Journal article
The "queen" of the "far-famed Penny Post": "the factory girl poet" and her audience
Women's writing : the Elizabethan to Victorian period, Vol.10(3), pp.503-526
10/01/2003
DOI: 10.1080/09699080300200283
Abstract
The brief floruit of Ellen Johnston (c. 1835-1873) offers rare insights into the obstacles a working-class woman needed to overcome to find a receptive audience for her verse. Alexander Campbell, an elderly radical and editor of the Penny Post from 1860 to 1868, published her work as well as the epistolary exchanges it evoked, arranged for the printing of her volumes, and exhorted his readers to buy subscriptions to Autobiography, Poems, and Songs (Glasgow, 1867 and 1869). This article considers the thematic and stylistic progression of Johnston's verse, and offers evidence that Campbell's personal kindness and his readers' many gestures of poetic solidarity brought forth a rich range of autobiographical resonances absent from her earlier work. Johnston's poetic correspondence with "Edith" and other readers in Campbell's columns enabled her to articulate the poetic identity of a woman who overcame adversity to find community with sympathetic readers. The article also examines her silence between her publication of these poems and her anonymous death, four years after age and ill-health forced Campbell to relinquish editorship of the Penny Post. In a sequence of verses in the Autobiography's second edition, Johnston entrusted her poetic legacy to an unnamed friend. If this was Campbell, it suggests that she was aware of her need for the support of a principled editor and responsive working-class audience to publish at all. Such evidence and the near-uniqueness of her brief rise to local prominence, suggest that such striking forms of editorial and working-class solidarity may have been necessary prerequisites in the 19C for the emergence of a distinctive and determined working-class woman's poetic voice. (Original abstract)
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- The "queen" of the "far-famed Penny Post": "the factory girl poet" and her audience
- Creators
- Florence Boos
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Women's writing : the Elizabethan to Victorian period, Vol.10(3), pp.503-526
- DOI
- 10.1080/09699080300200283
- ISSN
- 0969-9082
- eISSN
- 1747-5848
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 10/01/2003
- Academic Unit
- English; International Programs
- Record Identifier
- 9984397934302771
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