Ellen Johnston (1835–1873?), “The Factory Girl”

Ellen Johnston’s life reads like a Victorian novel in miniature: a story of abandonment, survival, resilience, and the quiet rebellion of a working-class poet.

Born in Glasgow in 1835, Johnston was the only child of James and Mary Johnston. Her father, a stonemason and occasional poet,^[1] emigrated to America when she was still an infant, leaving behind a wife who refused to follow him and a daughter whose early life would be shaped by hardship.^[2]

Johnston’s childhood was marked by violence, poverty, and the kind of suffering that rarely made its way into polite Victorian literature. After her mother remarried, she endured abuse, both physical and likely sexual, at the hands of her stepfather, a power-loom worker.^[3] When she was just ten years old, he sent her to work in a weaving factory, hoping to stifle her appetite for reading and writing.^[4] The move reflected broader anxieties about working-class literacy and women’s intellectual independence.^[5] Yet even in the clatter of the factory, Johnston’s drive to write could not be extinguished. Like other working-class poets such as Christian Milne,^[6] Elizabeth Hands,^[7] Robert Bloomfield,^[8] and Gerald Massey,^[9] she carved out a space for herself in defiance of the social forces that sought to silence her.

At seventeen, Johnston gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Mary Achenvole—an event that could have erased her from respectable society. Refusing to accept the label of “fallen woman,” she later recounted her experience in her Autobiography, where she insisted on her innocence and her right to be both mother and writer.^[10]

Ill health kept Johnston out of the factories from 1852 to 1857, but this period allowed her to begin publishing poetry in Glasgow newspapers. One of her early patriotic poems, “Lord Raglan’s Address to the Allied Armies,” prompted a financial gift from Lord Raglan himself,^[11] a rare moment of establishment recognition for a working-class woman writer.

Johnston’s most significant literary support came through her collaboration with Alexander Campbell, editor of the Glasgow Sentinel and the Penny Post.^[12] Campbell, known for his radical politics and advocacy of working-class writers, invited Johnston to contribute regularly to his publications. In the “Poet’s Corner” of the Penny Post,^[13] she published not only her own poems but also engaged in lively exchanges with other writers and readers. This space allowed Johnston to develop both her literary voice and her political consciousness, speaking to readers who shared her experience of industrial labor and economic precarity.^[14]

In 1867, Johnston published Autobiography, Poems and Songs of Ellen Johnston, The Factory Girl, followed by a second edition in 1869. The volume was an unusual achievement for a working-class woman: part memoir, part poetry collection, it offered readers both her life story and her creative work.^[15] Later editions softened or omitted some of her more candid reflections on abuse and the birth of her daughter,^[16] but the central themes of resilience and injustice remained.

Despite moments of recognition, including modest financial support from Prime Minister Disraeli and Queen Victoria,^[17] Johnston’s life remained shaped by poverty and social exclusion. In 1863, she successfully sued an employer for back wages,^[18] an act that won her few friends among her co-workers, who already viewed her literary ambitions with suspicion. When Campbell died in 1870,^[19] Johnston lost her strongest advocate and, with him, the public platform that had sustained her poetry. By 1873, or possibly 1874, she died in a Glasgow poorhouse at the age of thirty-eight.^[20] The fate of her daughter is unknown.

By the time of her death, Johnston’s book had sold several hundred copies,^[21] a modest but noteworthy accomplishment for a woman of her background. Her poetry remains striking for its range: she wrote on labor and industrial life (“The Workman for Ever”), national identity and exile (“The Exile of Poland”), romantic betrayal, maternal devotion (“A Mother’s Love”), and the political upheavals of her time. She moved between personal lyricism and sharp social critique, often using Scottish dialect alongside Standard English to challenge assumptions about who could be a poet and what counted as literature.^[22]

Johnston’s legacy is complicated. She was never fully embraced by the literary establishment, yet her work continues to speak to readers interested in the intersections of class, gender, and creative expression.^[23] Her poems remind us that literature was not, and is not, the preserve of the privileged.