Poets of the People's Journal

The People’s Journal, ‘A Penny Saturday paper devoted to the interests of the Working Classes’, was one of the most successful and culturally influential publications in Victorian Scotland.

From the beginning, the Journal set out to represent ordinary men and women, providing a platform for their opinions and experiences, publishing readers’ letters, stories, and especially their poetry. Collected here are more than one hundred examples of these poems – comical, sentimental, political and polemical – on a dizzy variety of subjects, from domestic pleasures and local events to national questions and foreign affairs.

These works, written by tradesmen and women, factory workers, servants, and others, are both deeply fascinating and highly entertaining. Their voices are part of a literary heritage that deserves recovery, and their concerns and interests often chime, more than we might expect, with issues still very much current in the modern day.