ABSTRACT
Some fifteen years after her death a monument was erected in Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh, to the memory of Mary Pyper, a woman who ‘cherished her gift as a writer of sacred verse’ under ‘untoward circumstances’ (Edwards, p. 286). Ill-luck and adversity had surrounded Pyper and her family from the earliest times. She was a ‘very puny child––almost a dwarf ’, and is unkindly described as being ‘of most peculiar appearance’ (Edwards, p. 285). Her clock-maker father, although ‘much undersized’ for military service, was press-ganged into the army when she was a baby, and he died soon after. His widow and her child moved from their home in Greenock to a small room in Edinburgh where the mother ‘earned a meagre living by shoebinding’ and Pyper, though habituated to ill health and ‘quite unfitted for hard work’, was apprenticed for three years to learn lacemaking; afterwards working for many years as a button-maker and in a trimming shop (Edwards, p. 284). When Pyper’s mother, her ‘only friend and companion’, became chronically ill, she bore the full burden of nursing care, even denying herself ‘the recreation of an evening walk after the shop closed’. During her long night vigils Pyper began to write poetry, finding solace and ‘no small enjoyment in the work’ (Sacred Poems, p. xiv). In Select Pieces (1847), the first of Pyper’s two volumes of verse, the author speaks of the ‘six sorrowing years’ spent by her mother’s ‘couch of pain’ (‘Apology of the Authoress for her Muse’). The ‘one event of Mary’s history’ was her mother’s death, yet even the desolation she felt at her loss was compounded by the crushing effort of paying off final debts of nine pounds. The significance of this amount becomes clear when reckoned against the six shillings a week that Pyper earned as a lacemaker, or the meagre three and a half pence she was paid for the ‘deeply fatiguing’ work of hand stitching a shirt, ‘full-sized and full-breasted’. Pyper had been thought ‘too feeble’ to go to school and was educated at home by her mother; together they studied history and ‘all the poetry she could get hold of … Shakespeare, Milton, Cowper, Scott’, and her favourite, Dryden (Edwards, p. 285). But as a ‘slave of the needle’, the poem that she felt spoke most truthfully of her situation was Thomas Hood’s diatribe against the exploitation of seamstresses, the ‘Song of the Shirt’ (1843). Pyper’s eyesight eventually began to fail and she was reduced 222to working as a street pedlar, selling buttons and fringes from a basket; losing even this ‘uncertain’ livelihood when blindness descended. Latterly she was forced to rely on the charity of her fellow worshippers at St. Columba’s Church and though help was willingly given, they declared it difficult to answer the needs of a woman who ‘never asks for anything and never complains’ (Sacred Poems, p. xv.). The unremitting harshness of Pyper’s existence made divine consolation an essential ark for the soul and her best redress against suffering. Unlike her politically outspoken counterpart, Janet Hamilton (q.v.), Pyper’s gaze is resolutely focussed on the eternal world to come and her tone is typically quiescent. She differs also in adhering to what Leonard describes as the ‘diction of governance’, anglophone, monoglot, ‘respectable’ (Burns she found ‘rather coarse’). Valentina Bold notes the ‘wry humour’ in ‘On Asking a Lady to Subscribe’, but takes exception to Pyper’s fundamentalist response to a cholera epidemic: ‘God’s pestilence’, and is alienated by her ‘unsavoury’ subject matter (Bold, p. 252). To a modern secular reader, descanting on the spiritual sublime may be acceptable, but Pyper’s contemplation of a dead child as a nascent ‘infant cherub’ (‘On the Death of an Infant’) is less so. Pyper’s faith is so absolute that in her meditative moods she appears resigned, even sanguine in ‘preparing for the tomb’ (Edwards, p. 286). The Church was her chief comfort in more than spiritual matters, however. A ‘neatly got-up’ volume of her poems, with an introduction by Dean Ramsay, was published in 1865. The printer and publisher willingly worked without payment so that all profits should be devoted to the author. The result ‘was so successful that the proceeds were the chief support of her old age’ (Edwards, p. 286).
