Gilfillan of Dundee 1813-1878: Interpreting Religion and Culture in Mid-Victorian Scotland (review)

In a brief passage in Scotland's Books Robert Crawford recounts how in the 1850s, a school of poetry emerged in Scotland that dealt with the 'industrialization and city squalor' that was transforming the Central belt. This short-lived episode in Scotland's literary history, represented by the early works of Alexander Smith, delineated the 'possibilities of a new urban poetry'. Marked, however, by a 'melodramatic emotionalism', it was mocked out of existence by W. E. Aytoun's poem Firmillian. And this, as Aileen Black notes in her study, Gilfillan of Dundee, was a caricature of George Gilfillan, the eminence grise, if such a thing could exist, patronising and promoting Spasmodic poetry.

George Gilfillan was a rather unusual patriarch for a literary movement, for he earned his keep as a cleric in the United Presbyterian church in Dundee, where he ministered to his flock from 1836 to his death in 1878. As Black makes clear in this well-worked social biography, he was a rather unusual man of the cloth also. Black notes how Gilfillan was caught between his inheritance of a Calvinist commitment, and his curious temperament, which led him to learn of historical and natural theology. These resources, while they helped him overcome his perplexity at the existence of human suffering, prompted him to heretical thoughts, such as the Pre-millenarianism (the belief that Christ will return before the world ends) and universal salvation, the articulation of the latter leading to a charge of heresy being levelled against him in 1870.

Gilfillan's concern for social circumstance, and his imaginative commitment to the cause of the workers of the city, ensured that his real metier was the political campaign. As Black capably documents, he threw himself into an array of good causes with the energy his manic depression accorded him. He was found on platforms in favour of Italian independence (even trying unsuccessfully to bring Garibaldi to the city), of the abolition of slavery (although he supported the Confederacy in the American Civil War on other grounds), and of what he termed 'self-culture' or the movements towards education and cultivation. It was this which made sense of his espousal of the self-taught working-class poets that made up the ephemeral Spasmodic movement.

In line with his immersion in Romantic ideas of authorship and talent, Gilfillan heartily believed that poetry was sourced by divine inspiration and was potentially open to anyone. This Romantic strain to his thought found an outlet in a dazzling array of cultural commentaries, which peppered his career. Thoughtful passages in Black's treatment are taken up with documenting Gilfillan's often forgotten contribution to Shakespeare's popularity, to the literary legacy of Burns and Scott, and his own encounters with Thomas Carlyle and the Scottish reviewers.

In all this Black offers a rounded portrait of a minor figure in the Victorian cultural and religious landscape. Black is at her best, however, in situating Gilfillan in his home town. Dundee itself is a central character in this tale, from its industrial complexity, and rising prosperity, to its moral conscience and political activism, and its social habitat and religious demography. Dundee comes over as a cauldron of Victorian experimentation and investigation, shaped by industry, voluntarism and debate. In that Black's study of a minor player is all the more important, showing us how the great, impersonal forces of the period were created and confronted in a provincial town.

The structure of the book both helps and hampers this cause. Black devotes individual chapters to key themes within Gilfillan's career; the section on the place of oratory is particularly illuminating. But her treatment of religion and science, of oratory and politics, and of literature and history, all come after two chapters which offer a biographical overview. While this enables the reader to become acquainted with Gilfillan, it does imply that...