INDUSTRIALISATION meant increasing the concentration of the population of Scotland in cities throughout the 19th century, particularly in Glasgow and Dundee. This had a deep and lasting legacy in terms of modern national self-representation. The rate of urbanisation in Scotland, the rising number of emigrants leaving the country early in the century, and consequently the growing international readership yearning for images and icons of Scotland delivering consoling images of the country, were crucial to how the literature of Scotland changed in this period. Industrialising Scotland changed the nation’s character.

Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) was one of the most popular poets of his era, particularly with the unlikely Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), a long narrative poem set in wilderness America. In Lines on Revisiting a Scottish River, he laments so-called progress as industrial effluvia have turned the rippling beauty of the Clyde into a seething, polluted mess. Campbell’s Clyde is now a place where “Nature’s face is banish’d and estranged” and the riverbanks are “With sooty exhalations cover’d o’er”. “Unsightly brick-lanes smoke, and clanking engines gleam” in the effort “To gorge a few with Trade’s precarious prize...”: “And call they this Improvement?”

Similar abhorrence of industrialisation is present in the mid-century poetry of Elizabeth Hamilton and William Thom. In Glasgow: A Poem by John Mayne (1759-1836), the merchants at Glasgow Cross “shine like Nabobs” and “Commerce engages a’ their care” while in Glasgow (1857) by Alexander Smith (1829-1867) the city is depicted in vivid images of haunting ferocity and spectacle. Yet there’s a feeling of dark belonging in this poem which takes pride in the scale of industrialisation and identification of the poet with a world of “Black Labour” and “secret-moaning caves”: “City! I am true son of thine.”

Tom Leonard’s ground-breaking anthology Radical Renfrew (1990) drew attention to the neglected poetry of 19th-century industrial Scotland and new ways of reading it. It included consideration of emigrant poets like John Barr (1812-92), who went from Paisley to Otago, New Zealand, in 1852 to sing the praises of a non-industrialised social order in which capitalist economics might be practised without tyranny and the agonies of class discrimination. Other poets, and particularly women writing between 1850 and 1900, reflect and protest about the social conditions of industrialised Scotland. Much work is still to be done to revalue these poems. Janet Hamilton (1795-1873) writes in Oor Location of “the whisky-shop and pawn” and the “ruination” characteristic of cities of “ragged laddies...enginemen, and Paddies...colliers...fechtin’, drinkin’...” while Jessie Russell (1850-?) in “Woman’s Rights versus Woman’s Wrongs” is unforgiving in her feminist priorities. Many wives are beaten by husbands who never suffer due punishment: “...a life for a life, and the murderer’s hung, and we think not the law inhuman, / Then why not the lash for the man who kicks or strikes a defenceless woman?”

Like that of Alexander Smith, the poetry of James Young Geddes (1850-1913) also presents the sense that industry might have a strange, terrible beauty of its own but it is charged with moral force at the civic hypocrisies evident in industrial Dundee. Glendale & Co. (After Walt Whitman) begins with the great American poet’s sense of social justice and democratic constitution and employs Whitman’s long line and free verse, chanting a litany of bitter indignation as he describes the firm of Glendale & Co., “grown from small beginnings” to something now hellish that “dominates the town”: “Lit up at night, the discs flare like angry eyes in watchful supervision, impressing on the minds of the workers the necessity of improving the hours and minutes purchased by Glendale & Co.” The bitterness of the poem escalates in indignation, as that of the English poet William Blake does in his poem, London (from his Songs of Experience, 1794). Other important works include The New Jerusalem (“Machineries / Are there whose vast pulsations tear and thrash / the groaning air”), The New Inferno (full of “harsh dissonance”) and The Spectre Clock of Alyth. Geddes is Scotland’s most radical social poet between Burns and MacDiarmid.

Both John Davidson and James (“BV”) Thomson (1834-1882) were significant influences on TS Eliot and Hugh MacDiarmid. Thomson’s visionary poem, The City of Dreadful Night (1880), is a phantasmagorical nocturnal journey through a nightmare city of enervated, alienated sleepwalking individuals. Deeply read in Dante and Leopardi (whose work he translated), Thomson’s vision belongs in their company as well as that of early modern Scottish poetry. It is not, like that of James Young Geddes, one of an actual industrialised city, nor like Davidson’s, one of moral turpitude firmly based in historic fact. It is rather a metaphoric, illuminated nocturnal city, like Dante’s subterranean Inferno, whose inhabitants are doomed by something more inescapably human than alterable social conditions. Thomson’s injustice is not curable in economic terms though the moral authority of his poem might charge us to address social and remediable economic causes of alienation. Perhaps all cities bleed into one emblematic “dreadful” city in a vision where industrialism has brought about a dark spiritual uniformity. Thomson was also the author of extraordinarily perceptive essays, collected as Biographical and Critical Studies (1896), and of Walt Whitman: The Man and the Poet (1910).

For John Davidson (1857-1909), the Nietzschean character rises most strongly in the pessimistic Testaments. The Testament of a Vivisector is perhaps the most repulsive poem ever written, a coldly objective description of the flaying and anatomisation of a horse: “I study pain, measure it” and the proof is in the surgery: “I fixed / The creature, impotent and moribund, / With gag and fetter; sheared its filthy mane; / Cut a foot’s length, tissue and tendon...And made this faithful, dying, loathsome drudge, / One diapason of intensest pain”. The conclusion is the discovery that “Matter in itself is pain...being evermore / Self-knowledge.” Scientific chill runs all through Snow – a Dickensian phenomenon of feeling is examined through the lens of a cold crystallographer.

Davidson turns the objective gaze upon himself in The Testament of a Man Forbid and connects with traditional ballads in his own Thomas the Rhymer and A Runnable Stag, yet he is also one culmination of the tradition of Romantic sinners, from Milton’s Satan to Melville’s Ahab and on. For Davidson, “Greenock” is “this grey town / That pipes the morning up before the lark / With shrieking steam...where hammers clang / On iron hulls” and “men sweat gold that others hoard or spend, / And lurk like vermin in their narrow streets”.

While Davidson’s vision is clearly of an industrial city, the fantastic vision of a metaphoric city of darkness informs it. Darkness also characterises many of the poems of Robert Buchanan (1841-1901), who could write Robert Browning-like dramatic monologues such as Fra Giacomo, memorably set to music in 1914 by Cecil Coles (1888-1918), in which an Italian Renaissance aristocrat addresses a priest and gives him a glass of wine, while his wife lies dead in the bedroom upstairs, only to reveal in the course of the poem that he has discovered that the priest was his wife’s secret lover. He then reveals that the wine is poisoned, and just in case, he stabs the priest repeatedly and has his corpse thrown into the canal below! A grotesque poem of grand guignol, it skilfully indicts the fickleness of upper-class men and women.

Buchanan’s city-poems London and Vanity Fair and his portrait-poem, The Ballad of Judas Iscariot, teem with people and make an immediate formal appeal to a popular readership, but their subject is alienation. Desolation, loneliness and elemental, inhuman nature are most powerfully present in Sonnets Written by Loch Coruisk, Isle of Skye. We Are Fatherless ends with Nietzschean finality: “There is no God – in vain we plead and call, / In vain with weary eyes we search and guess – / Like children in an empty house...”

Fiction in Scots of the time occupied a much more populated context. The work of William Alexander (1826-1894), in Johnnie Gibb of Gushetneuk (1869-71) and The Laird of Drammochdyle (1865), rediscovered by William Donaldson along with a great deal of 19th-century popular fiction, often in Scots, frequently published serially in newspapers, charts closely the relation between the rural world of Aberdeenshire and the urban, industrialised world with its hard commercial imperatives. An eel-like intelligence and humour is at work in WE Aytoun (1813-1865), whose story How We Got Up the Glenmutchkin Railway and How We Got Out of It (1845) is reminiscent of Mark Twain in its wry engagement with the priorities of the new commercialism flourishing in industrial society. Alexander Anderson, known as “Surfaceman” (a railway worker) in a well-known poem of the 1890s, in Nottman tells the story of an engine-driver who one day sees a small dim object ahead and recognises a child asleep on the track, climbs forward from the cab and positions himself outside at the front of the engine as it rushes forward, and manages, a micro-second ahead of the train, to gently kick the child to one side and off the rails, recognising as he does so his own son.

Another popular writer of the period whose fame has been sustained throughout the following century and into our own connects the ambitions of serious literary work and the pleasures of light entertainment: Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). Beside his extended historical novels, among his most enjoyable stories are perhaps the Adventures and Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, set in the Napoleonic Wars. Doyle saw himself as a significant historical novelist but his most enduring works concern Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger, two archetypal characters, the professional detective and the adventuring speculative scientist. Their influence is evident in innumerable later manifestations but the originals retain a perennial charm and value.

Both are men of science in an age of industrialization and materialism, when orthodox religion was increasingly marginalized. Holmes offers the reassurance of material and rational explanation in a world from which God has departed. Challenger, while offering the same sense of scientific certainty, is an eccentric who keeps an open mind in an age when his colleagues and newspaper reporters are increasingly cynical. Challenger leads us to the Lost World, where prehistoric time and its monsters are present-tense. Holmes, confronting villains from the furthest reaches of Empire, maintains the virtues of imperial centrality, the core of urban life, but has his opposite number in the fearful Moriarty, the secret at the centre of the web of urban evil.

Morality is important in Doyle’s fiction but the work of the imagination, the unpredictable development of stories in a world on the brink of profound, permanent and violent change, is what gives them a resonance that points forward from RL Stevenson to John Buchan and Ian Fleming, a continuity of adventure surfing the high curling waves of the long declining empire, and heading for the rocky shore.

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JOHN DAVIDSON IN HIS OWN WORDS ...

From The Testament of a Man Forbid:

Mankind has cast me out. When I became
So close a comrade of the day and night,
Of earth and of the seasons of the year,
And so submissive in my love of life
And study of the world that I unknew
The past and names renowned, religion, art,
Inventions, thoughts, and deeds, as men unknow
What good and evil fate befell their souls
Before their bodies gave them residence…

Even when Davidson writes in the working-class voice of the wage-slave in Thirty Bob a Week, sympathetic compassion and class solidarity bring no alleviation to the human waste enacted by the industrial world:

It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf;
It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It’s walking on a string across a gulf
With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck;
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;
And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.