ABSTRACT
William McGonagall, an Irish cotton-weaver’s son, was born in Edinburgh, grew up in Orkney and lived most of his life in Dundee, where he worked as a handloom weaver and amateur actor. He is by far the best-known and best-selling labouring-class poet in the period covered by this volume, and possibly this entire series. His success has been extraordinary. His works have rarely if ever been out of print, and new editions and reprints of his work regularly appear. The picture may be a little more complex than this, however. Laughing at McGonagall is a tradition that was well established in the poet’s own lifetime, when university students would send him mocking letters and parodies, and garnish his public ‘performances’ with ironically effusive applause. McGonagall’s poetry may indeed suffer from multiple distorting cultural translations: he brings an old oral narrative pattern to Scotland, using it for a modern subject.
