ABSTRACT
Alexander Wilson was the most successful of the many Scottish labouring-class poets who flourished in the years following the dramatic rise to fame of Robert Burns. At the end of the 1780s, Wilson borrowed money from a friend to establish himself as a pedlar, a labour more conducive, he imagined, to the composition and sale of his verse, and in 1790 Poems was published, with a second, expanded edition in 1791. In accomplished prose, the journal lays bare the difficulties of an ambitious but unpatronised labouring-class writer, meeting with indifference, resistance and even violence in his earnest efforts to find subscribers while he works. More verse appeared after Wilson's death. The foresters is the account of a pedestrian journey from Pennsylvania to Niagara Falls undertaken in 1804, and Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect and Ancient Scottish Ballads appeared in 1816 and 1820.
