Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community by Kirstie Blair (review)

Kirstie Blair's Working Verse in Victorian Scotland: Poetry, Press, Community reassesses Scottish working-class verse culture, drawing it out of the literary margins and arguing for its importance to Scottish literary history and Victorian studies more broadly. Breaking with past studies that have been negative and dismissive of Victorian Scottish poetry, Blair shows that the working-class poets in her study are often self-consciously "imitative, parochial, provincial, romantic, sentimental, and escapist" and that these qualities are "not flaws" (8). These poets understood the potential cultural and political benefits of their mastery of high culture and wielded familiar forms in important, and sometimes innovative, ways and for political ends.

Blair's impressively extensive research gives readers a fascinating look inside a sizeable, rich, and largely untapped archive of Scottish working-class writing. Partly because this archive is so vast and complex, Blair's study focuses on popular poetics and poets who operated in local Scottish contexts, especially in the newspaper poetry columns. While this focus may seem narrow, Blair points out that because Scottish provincial verse often circulated in newspapers and periodicals as well as in song lyrics to "an extensive international diaspora of readers who still consider themselves to be locals," it "had a surprising global reach" (13). Moreover, this focus reveals "the enormously influential discourse … on Scotland's unique identity as a home for working-class poets" (14) as well as "the crucial significance of the 'local' bard in Scotland's cultural imagination" (26).

Each of Working Verse's five chapters considers a different context or genre while tying them back to their relationship to the provincial newspaper press. Chapter 1 considers occasional and performed verse and sets up the arguments of subsequent chapters. The Scottish working classes were encouraged to write poetry to bolster Scotland's status as the "Peasant Poetic Queen of Nations" (20). Local and provincial working-class verse cultures were, therefore, valued and, as Blair shows, mobilized for social, cultural, and political ends.

Chapter 2 examines an exceedingly popular series of Scottish poetry anthologies called Whistle-Binkie (1832–90), challenging its perception as a symptom of a post-Robert Burns decline in Scottish poetry. Through her analysis of the anthologies alongside unpublished correspondence between editors and contributors, Blair reveals how a collective of working-class male writers—the Whistlebinkians—was constructed and nurtured. One of the most interesting aspects of this chapter is Blair's discussion of nursery verse and the ways in which male authors appropriated the sentimental poetics most often associated with femininity and women poets. Indeed, though there were working-class women who wrote nursery verse, in Victorian Scotland working-class men were the foremost authors; nursery verse was largely regarded as a male genre. Through its positive depictions of working-class family values and the Scots language, this poetry demonstrated the fitness of the working classes for full participation in politics and society.

In chapter 3, Blair rereads poems that build on Burnsian pastoral as part of an activist tradition. She shows how, when we consider this poetry in its original context, the newspaper column, we can discern its political motivations. While it appears to be the least political of all poetic genres in the Victorian period, Blair argues that "its naïvety is a front" (136). Poems about rights of way, improvement, and emigration put familiar forms and tropes to work in debates about working people's relationship to the land.

Chapter 4 challenges the commonly held belief that industrial change was not fully explored in literature until the Scottish Renaissance of the early to mid-twentieth century. Blair shows that, on the contrary, "Scotland's industrial development is the context that shapes the verse culture on the [Victorian] period" (138). The chapter focuses on the poetry of miners and railway workers and explores how these poets deftly combined form and content to draw attention to issues and advocate for change.

The final chapter shifts from...