Janet Hamilton may have been the most widely read and appreciated working-class poet of Victorian Scotland. Her vigorous, satiric, and recollective poems in English and her native Doric (Lowland Scots) exemplified the values of a region and vanished time and provided rare insight into the developed views of an imaginative elderly woman who never attended school, remained poor all her life, raised a large family, and overcame illiteracy and blindness to record verses she composed in her head. An upright woman of mildly reformist inclinations, angered by the devastating consequences of urban industrial blight, Hamilton eventually became an articulate spokeswoman for the working class and a remarkable example of an elderly oral poet whose verses found wide circulation in print.

She was born on 14 October 1795 at Shotts, in Lanark (formerly a county in central Scotland), the child of James Thomson, a shoemaker, and Mary Brownlee Thomson. Through her...