ABSTRACT
Glasgow-born James Macfarlan was the son of a pedlar and 'a wanderer' from infancy; a habit that marriage, the birth of four children and the death of three, did little to alter. In spite of his feeble health and ‘wayward peregrinations’, Macfarlan was a fluent, prolific writer, who would periodically embark on a frenzied ‘ran-dan’ of solicitation, self-promotion and agonizing personal appeals for sponsorship––firing off poems and ‘screeds of prose things’ to papers ‘here, there, and everywhere’ (Poetical Works, p. ix). Macfarlan walked to London and secured a publisher for his first volume, Poems: Pictures of the Past (1854), soon to be followed by City Songs, and other poetical Pieces (1855) and Lyrics of Life (1856). His final collapse followed many cold and miserable hours spent hawking a prose pamphlet he had written, An Attic Study: Brief Notes on Nature, Men and Books.
