No shelter then from the blast had we,
The bitter blast or sleet,
But your gown to wrap about our heads,
And my coat round our feet.
The main literary work of Sir Samuel Ferguson was devoted to this
revivification of the spirit of ancient Celtic poetry, in spite of a
highly successful début as an English poet in The Forging of the Anchor,
which at once took its place among those poems that are the familiar
treasures of the people, and in this he was doubtless governed by
something of patriotic spirit as well as by natural predilection. His
work is not great in quantity, and he treasured his inspiration and
perfected his workmanship with careful pains. Its result is to give a
reproduction of the pervading elements of Irish Celtic poetry in English
form with almost absolute perfection, and imbued with a spirit of
original genius. In his poems, rather than in Macpherson's Ossian or in
the literal translations, will the modern reader find the voice of the
ancient Celtic bards speaking to the intelligence of to-day in their own
tones without false change and dilution, or the confusion and dimness
of an ancient language. The value of this work has not yet been fully
appreciated by literary critics, but there is no doubt in my mind but
that it eventually will be,
WILLIAM THOM, THE WEAVER POET.
|One of the most extraordinary and painful lives in literary history was
that of William Thom of Inverury,
Scotland. There have been Scottish poets before and since Burns who have
been bred in poverty and distress, and in whose lives the flowers
of poetry have bloomed amid the most depressing and uncongenial
circumstances. There have been crofters, shepherds, farm laborers,
tailors, weavers, and shoemakers, servant lassies and old wives, who
have given expression to their feelings in verse and song, with more or
less skill and success, and testified to the strength of the national
genius which has made Scotland so peculiarly the land of song, and
filled the lower bed of bracken and furze in which the higher and rarer
flowers of Scottish minstrelsy have stood preeminent. And the history
of the minor Scottish poets is full of the homely pathos of unrequited
toil, of pinching poverty, and of hopeless struggles with life, redeemed
by honest virtue, patience, and thrift, or clouded with still deeper
misfortune, and absolutely and irredeemably wrecked by dissipation and
improvidence. But upon none, in whom the divine spark of genius existed,
did the burdens of life fall more heavily than upon William Thom, or the
tragedies of existence reach a blacker depth of misery. The story has
been told by himself in The Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom
Weaver, his only volume, in nervous and vigorous prose, bearing traits
of the declamatory style of Ebenezer Elliot and the radical writers of
his school, but marked by native originality and strength. It has more
than a personal value, as illustrating the condition of the life of
factory hands in Scotland, when machines had multiplied to the complete
degradation of labor, and when it was simply a question with the mill
owners of extracting the largest amount of work for the smallest
wages from the operatives, and before the government had interfered to
regulate the hours of labor within endurable limits, and secure some of
the conditions of health to the mill hands. A more appalling picture of
hopeless poverty and starvation, and physical and moral degradation, has
never been given in the annals of the civilized world, and of its truth
there is abundant evidence in the writings of contemporary workingmen in
England and Scotland, and in the testimony which led to the passage of
the Factory Regulation acts by the English Parliament.
William Thom was born in 1798 of parents steeped in poverty, in a
tenement in one of the narrow closes of Aberdeen, and at the age of
ten began his apprenticeship to life in a cotton factory. At the age
of fifteen or sixteen he entered the "School Hill Factory,"--a building
since swept away,--as a weaver hand, and remained there for seventeen
years. The wages of the best operatives averaged through good and bad
times from six to nine shillings weekly, and of the second-class from
three to five shillings. The daily hours of labor were fourteen. What
that meant, not in poverty, but in absolute want of food, warmth, and
the means for the sustenance of life, the degradation of rags, the
shutting out of all glimpses of heaven and earth, leaving the only
alleviation to the hours of toil at the rattling machines, and the
squalid suffering in the reeking tenements, in the cheap and fiery
stimulants of the taprooms, can be only faintly imagined. An inheritance
of bad habits had also descended to the weaving class. When the
factories were first established in 1770, after the invention of the
spinning jenny, the wages of skillful workmen were forty shillings a
week, and the operatives usually remained drunk from Saturday night
until Wednesday morning, wore frilled shirts and powdered hair, sported
canes, and quoted Volney in their discussions on the rights of man in
the taprooms. The overplus of labor gradually reduced the wages to
the starvation point, while the habits of dissipation and recklessness
remained as characteristic of the craft. Thom gives a most affecting
picture of the lives and thoughts of these men, many of them, strong
with native intellect and passion, condemned to a life of unending
servitude and degradation, too ragged to dare to enter a church, even if
they wished, and getting their only glimpse of nature in the garden
of Gordon's Hospital, which was open on the Sunday holiday, while the
whiskey shop gave them their only taste of joy and exhilaration; and yet
who had a native feeling for poetry, repeating the verses of Burns and
particularly of Tannahill, their brother weaver, as they tended their
looms, and applauding the poets and singers in their own ranks, whose
rude verses expressed their feelings or appealed to their sympathies
in the gatherings in the taprooms. The moral influences of such a life,
where three or four hundred men and women were herded together in common
workrooms was also very bad, and many a young girl dated her ruin in
life, bringing additional desolateness to the miserable home, from the
promiscuous association, and being barred out into the streets with a
heavy fine for failing to be at the factory door at its opening in
the early morning. How virtue, morality, or any of the decency and
self-respect of humanity could exist at all in such a life may be
considered a marvel, and it is a proof of the inherent strength of the
Scottish character and its inherited virtues that these factories were
not greater plague spots than they actually were, and that honest lives
and Tinman affections flourished at all. In a poem, entitled Whisperings
to the Unwashed, in the fiercely declamatory style of the Corn Law
Rhymer, Thom draws a grim picture of the awakening of the weavers at the
call of the town drum, used for that purpose in the smaller burghs, at
six o'clock in the bleak and dark Northern mornings.
Rubadub, rnbadub, row-dow-dow!
Hark how he waukens the Weavers now;
Who lie belaired in a dreamy steep--
A mental swither, 'tween death and sleep,
Wi' hungry wame and hopeless heart,
Their food no feeding, their sleep no rest;
Arouse ye, ye sunken, unravel your rags,
No coin in your coffers, no meal in your bags.
Yet cart, barge, and wagon, with load after load,
Creak, mockfully passing your breadless abode.
The stately stalk of Ceres bears,
But not for you the bursting ears.
In vain to you the lark's lov'd note,
For you no summer breezes float,
Grim winter through your hovel pours--
Dull, dim, and breathless vapour yours.
The nobler Spider weaves alone,
And feels the little web his own,
His home, his fortress, foul or fair,
No factory whipper swaggers there.
Should ruffian wasp or taunting fly
Touch his lov'd lair, 't is touch and die!
Supreme in rags, ye weave, in tears,
The shining robe your murderer wears,
Till worn at last to the very "waste,"
A hole to die in at the best;
And, dead, the session saints begrudge ye
The two-three deals in death to lodge ye,
And grudge the grave, wherein to drop ye.
And grudge the very muck to hap ye.
All this bitterness had reason and fact to excuse it, and it is a wonder
that such feelings, fermenting in strong minds, did not lead to more
serious consequences than taproom talk and the formation of Chartist
clubs.
In such surroundings, what was the character and career of Thom himself?
An active mind led him to the perusal of such books as came in his way,
and a poetical temperament made him deeply sensitive to the suffering
and degradation of his condition, while it gave him a stimulus toward
the fleeting pleasures of dissipation and the glow of sociability and
popularity among his fellows. He was without the determined energy to
rise above his condition, which might have succeeded had an exceptional
strength been allied with his mental gifts, in spite of the forlorn
circumstances; and he appears to have been, if not content, at least to
have submitted to be only the popular genius among the workmen of his
factory, and the leader in the taproom gatherings with his social and
musical gifts. He wrote songs in imitation of those which he heard,
one of which, to his great delight, appeared in the poet's corner of
an Aberdeen newspaper. The story which he tells is that on the morning
after the poem had been dropped into the mail box, he and a companion
waited around the door of the publication office, endeavoring in vain to
induce some charitable purchaser to let them have a peep at the contents
of the paper, only succeeding at last by crowding the holder of a copy
into an entry way and examining the columns by force, being absolutely
without the penny with which to buy one. But this success did not
stimulate him with any hope of advantage by literature, and he regarded
his gift of song writing, like his skill with the flute, as simply the
means for his own enjoyment and the amusement of his associates, his
ambition shut in within his own little world of squalor and destitution.
In appearance he was below the middle stature, and with a club foot,
so that physical deformity weighed upon him, as well as the miserable
conditions of his life, and made him more sensitive as well as hopeless.
For seventeen years he bent over the looms in the School Hill factory,
and then removed to the small hamlet of Newtyle, near Dundee, where a
cotton factory had been recently established. He now had a family of a
wife and four children. In the commercial crash of 1836, after he had
been there but a short time, the factory was suspended, only sufficient
work being found for the operatives with families to allow them five
shillings a week. Five shillings a week for six persons meant starvation
and creeping death, "an empty armry and a cold hearthstone." Thom and
his family waited week after week, "hoping that times would mend,"
and with no prospect before them, if they abandoned their miserable
pittance, but roadside beggary. He gives the picture of the scene that
drove them to the latter alternative.
"Imagine a cold spring forenoon. It is eleven o'clock, but our little
dwelling shows none of the signs of that time of day. The four children
were still asleep. There is a bed cover hung before the window to keep
all within as much like night as possible; and the mother sits beside
the beds of her children to lull them back to sleep whenever any one
shows an inclination to awake. For this there is a cause, for our weekly
five shillings have not come as expected, and the only food in the house
consists of a handful of oatmeal saved from the supper of last night.
Our fuel is also exhausted.
"My wife and I were conversing in sunken whispers about making an attempt
to cook the handful of meal, when the youngest child awoke beyond its
mother's power to hush it again to sleep, and then fell a-whimpering,
and finally broke out in a steady scream, rendering it impossible any
longer to keep the rest in a state of unconsciousness. Face after face
sprang up, each with one consent exclaiming, 'Oh, mither, mither, gie me
a piece.'"
The family took to the road, leaving the key of the miserable tenement
with the landlord, in the hope of being eventually able to return to a
home like that. By the sale to a pawnbroker in Dundee of "some relics of
better days,"--one can hardly imagine what relics or what days,--a
small pack of cheap hawker's goods was procured for the wife, and four
shillings' worth of books for the husband, to try to sell, but they can
only have been the flimsiest disguise for the necessity of depending
upon charity. The tramp began, the mother carrying the youngest child on
her breast, and often bearing the next youngest also, who was unable to
follow the weary road the whole distance. Sunset was followed by cold,
sour east winds and rains. At nine o'clock they arrived at a comfortable
farmhouse, where they were refused shelter, in the absence of the
proprietor. All beseeching of the housekeeper was in vain, and the
husband returned to the family, who had crept closer together, and were
all asleep except the mother.
"Oh, Willie, Willie, what keepit ye. I'm dootfu'o' Jeanie; is na she
waesome like? Let's in frae the cauld."
"We 've nae wae to gang, lass, whate'er come o' us. Yon folk winnae hae
us."
After cowering under a wet mantle in despair for a time, another effort
was made. The husband wrote a note by the fast fading light, asking for
shelter, and endeavored to have it taken in at a gentleman's mansion
near by. It was refused, but a farm laborer was touched by the spectacle
of the forlorn family, crouching shelterless in the cold and rain, and
took them to a neighboring farmhouse, where they were warmed and fed in
the servants' quarters, and put to rest in beds of straw and bagging in
an outhouse. Between three and four o'clock the father was wakened by
the deadly scream of the mother, who had wakened to find her infant dead
by her side, its little life having been worn out by the cold, hunger,
and fatigue of the previous day. Amid the wailing of the children, and
in the benumbing anguish of the blow, the most vivid remembrance of that
moment to the father was the watching of the wheeling and fluttering of
a colony of swallows, their fellow-lodgers, who had been awakened by the
outcries.
From perfect grief there need not be
Wisdom or even memory;
One thing alone remains to me,
The woodspurge has a cup of three.
Kind hands assisted in burying the child in the country graveyard, and
the tramp was renewed. The poor goods and books would not sell, and no
work was to be found, if, indeed, it was more than hopelessly looked
for. The people, mostly the poor, "gave bits of bread for the poor
bairnies," and shelter was found after nightfall in the outhouses of
farms, experience having taught them that it was useless to apply for
lodgings during daylight. They met and shared the fortunes of many
"gangrel-bodies," some poor and respectable like themselves, and others
professional mendicants and wandering ne'er-do-wells to whom beggary
was the accustomed mode of livelihood, and many tragedies of life in its
last extremity like their own passed under their eyes. One evening, in
a gathering of people in the street of the village of Errol, he heard
a man of grave countenance and respectable appearance singing, and
with that note of despair in his voice which touched his heart with the
sympathy like that which made Goldsmith rush from the lighted room to
relieve the poor beggarwoman singing under the window. That night in
their lodging there was a young woman rocking a corpse-like infant,
whose wailing would not be stilled. Then the man who had been singing
entered, and bent over the dying child:--
"I have wearied sadly for your coming, James," said the woman.
"It 's so dark out by the nicht," replied the man, "I only found out
this door by our wean greetin'."
The child died during the night.
At length in the town of Methven, without even the necessary sixpence,
preliminary to untieing the shoes in a tramp lodging house, an idea
struck Thom that he might make use of his flute to avoid absolute
mendicancy. Telling his wife to take the flute from their budget, and to
accompany him, he went out into the streets. The story can be told only
in his own words.
"We found ourselves in a beautiful green lane, fairly out of town, and
opposite a genteel-looking house, at the windows of which sat several
well-dressed people. I think that it might be our bewilderment that
attracted their notice--perhaps not favorably.
"'A quarter of an hour longer,' said I, 4 and it will be darker. Let us
walk out a bit.'
"The sun had been down a good while and the
gloamin' was lovely. In spite of everything I felt a momentary reprieve.
I dipped my dry flute in a little brook and began to play. It rang
sweetly amongst the trees. I moved on and on, still playing, and still
facing the town. The Flowers of the Forest brought me before the house,
lately mentioned. My music raised one window after another, and in less
than ten minutes put me in possession of three shillings ninepence
of good British money. I sent the mother home with this treasure, and
directed her to send the little girl to me. It was by this time nearly
dark. Every one says, 'Things just need a beginning.' I have had a
beginning and a very good one, too. I had also a turn for strathspeys,
and there appeared to be a run on them. By this time I was nearing
the middle of the town. When I finally made my way, and retired to my
lodging, it was with five shillings and some pence in addition to what
was given us. My little girl got a beautiful shawl and some articles of
wearing apparel."
He followed up his playing by writing an ode to his flute, which he got
printed on slips, and sent in to the houses before which he appeared,
with satisfactory results in donations, in one instance receiving
the magnificent reward of half a guinea. But, as he says, it was but
"beggar's wark," and he was glad to return to his weaving when times got
a little better.
After a year at the loom in Aberdeen, he had an opportunity to work as a
journeyman for a weaver, who took in custom work, in the little town
of Inverury in the district bordering on Mar. Here, after nine months'
residence, his wife, his "faithful Jeanie," died in child-bed, leaving
him with three children, the daughter a herd lassie at a lonely farm
at some distance. In January, 1841, being then more than forty years of
age, and never before having attempted to find a market for his verse,
the notion occurred to him, in despair at the dullness of work, to send
a poem, entitled The Blind Boy's Pranks, to the Aberdeen Journal. It was
prefaced by a note, signed "A Serf," and declaring that the writer was
compelled to weave fourteen hours out of the four and twenty. After some
time, and while he was engaged in packing the few clothes of himself and
children in order to seek shelter at the Aberdeen House of Refuge,
he received a letter, with encouraging words, from the editor, and
inclosing half a guinea. The poem was widely copied into the Scottish
newspapers, and attracted very favorable attention. Among its admirers
was a Mr. Gordon of Knockespock, an Aberdeenshire laird, who made
inquiries about the author and interested himself in his welfare. It is
difficult to understand the sudden and extraordinary popularity of this
poem, which is by no means of commanding merit, but the story of
Thom's life became known and he was treated as a literary phenomenon. He
was taken on a holiday trip to London by Mr. Gordon, and introduced to
the leaders of the Scottish colony there, who made much of him, and on
his return he was given a public dinner in Aberdeen. Demands for his
verses came upon him from various periodicals, and he was enabled to
establish a custom weaving shop in Inverury for himself. The next
three years, while he was thus engaged, were the happiest and the only
comfortable ones of his life. He refused other offers of employment, and
asked no patronage except the purchase of his home-made clothes. He was
the head of a little circle of local bards, who looked up to him, and
sought his critical approval and patronage for their verses. His fame
was increasing and reached a national knowledge in the publication of
the volume of his poems, in 1844, by a leading London firm. In an evil
hour he was persuaded to give up his business of weaving and establish
himself in London as an agent for the sale of weaver's cloth. He was
without business knowledge or business habits, lived recklessly
and extravagantly, keeping an open house for Chartist agitators and
wandering Scottish poets. His inspiration failed him; he wrote little
or nothing, and lost his head completely in the whirl of excitement
and social dissipation. After three years of this, what he called his
"Hospital" was closed by a sheriff's sale of his furniture, and he
returned to Scotland by the aid of a subscription from his friends and
a grant from the Literary Fund. He settled at Hawkhill, near Dundee,
but his health was broken, and his habits of industry destroyed, and he
lived recklessly and wretchedly, until death relieved him soon after, in
February, 1848. With one fitful gleam of prosperity William Thom's life
of half a century had been passed in such want and abject misery as
falls to the lot of few mortals, and amid a squalor and degradation of
surroundings to which the country poverty of Burns and Hogg, in healthy
air and in touch with the sweetness and majesty of nature, was rich and
fortunate. One is as surprised and almost shocked to find the flowers
of genuine poetry blooming in such a life, as to see a pot of violets
growing amid the whirling dust and rattling noise of a weaving factory
or in the window of a dingy whiskey shop. That his life was not
worse than it was under the influences which affected it, is no less
wonderful. "To us," he says, "virtues were known only by their shadows,"
and that sentence tells all the hopeless misery of an existence in which
squalor and unremitting toil were relieved only by the fitful gleams
of stupefying indulgence, and in which an ever-pressing want meant the
deprivation not only of the comforts, but of the necessities of life.
That such a page of human history should be possible and common in the
record of a civilized society is more appalling than the devastation
of war, or the crimes of natural malignity, and we must wonder how any
spark of virtue or genius survived it.