The Factory Exile: Ellen Johnston’s Autobiography, Poems and Songs

Old Scotland shall feel proud ere long, When time your worth unfurl, That she you crowned the Queen of Song Was but a Factory Girl.

Ellen Johnston, “An Address to my Brother Bards” (ll. 45–48)¹

Thou lovely verdant Factory! What binds my heart to thee? Why art thou centered in my soul, twined round my memory? Why dost thou hover o’er my dreams my slumbers to beguile? When falsehood of the deepest dye has doomed me an Exile.

Ellen Johnston, “The Factory Exile” (ll. 1–4)

As of thirty years ago, the works of nineteenth-century Scottish factory worker and poet Ellen Johnston, known to her readers as “The Factory Girl” and the “Queen of Song,” had all but disappeared. Thankfully, though, scholars dedicated to reclaiming the historical and literary legacy of working-class writers have reintroduced Johnston and a handful of her literary peers into Romantic and Victorian studies. Selections of her work now can be found in anthologies, online archives and databases, and collections of autobiographies; in addition, she has been the subject of a Dictionary of Literary Biography entry, an Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, and one scholarly monograph.² In 2007, the US-based Kessinger Publishing, through their Legacy Reprint Series, made available a facsimile reprint of the 1867 first edition of Johnston’s only volume Autobiography, Poems and Songs.

Johnston’s work has been received primarily in socio-historical terms, delving into the ways in which she enriches our understanding of nineteenth-century working-class life and writing. Studies devoted to Johnston address similar concerns: discourses of gender and class, domesticity, dialect writing, recovery work, periodical publication, working-class literary expression, autobiography.³ Thus, Johnston’s poetry has been revived in valuable ways, to be sure, but in nonetheless limited ways.

As a power-loom weaver turned published poet, Johnston wrote of subjects ranging beyond the obvious ones open to “The Factory Girl.” Uniquely possessed of the necessary bona fides to speak to her fellow workers in the pages of the Penny Post, she wrote about the pains and glories of mid-century working-class life: finding and securing work, making a life in the cities, struggling for acknowledgment as a laborer and credibility as a writer. At the same time, she also wrote of things familiar to many: raising children, falling in love, losing a loved one, strength in the face of defeat and despair. But for the Factory Girl, becoming the “Queen of Song” by engaging with the literary world was a risky act, one with the potential to harm her when others sought retribution not for what she wrote, but for her writing at all. Her poetic persona, shaped by being “The Factory Girl” and “The Queen of Song,” is equally shaped by her experiences as “The Factory Exile.” As a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather, the mother of an illegitimate daughter, and a factory-girl turned poet, Johnston found herself exiled, sometimes violently, from numerous communities. She was sent out to factory service at age ten in an attempt to curb what her stepfather in particular viewed as her slipshod, dreamy, bookish ways. Following the birth of her daughter, Mary Achenvole, she found herself abandoned not only by the child’s father, but also by her family members. Jealous fellow factory workers physically assaulted her in retribution for what they considered her pretensions to artistic creation and intellectual pursuits. Her lack of formal education and vernacular voice disqualified her from serious consideration within the literary world. Consequently, Johnston’s exilic experiences function on numerous levels: professional, personal, and artistic.

But there is another aspect to Johnston’s exile, one that this essay seeks to remedy. Like that of so many of her working-class peers, Johnston’s poetry still suffers from a marginalized existence in literary criticism and nineteenth-century scholarship. By way of illustration, consider two examples: Florence S. Boos’s essay “‘Nurs’d up amongst the scenes I have describ’d’: Political Resonances in the Poetry of Working-Class Women” and Regenia Gagnier...