ABSTRACT
Ill-luck and adversity had surrounded Mary Pyper and her family from the earliest times. After her father's death, she and her mother moved from their home in Greenock to a small room in Edinburgh where the mother ‘earned a meagre living by shoebinding’ and Pyper, though habituated to ill health and ‘quite unfitted for hard work’, was apprenticed for three years to learn lacemaking. During her long night vigils Pyper began to write poetry, finding solace and ‘no small enjoyment in the work’ (Sacred Poems, p. xiv). In Select Pieces (1847), the first of Pyper’s two volumes of verse, the author speaks of the ‘six sorrowing years’ spent by her mother’s ‘couch of pain’ (‘Apology of the Authoress for her Muse’). To a modern secular reader, descanting on the spiritual sublime may be acceptable, but Pyper’s contemplation of a dead child as a nascent ‘infant cherub’ (‘On the Death of an Infant’) is less so.
