ABSTRACT
Janet Hamilton, poet, essayist, and 'apostle of temperance', was as remarkable for her personal fortitude and the singular power of her moral vision as for the passion and scope of her writing. Born Janet Thomson in the moorland village of Carshill, Lanarkshire, in October 1795, she moved during childhood with her shoemaker father and labourer mother to seek work in Langloan. Hamilton’s passionate attachment to literature flourished, often covertly, amidst a life of enforced multi-tasking and domestic distraction. Hamilton’s true creative florescence came in her fifties when she began to submit poems and essays to Cassell’s The Working Man’s Friend and Family Instructor and The Adviser, A Monthly Magazine for Young People. Pastoral poems such as ‘Spring Scene in the Country’ may seem overly ripe in sentiment for modern taste, but whilst Hamilton is lyrically responsive to the beauty of the natural world and tender towards the lineaments of the past, she is no mere dreaming Arcadian.
