Elizabeth Duncan Campbell
Elizabeth Duncan Campbell was a Scottish working class poet and autobiographical writer.
Biography
Campbell was born on 11 February 1804 at Quarry Head, Edzell, Forfarshire, Scotland. She was baptized in Tannadice parish. Her father was a ploughman and she was the fifth of six surviving daughters born to her family. Her mother died when Campbell was aged 3, which she later wrote about in her poetry as her first clear memory, stating that she and her sisters "wandered like forlorn cows from morn to night."Campbell briefly attended the village school, where she learned to read, before entering agricultural service aged 7. She worked as a cow tender and whin gather and her employer's wife was physically abusive towards her. While working as a domestic servant for the Gray family Campbell lived in Saint Malo, France, for two years. She spent a period working as a cook at Barry's Inn in Edinburgh, then became a millworker.
In 1832, when she was aged 29, Campbell married a flax dresser from Brechin, Forfarshire, called William Campbell. They had four sons and four daughters. Her husband died in 1873 in Arbroath, Forfarshire. She lived with her three unmarried daughters in Lochee after his death.
Campbell firstly printed her poetry without editorial help and as short leaflets for sale. Her 1875 work Songs of My Pilgrimage included a "commendatory preface" by Dundee minister and poet George Gilfillan and was edited by local civil servant Peter Whytock. It also included a sample of Campbell's handwriting, a photograph and an autobiographical memoir.
Campbell wrote in her poetry that her life had been "full of toil and sorrows so many and so deep that I never could tell them." Two of her sons died in infancy. Another son called Willie fought at Sebastopol in the Crimean War and survived, but was killed in a factory accident, when he was aged 35. She wrote of the Crimean War that:
Campbell also included abolitionist views in her poems.
Campbell was burned when her clothing caught fire and she died on 24 December 1878 in Lochee, Dundee, Scotland.
Publications
Burns’ Centenary, an Ode: and Other Poems Songs of My PilgrimageHer poems Willie Mill’s Burn and Three Score and Ten were included in One Hundred Modern Scottish Poets by David Herschell Edwards.