Elizabeth Duncan Campbell (1804–78)

Elizabeth Campbell prepared a brief nine-page memoir, ‘The Life of My Childhood’, to affix to her 1875 Songs of My Pilgrimage, in which she recalls some of the pleasures, as well as the deprivations, of her early life. Gilfillan had remarked that ‘The whole volume seems an experiment [in] how much can be done by naked nature, and it appears to us completely successful’ (Boos, p. 143).² Accordingly, the contributions of Whytock are not mentioned; the memoir seems designed to emphasise Elizabeth’s childhood love of beauty, as well as her intense response to loss. By contrast, her adult life had been bleak: ‘full of toils and sorrows so many and so deep that I never could tell them’ (p. 140), and Songs returns often to the theme of a more innocent but vanished childhood.

Elizabeth describes her father, James Duncan, as a ploughman who (at some point) worked for the local proprietors of the Castle of Findlowry, near Brechin, whose environs she remembered with fondness: ‘That great kail-yard in a wilderness was the paradise of my childhood […]. I loved the bourtree’s white blossom, and the sweet briar roses, the bed of sweetwilliam, the southern wood, like a great bush of broom, the lint, with its sweet blue bells’ (p. 136). The family had included ten children; one brother had died young and Campbell had lost her mother at the age of three: ‘Her death was to me like a dream. The morning she died my elder sister milked the cow, and gave us our porridge with the new milk by the side of the turf stack, and I have never thought any feast half so grand since’ (p. 136). She remembered her dog Cherry fondly, and by implication a severe childhood: ‘ “Cherry” was a cunning dog, and saved us children from many a beating. If my father laid a hand on us he was on him in a twinkling’ (p. 137). Her first job as a servant at age seven had been harsh, even abusive: her employer ‘beat me and pushed me out of doors into the dark, and called on the ghost of Brandy Dan to take me. I was as unhappy as a banished convict in that ugly cot on the whinny moor’ (p. 138).

Many of Elizabeth’s memories suggest a poetic or musical sensibility; during her second job as a cowherd and shepherdess, ‘I was at the top of the hills before the sun rose in the month of June, with my dog, […] singing like a mavis’ (p. 140). Though deprived of any formal education, except in sewing, she had learned to read the few written materials available to her. Later employments as a cook in Edinburgh improved her status and the high point of her memories may have been her two-year sojourn in Brittany as a servant to the Grays of Carsegray: ‘I liked France, it was such a beautiful country with its vines growing in the fields by the river, where I used to watch the vessels and pleasure boats sailing like swans in the clear sunlight’ (p. 140).

Later, Elizabeth became a handloom weaver and, sometime after the age of twenty-six, she married William Campbell, a flaxdresser.³ The couple had eight children, though Campbell continued to work as long as possible, ‘I filled pirns to four weavers for two years, when my boys were wee toddlin’ things’ (p. 140). After the couple moved from Brechin to the larger town of Arbroath, William unfortunately suffered an accident ‘by which for a long time he was never able to work, and which at last brought on his death’ (p. 140). It seems notable that in her memoir and poems, Campbell mourns the deaths of her sons and the difficulties faced by her children, but no comments are made on William. The stress of caring for herself and her remaining children without a husband’s income may have prompted Campbell to gather some of her poems in the hope of earning money through their sale, though the poems themselves evince a deep urge to express her emotions amid a sense of personal isolation.

Campbell’s early Poems: the Crimean War

In 1862, Campbell printed a small booklet, Burns Centenary: An Ode and Other Poems, and this effort seem to have been well received because, later that year, she brought out the first of four slightly longer booklets, the 1862 Poems. The twenty-six pages of Poems 1 gather verses on her most powerful themes: the Crimean War, the deaths of family members, and the anxiety and grief of a mother unable to know, or influence, her children’s fates.

Of the thirteen poems in Poems 1, five express anguish over her son Willie’s absence in the Crimean War, anger at the conduct of the war itself, and concern for the many others for whom the war has brought suffering. In 1853–6, Campbell would have been in her late forties and early fifties, but since Poems 1 appeared six years later, it likely contained verses selected from among those preserved from earlier periods, including the mid-1850s. The reference to Lord Aberdeen in ‘The Attack on the Great Redan, and the Fall of the Malakhoff’, for example, dates this poem from before the British prime minister’s resignation in 1855 in the wake of the unsuccessful Battle of Balaclava (made infamous by Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’).

The Crimean War brought an outpouring of verse, augmented by the fact that no previous British war had benefitted from rapid telegraph dispatches or extensive newspaper coverage. Tai-Chun Ho observes that, of the dozens of war poets from Tennyson downwards (Sydney Dobell, Gerald Massey, Thomas Campbell, Tom Taylor, and many others), a vanishing few would have visited the Crimea.⁴ To frame Crimean War poems, therefore, Ho notes that many drew upon their formal education in such classics as the Iliad and Tyrtaeus’s war elegies, which celebrated individual heroism and bravery rather than focusing on the impersonal slaughter of battle (pp. 31–2). He also observes the relative critical neglect of female war poets (pp. 42–3), among them Louisa and Arabella Shore, Emma Tatham, Adelaide Ann Proctor, Dinah Maria Craik and Louisa Stuart Costello, an accomplished author whose allegorical and pacifist ‘The Lay of the Stork’ (1856), became a popular success (pp. 43–4). None of these humanitarian middle-class women were related to ordinary soldiers, however. It is a striking testimony to Britain’s class hierarchies that the more frequently remembered Crimean War poets, whether male or female, seem to have been personally unacquainted with the soldiers whose fate was the object of patriotic solicitousness. Besides some broad commonalities, Campbell’s war poems are thus quite distinctive, as witnesses to psychological trauma in their enactment of a mother’s distress, horror, and anger at the circumstances that threaten her son.

A striking series of poems in Poems 1 respond with fear and shock to the Crimean War: ‘The Attack on the Great Redan, and Fall of the Malakhoff’, ‘The Windmill of Sebastopol’, ‘The Mother’s Lament’, ‘The Absent Soldier’ and ‘Bill Arden’ were clearly inspired by her anxiety for her son Willie. These enact the frenzied immediacy of her response to accounts of the Battle of Sebastopol at a time when she cannot have known whether Willie had survived. In ‘The Attack on the Great Redan’, the poet conjures up a dream-like vision in which she imagines herself as onlooker and witness:

What a scene, what a scene! no mortal can dream, –

Forbid, O forbid such a one come again;

As when great shells and balls flew in clouds o’er the walls,

Tearing up churches and murdering men.

Guns roaring like thunder, the earth rocking under,

Echoes resounding o’er mountain and plain,

Smoke to the clouds bounding, the war trumpets sounding,

Mixing with moans and screams of the slain. (p. 3, stanzas 1–2)

Campbell focuses on individuals – some, such as Lord Aberdeen, have (in her view) been traitors – and warns the army’s ostensible leaders that they should not claim credit for England’s victories, for these have been won by common soldiers: ‘’Twas the stout limbs of England the Malakhoff gained’. Even the Queen is portrayed ambivalently for her role in promoting war: ‘Weep, Queen of England, weep for the great Redan, | There Britain’s brave men fought and fell bleeding, | Sold life for liberty – all at your bidding; | If war be a glory, on their’s [sic] is no stain’. Her particular concern, however, is for those like herself who wait at home: ‘Mothers of England, weep for the great Redan, | Weep for your murdered sons there that were slain; | […] They thought of sweet home amid trickling rain’; and for the slain, ‘Where faint they did lie, and dim grew their eye […] | Narrow and cold is the bed that confine[s] them’. When searching for a final consolation, the poet seems uncertain and minimalist, asking ‘Has Jesus been pleased to heal all their pain?’ (p. 4). If Campbell’s syntax occasionally falters, she captures the battle’s essential elements: mayhem, smoke, explosions and carnage; and evokes populist distrust of distant leaders whose decisions have led to widespread desolation.

Another 1862 poem, ‘The Windmill of Sebastopol’, similarly captures a series of desolate scenes based on contemporary accounts – wandering soldiers fearing a night-time attack, a sentinel surveying a lonely ruin, a father who lies wounded on the battlefield longing for his loved ones while his distraught wife fears for his death – all associated with the homely image of a deserted windmill:

And war has made the old mill dumb,

Stilled it’s [sic] clattering tongue,

Rusty’s its wheel and drum, this heavy time. […]

With its battered walls, and its flails torn,

Stood the old mill forlorn, beating the winter storm,

Where sweet peace once hailed the morn

That land within. (p. 19)

Again, Campbell’s disjointed imaginings, uneven lines, and insistent, echoing stresses reflect the combat zone’s bleakness. And in what (in this context) seems an unexpected extension of empathy, she notes the grief of the similarly displaced Russian soldiers (an estimated 450,000 Russians were killed in the Crimean War as opposed to 22,000 British) (Figes, p. xix):

Deep did the Russians mourn for their broad fields of yellow corn,

Home by the reapers borne, when peace was the theme;

Now deserted in cot and town,

Away are the inmates flown,

And a hundred thousand cut down

Of that unhappy band. (p. 19)

Repeatedly, Campbell faces her own helplessness in the face of outer events and the unresponsiveness of the universe, its immensity a source of fear rather than romantic exultation. ‘The Mother’s Lament’ poignantly conveys a parent’s inability to protect, or even to communicate with, her son:

I leaned against a wooden rail,

And sighed beside the sea,

And wondered, if ye were in life,

If ye remembered me.

Ah, there I stood and wept aloud,

And call’d aloud to thee,

As if through the horizon,

Or up out of the sea,

Ye like a vision in a dream,

Would come and speak to me.

[…]

I felt I was a thing of earth,

A filthy little worm,

Yet in my great undying soul

Such love and grief did burn. (pp. 20–21, stanzas 3 and 7)

The later series of Poems contain fewer Crimean War poems, though evocations of the carnage of battle surface unexpectedly. In Poems 2 (1863) the speaker of ‘The Comet’ is awed by the comet ‘Shin[ing] on bloody fields of war’ (p. 9). Likewise, the female speaker of ‘A Dream’ hears the roar of cannons, where ‘my two sons, my only sons, | Were fiercely fighting there’ (p. 6), though with the illogic of dreams, as she rushes to defend them she is distracted by the plight of an orphan child, whom she is likewise unable to save. Poems 3 (1865) includes ‘The White Russian Tower’ and ‘Malta’s Isle’, and Poems 4 (1867) two additional war-themed poems, ‘The Amber Cloud’, and ‘The Crimean War’. The tone of the lattermost resembles the frenzied pain of the earlier 1862 Crimean War poems, but is also striking for its consideration of wider issues of morality and causation:

I think it’s a pity that kings go to war,

And carry their murd’rous inventions so far;

Since Adam did blunder such blunders have been,

And I weep for those that’s the victims of kings.

I weep for the coward, I weep for the brave,

I weep for the monarch, I weep for the slave,

I weep for all those that in battle are slain;

I’ve a tear and a prayer for the souls of all men. (p. 24)

With its thirteen irregular stanzas, ‘The Crimean War’ is relatively lengthy, as Campbell returns repeatedly to the theme of the senseless slaughter of battle:

The King of kings, with power and will,

Said blood of men shall dye the rills,

And stain the plain and Crimea hills

’Neath glowing skies so starry.

The God of War, in Heaven’s car,

Cried, haste, I shall not tarry;

Go, kill! kill! kill! For slain shall fill

The trenches and the quarry. (p. 25)

Characteristically, she imagines the painful plight of the most abject – British deserters shot by their own army – from the perspective of grieving mothers:

’Twas well for those that found a grave

Aside those walls when fighting brave,

It many a mother’s tears did save

From seeing her son a British slave,

’Neath Britains’s boasted Freedom’s flag,

Deserters out their life must drag,

White fear their footsteps dogging. (pp. 26–7)

The very gaps, disjunctions, and incoherence of Campbell’s outbursts seem fitting as the expressions of a mind nearly unhinged by pain. At a political level, Campbell’s responses may seem somewhat inconsistent – she assumes British superiority and bravery, sympathises even with deserters and the Russian wounded, but as we have seen, condemns war itself as a product of monarchical ‘murd’rous inventions’ (p. 128). As a poor woman, the poet represents the condition of many, separated from their offspring across an unbridgeable distance of space and silence and deprived of their loved ones by a conflict fomented and prosecuted by others.

Campbell’s early Poems: transcendence and loss

Throughout her earliest poems, Campbell’s theme is loss in all its forms, with an emphasis on the desperation of those who must struggle to cope. Space precludes full discussion of some of her more specific preoccupations – motherhood as a source of anxiety and pain;⁵ the search for comfort in the numinous and sublime, in stars, rivers, oceans and nature in general; and her compassion for outcasts of all varieties. In ‘The Summer Night’, for example, she returns to her childhood home, now entirely deserted and decayed:

My eyes reached the spot, where once stood my father’s cot,

’Mid broom, ’side a purple heath;

With dim and misty eyes, like stars in disguise,

I trembled and pressed back my breath.

[…]

I stepped very slow, with a heart full of woe,

From wounds that death can but heal;

I wept like the cloud, and praised God aloud,

Who else would have cared for my tale?

I passed a brow that shut the scene from my view,

And the glory that over it shone;

Lit up every tree, and flower on the lea,

All so calm, all so still, but my moan. (Poems 1, p. 14)

Like many of Campbell’s other early poems, ‘The Summer Night’ reenacts unresolved trauma, with its intense intermixture of sublimity and grief, at once repetitive, alienating and consoling.

Several early poems centre on the plight of the truly marginalised. ‘Francis the Slave’, for example, offers an account of a fugitive slave most likely based on a reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856).⁶ Francis is a fitting subject for Campbell’s interest, as she imagines the victim’s fear and torment as he hides from his violent pursuers:

Francis fled to the swamp, where serpents did ramp,

’Mid slime, with vapouring smoke,

Where wolves did howl and wild dogs growl,

Round his bed on the shelf of a rock. (Poems 1, p. 24)

Campbell chastises the United States as a site of brutality, where (as Stowe’s novels emphasise) slaves were denied literacy and, often, attendance at religious services:

In the land where each tyrant a monarch may reign,

For spreading the Gospel the lash causes pain.

When the last link it broke in humanity’s chain,

Francis fled to the North with the underground train. (p. 25)

In 1862, of course, the outcome of the Civil War would have been uncertain and the poet rather trustingly sends her beleaguered protagonist to Britain, in whose ‘musical vales no slave ever trod’ (p. 26).

As we have seen, Campbell’s earliest poems are rough in metre and often ungrammatical, but they seethe with anger and confusion at a hostile world and consistently identify with the victims of social hierarchy – the itinerant, the marginalised, Crimean soldiers, and slaves. At times, these verses become performance pieces, as the poet enacts in her own fractured voice her sense of wrong and challenges the authorities responsible for society’s injustices. In these early verses in Poems 1 and 2, Campbell’s appeals to a God or afterlife, though sincere, are brief, for any divine order seems to operate in a realm above and apart from the poet’s personal pain.

By Poems 3 (1865), however, although the poet’s musings still turn on the arbitrariness and inevitability of death, these are intertwined with her visits to local sites of Scottish history (‘A Visit to Burns’ Monument’, ‘Ossian’s Grave’). Her interest in the outcast and marginalised continues (‘A Prison Cell’, ‘The Criminal’s Death Knell’) and something of the earlier style returns in the blunt, uneven rhetoric of the personified figure of Death, who in ‘The Bereaved Mother’ ominously threatens his victim: ‘O Loving mother hark, lo, I come an angel dark, | With a sword that’s ever sharp, | To shear branches from your tree […]’ (p. 35). Although the tonal and stylistic shifts in Campbell’s verses over time are not linear, the progression toward smoother diction and more mellifluous versification creates the effect of greater resignation and control. These gradual changes suggest the possibility of some prior editorial influence and anticipate the modifications in style and content apparent in her final, edited volume.

Songs of My Pilgrimage, 1875

As we have seen, Campbell’s small pamphlets might well have been forgotten, had her self-published verses not come to the notice of Peter Whytock, and through him George Gilfillan, pastor of the School Wynd Church in Glasgow. Gilfillan was noted for his literary labours and broad-minded contributions to the culture of his native region, and he had previously written introductions to the poetry of Scottish working-class writers Ellen Johnston and Janet Hamilton. Gilfillan’s praise of Campbell emphasises her memoir, ‘Anything more simply graphic and unostentatiously beautiful, we have seldom, if ever, read’ (Songs, p. iii), and in confirmation of her character he quotes ‘a gentleman’, perhaps Whytock, who testifies, ‘Her life is a wonderful life! […] And as an evidence of the high principles which actuate our best humbler classes, it is above price to show upon what solid foundations of hidden worth and pious resignation our noble old country rests’ (p. iv). Her poetry is viewed through a similar lens, as Gilfillan praises its share in ‘that simplicity and earnestness which distinguish her prose. […] Her devotion, like her poetry, is of the very simplest and sincerest character’ (pp. iv–v). Though the verses of Songs of My Pilgrimage bear out these descriptions to some degree, the tone adopted by her patrons also reflects a desire to discern natural piety among the poor and, perhaps especially, poor women. Such attitudes may well have influenced editorial selection, so that the more polished and hopeful poems of Songs testify to the effects of middle-class mediation of an unlettered poet’s original verses.

The 129 pages and 72 poems of Songs constitute a relatively extensive collection for a working-class poet, especially since, with some exceptions, poems from her earlier collections are not reprinted intact.⁷ Interestingly, however, at least eight earlier selections reappear in highly altered versions, providing a clear contrast of styles. Here are Campbell’s opening two, out of twenty-two, stanzas of ‘Ossian’s Grave’ as they had appeared in Poems 3:

I wandered among Scotland’s hills,

When summer suns did shine

Around the rocks and mountain rills,

At noon, where shepherds dine.

Their gun and flute aside them mute

Upon a mountain stone,

Where darts the swallow o’er the trout,

In mountain lakes so lone. (p. 18)

The later, edited Songs version condenses the poem to five stanzas, adding fuller lines and emotionally evocative allusions:

The wind blew through a woody creek, clouds raked across the sky,

The dark’ning shadows slowly crept upon Ben Ledi high –

Where ancient Druids victims slew in human sacrifice,

While mothers moaned and fathers stood with salt tears in their eyes. (p. 126)

Another contrast occurs between the twenty-four stanzas of ‘Long, Long Ago’ (Poems 2) and the later ten-stanza version:

The morning stars shown brighter gold,

Long, long ago;

Wore brighter spangles o’er the wold,

When I walked with my Joe. (p. 26)

Here is the later, more poeticised recasting in Songs:

Bless’d was the witching twilight gray

Long, long ago;

Soft stealing o’er the new-mown hay

In ricks in many a row.

The evening star shone brighter far

Long, long ago;

And broad moons shot their silvery bar

Through clouds of purer snow. (p. 83)

Even more drastic revisions appear in ‘Prince Charlie’, which in Poems 3 had begun:

When Charles Stuart with his broad sword

Fought Culloden fairly,

And lost his clan to a man.

The brave Prince rued it sorely.

Prince Charlie from Culloden fled,

With ‘thirty thousand’ on his head;

Without a home, without a steed,

When drift was driving sairly. (p. 23)

Ten years later, the Songs version retains little beyond the ballad rhyme scheme (from William Glen’s ‘Wae’s Me for Prince Charlie’):

Mid rugged rocks where eagles soar,

Where storms and tempests rave and roar,

And often by the lonesome shore

Did wander Royal Charlie.

A price was set upon this head,

They cared not if alive or dead;

They pressed him sorely in his need –

The hapless Royal Charlie. (p. 91)⁸

Since many of the topics of Campbell’s poems repeat – a motherless child; a bereaved parent; the sublime and threatening aspects of nature – it is possible that Campbell had composed more verses than she could include in her previous booklets, leaving the overage available for later re-editing. She would have been sixty-nine when Songs was published and, as in her memoir, the poet focuses on her memories of childhood, its lost pleasures and imaginings, and the sense of an irretrievable barrier between an innocent past and bereaved present. Several ‘songs’ recount her sadness at the deaths of family members (‘Noran River’; ‘The Cot by the Moor’, which seems a calmer reprising of Poems 1’s ‘The Summer Night’; ‘The Robin Redbreast’), as well as her youthful imaginings of a fairy kingdom (‘The Fairy King’s Wedding’, ‘The Man in Satin Shoon’). Others regret an early aborted courtship with a lover who ‘crossed the Indian Sea’ never to return (‘Early Love’), who had died at sea (‘The Bygone Days’), or whose ‘tale was false’ (‘First Love’) though fondly remembered. Her appreciation of sublimity in nature continues, with ‘The Sea’ and ‘Address to the Morning Star’, as well as her compassion for orphans (‘Fatherless Mary’, ‘A Motherless Babe’).

Moreover, Campbell’s bitterness toward the monarchy seems to have abated somewhat, perhaps as the widowed sovereign increasingly took up summer residence in Scotland from the 1860s onwards. Although ‘My Tramp to See the Queen’ reproves London’s ‘pleasure-seeking tourists’ who crowd to see the monarch, her local pride is gratified that ‘in Scotland’s royal tartan I saw the great John Brown’, as well as ‘modest, Highland matrons in their Sunday mutch and gown’ (Songs, p. 62). Campbell even celebrates a royal wedding, recasting Louise, Princess of Argyle, as natively Scottish (‘And Scotch blood [is] in Louise’s veins’, ‘The Royal Wedding’, p. 96). And Songs’ sole poem on the Crimean War, ‘The Battle of Alma’, offers celebratory patriotism, although a trace of the poet’s former regrets remains in its conclusion:

But o’er that glory falls a shade,

For many in the Highland plaid

To sleep their last long sleep were laid

On the bloody hill of Alma! (p. 68)

It is possible that Campbell’s emotions softened with age into patriotic and religious acceptance. It is also likely, however, that in selecting and recasting her verses, her editor chose topics more likely to attract middle-class readers, and/or to recast the poet’s responses into more congenial and uncontroversial channels. Several of the volume’s poems conclude with final stanzas of religious affirmation and a few centre directly on moral themes (‘The Battle of Alma’, ‘Death and Sin’), admonishing readers to anticipate a consoling afterlife. These anticipations, however, are chiefly presented as antidotes to a diminished present:

Though dim-eyed and gray-haired and laden with care,

Hope drives off the demons of black-winged despair;

And I hear as I sit ’neath this tree by my door

Strains of music divine from the radiant shore. (‘The Pear Tree’, p. 76)

Though Songs offers more third-person narratives than the earlier booklets (‘Anna Bell – A Ballad’, ‘Mary Lee – A Ballad’), as we have seen, the autobiographical themes of the poet’s earlier verses remain: her pain at the rupture of her childhood sense of security within a natural setting and her grief at the loss of her children. Two poems especially add details of these losses, ‘My Infant Day and My Hair Grown Gray’, and ‘The Graves of My Sons’. Fittingly, ‘The Death of Willie, My Second Son’ is the volume’s final selection, and a headnote explains its context:

On the 20th April 1866, my son, William Campbell, was killed at Aberdeen, in the 35th year of his age. It was caused by a hair-teasing machine insufficiently covered, at which he was employed. They telegraphed for me to come to identify his corpse […]. There was a fearful wound in his brow over the left eye, and all his body was terribly mangled. Filled with deep and bitter grief for the sad fate of my poor son, I wrote this piece. – E. C.

I tucked him in his white shroud and hid him in the ground,

I saw how deep in earth he’ll sleep with many a gory wound!

[…]

His ever welcome footsteps and voice I’ll no more hear,

No more tales in my ear he’ll pour my heart to chill or cheer;

O! Nellfield lonely graveyard, I’ll often think of thee,

Where Willie sleeps ’mong strangers, by the silvery flowing Dee. (p. 128)

Campbell’s own obituary in the Dundee Evening Telegraph, 25 December 1878, describes her last years:

Since the publication of her poems, which met with the most unexpected success, her health has gradually been giving way, and she has been unable for any sustained mental effort. She has recently produced several pieces, portions of which have displayed considerable imaginative power, but cannot, from a literary point of view, be classed as equal to those contained in the volume. […] [A]bout three weeks ago she lost one of her daughters [Agnes]. Out of a family of eight, only two daughters survive.

Since the writer notes the ‘unexpected success’ of Campbell’s poems and seems able to judge her writings ‘from a literary point of view’, might this be the voice of Whytock?

In conclusion, the greater concision, flowing metre, varied diction, and allusiveness of these later Campbell/Whytock poems provide some softening distance for the poet’s sorrows. Unlike Campbell’s earliest verses, in which the speaker seems trapped within grief, these later poems assume a more controlled authorial voice, as personal monologue and declamation give way to narrative. Songs of My Pilgrimage lives up to its title as the poems merge in tone – nostalgic, mildly cheerful, and accepting by turns – making the edited Songs a more coherent volume than its predecessors, if also more generic and indirect in its allusions to buried trauma. The contrast between Campbell’s earlier series of Poems and the later Whytock-revised Songs, thus suggests the extent to which the writings of poor mid-Victorian women (and others) may have been altered by editors who, in some cases, smoothed over fractured, raw, and troubled poetic works. Indeed, we might expect proletarian writings to reflect the recurrent distress later identified by psychologists as ‘complex post-traumatic stress disorder’, as opposed to the more polished and generalised versions approved by their literary patrons (Herman, p. 33).

The poems of Campbell’s anguished Crimean sequence remain among the very few contemporary works that questioned, even briefly, the morality and destructive consequences of Britain’s imperial mission in south-west Asia. Unconstrained by the ‘womanly’ virtues of resignation and propriety preached to the less prosperous, Campbell’s sincere, troubled, and angry early self-published poems seem a fitting embodiment of the repeated losses experienced by their impoverished author. Their reshaping into more patriotic, quiescent and polished verses by a middle-class editor provides a striking instance of the imposition of normative standards on the writings of a member of the Victorian underclass.

Notes

1. 1.  The 1871 census describes Whytock as a ‘Deputy Superintendent of the Mercantile House’, and around 1877 he became a missionary in the Congo. ‘The Skein o’ ‘Oo’, in Edwards’s One Hundred Modern Scottish Poets, exhibits a facility with dialect and a blend of humour and moralism. His Dundee Courier obituary describes him as ‘a man of amiable and warm-hearted disposition’. Black notes that it was Whytock who introduced Campbell’s poems to Gilfillan (p. 163). For both obituaries and census information I am indebted to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Charlotte Lauder.

2. 2.  Unless otherwise noted, page numbers for the memoir are from Boos (2008).

3. 3.  According to the 1841 Census, William Campbell and his wife Elizabeth, both aged thirty-five, and their children John, seven, William, five, and Agnes, one, resided at Mickle Mill, Brechin, Forfarshire. By 1851, the family resided in Upper Tenements, Brechin, William is listed as forty-five and Elizabeth forty-seven, ‘laundress’, and John, seventeen, and William, fifteen, are linen weavers. There are now two new daughters, Helen, nine, and ‘Jean’ (error for Jane), two. By 1861 the family had moved to Panmun Street, Arbroath, and all three daughters are ‘Flax Factory’ workers. By 1871, the family are in thirty-one East Abbey Street, Arbroath; William is deceased, Elizabeth sixty-seven, and the three daughters mill workers.

4. 4.  Dereli (2003) traces the press’s shift in emphasis between enthusiasm for an early victory at the Battle of the Alma in 1854 and dismay at the mismanagement that had led to the needless death of British soldiers throughout 1855, responses reflected in Campbell’s poems.

5. 5.  In addition to Poems 1’s ‘The Mother’s Lament’, the theme reappears in Poems 2’s ‘The Snow-Drop’, ‘The Absent Soldier’ and ‘The Farewell’. Poems 3 contains two striking examples, ‘I Stood by the Wooden Rail’ and, as mentioned later in the text, ‘The Bereaved Mother’.

6. 6.  In an attempted correction to the representation of an overly compliant male hero in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Stowe’s Dred, a Black revolutionary maroon exiled to a swamp, calls for his fellow slaves to revolt.

7. 7.  ‘Malta’s Isle’ is also in Poems 3 and ‘The Evening Star’ in Poems 4.

8. 8.  Several additional selections from Poems 4 appear in revised form in Songs: ‘The Lily of the Valley’, ‘Robin Redbreast’ (‘The Robin Redbreast’ in Songs), ‘The Sea’ and ‘Edinburgh’. ‘Edinburgh’ has been greatly altered: for example, the earlier reference to ‘many a dissolute maiden | […] living on the street’ has been removed.

Works cited

• Black, Aileen, Gilfillan of Dundee, 1813–78: Interpreting Religion and Culture in Mid-Victorian Scotland (Dundee: Dundee University Press, 2006).
• Boos, Florence (ed.), Working-Class Women Poets of Victorian Britain: An Anthology (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008).
• Campbell, Elizabeth, Poems (Arbroath: Printed for the Author, 1862).
• Campbell, Elizabeth, Poems, second series (Arbroath: Printed for the Author, 1863).
• Campbell, Elizabeth, Poems, third series (Arbroath: Printed for the Author, 1865).
• Campbell, Elizabeth, Poems, fourth series (Arbroath: Printed for the Author, 1867).
• Campbell, Elizabeth, Songs of My Pilgrimage (Edinburgh: Elliot, 1875).
• Dereli, Cynthia, A War Culture in Action: A Study of the Literature of the Crimean War Period (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2003).
• Edwards, D.H. (ed.), One Hundred Modern Scottish Poets, vol. 1 (Brechin, D.H. Edwards, 1880).
• Figes, Orlando, The Crimean War: A History (London: Metropolitan Books, 2011).
• Herman, Judith, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
• Ho, Tai-Chun, The Crimean War in Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2021).

Obituaries

• ‘Elizabeth Campbell’, Dundee Evening Telegraph, 25 December 1878, 4d.
• ‘Peter Whytock’, Dundee Courier, 12 November 1904, 7e.