ABSTRACT
Through the success of his sole volume, Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-Loom Weaver in 1844, William Thom was propelled into fame, briefly feted and lionized by the London literati, and died, wasted by alcohol and tobacco, at 48. After his father died, Thom and his mother lived in the slum district of Justice Port, Aberdeen, where he got the barest scraps of an education from a local ‘wifie’ with ‘one cat, one taurds [leather strap] and one opinion’ (Bruce, p. 17). Though he tried to earn bread as a pedlar and by busking with his flute, Thom recoiled from street begging, as much as he detested having to worm his way through the ‘creeping intricacies that lie between starvation and parish charities’ (Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-Loom Weaver (1844), p. 27).
