ABSTRACT
Glasgow-born 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. Physical deprivation and poor housing in his itinerant early years, together with a ‘furtive, flickering, “will o’ the wisp” existence’ contributed to the lung disease that killed him at thirty. Macfarlan’s life and work manifest aspects of the incongruous crush of contradictions and oppositions that Hugh MacDiarmid has identified as the prime characteristic of Scotland, and the Scots. Macfarlan is a Jekyll and Hyde conundrum, a walking paradox described by Colin Rae-Brown as seeming to possess ‘two separate and distinct individualities: one soaring high in the sunny empyrean of the sacred Nine, the other grovelling in the dingiest purlieus of the populous “City by the Clyde” … Predisposed to consumption, wan and dejected of visage, always meanly clad, and continually craving “assistance”, he generally got a “wide berth” in the daylight. At night, however, he was only too warmly welcomed at the public house, and too frequently regaled with whisky’. Macfarlan’s response was resigned: ‘beggars canna be choosers, and when I feel a sinking within, surely whisky is better than naething’ (Poetical Works (1882), p. vii). 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). Rejection reduced him to the desolate conclusion that suicide was ‘almost a necessity, and death a relief’ (Lyrics of Life, p. vii), but his efforts were partially rewarded when Charles Dickens, ‘the prince of editors’, published ‘Northern Lights’ (q.v.) and several other poems in Household Words. Determined and desperate, 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). Macfarlan’s glamorized figuration of the labouring man as titanic hero in ‘The Lords of Labour’ caused Thackeray to exclaim that ‘Burns himself could not have taken the wind out of this man’s sails’, yet in the brutal pandemonium of Macfarlan’s industrial city we see the soul of humanity and, specifically, the 302spirit of the ‘young Boy-Poet’, crushed by the pitiless juggernaut of profit. In ‘The Ruined City’, he evokes an astonishing ‘Poe-like vision, in almost science-fiction terms, of a “city’s blasted heap”’ (Morgan, p. 342). Brian Aldiss has described science fiction as the collision of hubris and nemesis in a characteristically Gothic context. Macfarlan’s surreal images of post-apocalyptic devastation exude a menacing fatalism that extends the bounds of the sic transit gloria theme in his shaping predecessors, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley. His sombre dreamscape of exploded grandeur probes the exposed nerve of nineteenth-century insecurities about human degeneration, even as it foreshadows the nihilistic tenor of James Thomson’s ‘City of Dreadful Night’. To the hapless Macfarlan, humiliated by poverty and galled bitterly by rejection, cosmic visions of mankind’s fall into dateless night may have offered some cathartic relief. 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. No copy of this work is known to have survived.
