ABSTRACT
John Macleay Peacock was born into a poor family in Kincardine, Perthshire. His father died when he was very young, and Peacock worked at a tobacco-factory and a bleaching works before becoming apprenticed as a boilermaker. His education was minimal and his choices limited, as he describes in the ‘Preface’ to his first volume: Born of humble parents-nursed in the lap of poverty-sent to work for a scanty pittance at the age of nine or ten-left an orphan at an early period of my life, to battle, as best I could, through the world without a guide, my education has been but meagre, picked up at intervals and by snatches, and confined to the simplest rudiments of reading and writing.
