Career
While still a youth Wright composed fifteen hundred lines of a tragedy entitled ‘Mahomet, or the Hegira,’ which he was forced to retain in his memory until he learned to write at the age of seventeen. In 1824 he proceeded to Glasgow, carrying with him ‘The Retrospect’ and some smaller poems. On his arrival he saw John Struthers and Dugald Moore, who approved his work and assisted him to go to Edinburgh.
There he found patrons in ‘Christopher North’ and Henry Glassford Bell, who helped him to obtain a publisher.
‘The Retrospect’ appeared in 1825, and was lauded by the ‘Quarterly Review’ and the ‘Monthly Review,’ as well as by Scottish journals. Some shorter poems which were published with it had the higher honour of being praised by Sir Walter Scott.
Finding his means scanty he printed a second edition of the ‘Retrospect’ two or three years later, and made a tour through Scotland selling copies. He found that his fame was extensive, and the discovery was his ruin.
The hospitality he received encouraged habits of intemperance which, a few months after his return to Cambuslang, completely mastered him.
In 1843 he made a determined effort to regulate his life. He had a genuine poetic gift and an intense appreciation of natural beauty. His more ambitious pieces were marred by an artificial imitation of Lord Byron, but his shorter poems, reflecting the emotions of his own life, were happier.
He gave evidence of powers of memory by reciting the whole of the 119th Psalm in the Sabbath school to the discomfort of his audience.
From the age of seven he assisted his father in driving coals, and at thirteen he was apprenticed to George Brown, a Galston weaver, a man of cultivated mind, who assisted his education and placed books at his disposal.
