‘Welcome and Appeal for the “Maid of Dundee”’: Constructing the Female Working-Class Bard in Ellen Johnston’s Correspondence Poetry, 1862–1867

Abstract

This chapter explores the significant role of the press in the cultivation of class-based networks of female readers. The essay takes for its focus the Scottish poet Ellen Johnston’s (c.1830–74) ‘conversations in verse,’ conducted with her working-class correspondents within the letters page of a Glasgow newspaper, the Penny Post (153). Writing under the pseudonym ‘The Factory Girl,’ Johnston was in fact a woman writing in her late twenties and thirties, which once again indicates the malleability of ‘the girl’ as a site of identification for female authors and readers alike. The poetic exchanges between ‘The Factory Girl’ and her working-class female correspondents demonstrate the radical potential of the letters page. As a space co-opted by female readers and writers for the development of ‘their own system of writing and mentoring,’ the letters page is here shown to have destabilised the ‘material and social limitations of class by enabling conversations between marginalised authors that would not have otherwise occurred’ (158-59). These intimate poetic exchanges in the public space of the newspaper are read as a political intervention through which women sought to ‘achieve upward social and cultural–if not economic–mobility’ (154).