ABSTRACT
Thomas Blacklock is a prime success story in the annals of labouring-class poetry, overcoming more than the typical share of hardships. Not only did he hail from humble circumstances, his father being a bricklayer in Annan, Dumfriesshire, but at the age of six months, he was left completely blind from smallpox. As a child, he is said to have enjoyed having poetry read to him, and demonstrated the necessary prodigious qualities of beginning to produce his own verse by the age of twelve. His poems were circulated, and attracted the attention of a Dr John Stevenson, a physician who lived in Edinburgh and who paid for Blacklock to come to the city to pursue his education. Blacklock inscribes the first poem of his first volume, Poems on Several Occasions. Although Blacklock's knowledge of classical languages and literatures might have qualified him for a professorship, on advice from Hume, he pursued a degree in divinity and became a preacher in 1759.
