be consistent with the death records listing the death of a “Helen Johnstone” in the Barony Poorhouse Hospital in 1874.
- 12.
Klaus has also found tentative confirmation of the wedding of Johnston’s parents in marriage records for James Johnston and Mary Bil(s)land, of Tradeston and Gorbals, on October 25, 1825 (“New Light,” 432).
As Klaus points out, the claim that her mother remarried when she was eight would be inconsistent with a birthdate of 183–.
- 13.
In the “Autobiography” Johnston calls her daughter “My bonnie Mary Achinvole,” but a note to “A Mother’s Love” (44) explains that the child the poem’s speaker calls “My Mary Achin” is “Miss Mary Achenvole,” born September 14, 1852.
- 14.
Napier (1791–1876) was a distinguished engineer, shipbuilder, and art collector; his pioneering ship engines helped develop the Clydeside shipbuilding industry.
- 15.
The exact dates of Campbell’s official editorship of the Sentinel and the various roles he performed at any given time seem ambiguous; W. H. Marwick, The Life of Alexander Campbell, Glasgow and District Cooperative Association, 1964, describes him as the proprietor of the Weekly Chronicle, absorbed in June 1858 by the Glasgow Sentinel, edited by Robert Buchanan, of which Campbell served for a time as “chief proprietor,” “industrial reporter,” and editor “for some years from about 1863,” as well as “printer and publisher” of the associated Penny Post (15).
During Campbell’s editorship of the Penny Post, the “Notices to Correspondents” column usually appeared at the top left of the second page, and set a friendly and unpretentious tone for the paper. In it Campbell blended praise, personal news of contributors, and appreciative comments on the poems submitted, including the accepted poem which headed each issue, and the sense of fellowship of the correspondents’ column made it by far the most interesting part of many issues. Before and after Campbell’s editorship, by contrast, the paper’s “Notices to Correspondents” and “Answers to Correspondents” columns are perfunctory and colorless, lacking the impress of his genial personality and zest for regional topics and working-class compositions. For Campbell’s life as co-operator, editor, and advocate for Scottish workers, see W. H. Marwick, The Life of Alexander Campbell and W. Hamish Fraser, Alexander Campbell and the Search for Socialism, Manchester: Holyoake Books, 1996.
- 16.
Marwick, Life, 7, 10.
- 17.
Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 88. Fraser describes the Sentinel as “the main working-class organ in Scotland” in the mid-1860s (152). Fraser’s excellent biography of this energetic campaigner does not mention his support of working-class poets, only one among his many disinterested efforts in support of working-class culture and autonomy.
- 18.
Marwick, Life, 19.
- 19.
A more detailed account of Johnston’s publication history appears in Florence Boos, “The ‘Queen’ of the ‘Far-Famed Penny Post’: Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl,’ and Her Audience,” 503–26.
- 20.
Ellen Johnston and Working Class Poetry in Victorian Scotland, 1997.
- 21.
Bold, “Beyond ‘The Empire of the Gentle Heart,”’ 258.
- 22.
“Your Wee Neighbor Nell,” “The Shaemaker’s Wife,” “Wee Poet Nell,” “A Satire on a Pretended Friend,” “The Peacock”.
- 23.
R. H. P. (the penname of a John Pettigrew ) later proved a longtime friend—contributing two laudatory poems to her volume and ordering copies for himself and other subscribers—as did two other poets, David Morrison of Caldervale and Daniel Syme of Lanark.
- 24.
Rosen, “Class and Poetic Communities,” 223.
- 25.
Helen Fleetwood, in The Works of Charlotte Elizabeth, Vol. 2, New York: M. W. Dodd, 1845, 43–184. The “rank oil” is described on p. 156. See also the description in William Dodd’s “A Narrative of the Experiences and Sufferings of William Dodd,” in Factory Lives, ed. James R. Simmons, Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2007.
- 26.
Rosen,“Class and Poetic Communities,” 223.
- 27.
In “On Receiving the Cartes of Mr. Russell and the Factory Poet,” the speaker imagines that had she been a “youth,” she might have courted the Factory Girl: “Ah sister! Had I been a youth, this tale would have been mine; / I’d whispered in thine ear such vows while beat my heart by thine / … Still take my heart that was another’s—through life I’ll thee enfold”.
- 28.
Mr. Love, 40 St. Enoch’s Square, Glasgow. Love was Campbell’s son-in-law and part owner of the Sentinel, which at the time was edited by Campbell. In Ellen Johnston, Klaus notes that William Love had collaborated with Campbell on a weekly paper The Spirit of the Age (1848), and that his printing establishment was a radical meeting place (69). See H. Hamish Fraser, Alexander Campbell and the Search for Socialism.
- 29.
Klaus, Ellen Johnston, 72. Glasgow Sentinel, November 11, 1867; Glasgow Herald, December 11, 1867; Dumfries and Galloway Standard, January 1868. Klaus notes that the radical Glasgow Sentinel praised her poems as containing “rich poetic imagery, as well as smoothness of diction,” but the Dumfries and Galloway Standard applauded counterfactually her “poetry of a meekly sinning and suffering spirit.” Perhaps the reviewer had not bothered to read Johnston’s volume.
- 30.
Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 27, 52–55. He was imprisoned as a signatory for the debts of the Orbiston community, which was disbanded in 1827; by 1829 he had returned to campaigning in Glasgow. Tried in 1834 for having issued The Tradesman , he served as his own defense in court, arguing that it was his duty to inform the working classes of Scotland of their “just rights”; he was found guilty and spent seven weeks in jail.
- 31.
Klaus suggests that Campbell may also have helped with the application to Disraeli. He reproduces the application letter (Ellen Johnston, 91–93) and argues that “This highly stylised petition is unlikely to have been composed by Ellen. Indeed, she may even have required a finishing writer for the purpose; for why should she have misspelt her own name at the letter-head, whereas the signature is correctly put?” (74).
- 32.
Campbell died in February 1870. The new editor of the Penny Post was James Watt . The “Notices to Correspondents” became “Answers to Correspondents,” the new editor showed no particular interest in poetry, and the genial friendliness of Campbell’s columns was much diminished.
- 33.
I am indebted to Catherine Kerrigan for the suggestion that she most likely died in the hospital rather than the Poorhouse itself. In Ellen Johnston, Gustav Klaus reports that no person of her name is recorded as dying in the Barnhill Poorhouse, Springburn, used by the Barony Parish, Glasgow in 1873, but that a Helen Johnstone, a single pauper, age forty-six, was reported as dying of anascarca on April 20, 1874 (77). Anascarca is usually caused by liver or renal failure or severe malnutrition/protein deficiency.
- 34.
Klaus, “New Light,” 430. He notes that on the application for poor relief the section for “names of children not dependent, earnings etc.” was crossed out; on the other hand this might have been a customary mercy so that elderly parents would not be forced to rely entirely on their children.
- 35.
Alves, “A Thousand Times,” 42.
- 36.
Rosen, “Class and Poetic Community,” 216.
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Boos, F.S. (2017). Ellen Johnston: Autobiographical Writings of “The Factory Girl”. 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_7
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