ABSTRACT
Alexander Anderson was born at Kirkconnel in Nithsdale, Dumfriesshire, the son of a quarryman, and the youngest of seven children. As a child he loved drawing and writing, and became a voracious reader of novels and poems. His first poems appeared in The People’s Journal, published in Dundee and a major outlet for labouring-class poets in this period. His poems won People’s Journal prizes in 1869, 1871 and 1872. This led to further publications in The People’s Friend and a lifelong friendship with its editor Andrew Stewart, and to his first volume, A Song of Labour and Other Poems. Anderson is one of the more substantial poets to have emerged from the late nineteenth-century industrial scene. Despite the critic’s familiarly predictable astonishment at the spectacle of a self-taught poet writing ambitiously, this hits several true notes: in the ‘passions rushing with the trains’, the ‘high and wide’ aims, and the ‘culture of intellect’.
