Alexander Smith was a Scottish poet, labelled as one of the Spasmodic School, and essayist.
Background
Alexander Smith was born at Kilmarnock on the 31st of December 1830. He was the eldest of eight, possibly nine, children born to John Smith (1803-1884) and Christina née Murray (1804-1881). John Smith was a pattern designer for the textile trade; he worked variously in Paisley and in Kilmarnock, where Alexander was born, before moving to Glasgow when Alexander was about eight years old.
Education
His parents being too poor to send him to college, he was placed in a linen factory to follow his father's trade of a pattern designer.
Career
His early poems appeared in the Glasgow Citizen, in whose editor, James Hedderwick, he found a sympathizing and appreciative friend. A Life Drama and other Poems (1853) was a work of promise, ran through several editions, and gained Smith the appointment of secretary to Edinburgh University in 1854. As a poet he was one of the leading representatives of what was called the "Spasmodic" School, now fallen into oblivion. Smith, P. J. Bailey and Sydney Dobell were satirized by W. E. Aytoun in 1854 in Firmilian: a Spasmodic Tragedy. In the same year Sydney Dobell came to Edinburgh, and an acquaintanceship at once sprang up between the two, which resulted in their collaboration in a book of War Sonnets (1855), inspired by the Crimean War. After publishing City Poems (1857) and Edwin of Deira (1861), a Northumbrian epic poem, Smith turned his attention to prose, and published Dreamihorp: Essays written in the Country (1863) and A Summer in Skye. His last work was an experiment in fiction, Alfred Hagart's Household (1866), which ran first through Good Words. He died on the 5th of January. 1867.
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
"Stirling, like a huge brooch clasps Highlands and Lowlands together".
"In Scotland one is continually coming into contact with an unreasonable prejudice against English manners, institutions, and forms of thought; and in her expression of these prejudices Scotland is frequently neither great nor dignified. There is a narrowness and touchiness about her which is more frequently found in villages than in great cities. She continually suspects that the Englishman is about to touch her thistle rudely, or to take liberties with her unicorn. "
Personality
He contracted diphtheria in November 1866. That became compounded with typhoid fever. By the end of the year he seemed to be rallying but the combination was too much. He died at home on 5 January 1867 aged thirty-seven, and was buried five days later in Warriston Cemetery.
Connections
On 24 April 1857 Smith married Flora Nicolson Macdonald (1829–1873), at Ord House, her parents' home on Sleat peninsula in Skye.
Alexander and Flora had five children: Flora Macdonald; Jessie Catherine (Murray) went to Australia where she married James Morris; Charles Kenneth Macleod;
Marcella MacLellan (1864-1865) (7 months); Isabella Mary Macdonald went to an uncle at Ord; she married Dr James Pender Smith.
With Alexander's death, Flora's life turned to tragedy. Her mother had died the previous summer. Now, in the space of three months and a few days, she lost her husband, her father, and her eldest child. Only two months after that, McCulloch, who was probably the family's best friend in Edinburgh, died. McCulloch's widow, Flora's cousin, left for Australia, and died on the voyage. Flora, who had come from a beautiful and fairly isolated place, was left in a Victorian metropolis with three small children. She died in 1873, aged forty-four; her death certificate gives the causes of death as cardiac disease, apoplexy and alcoholism.