Early Life
Smith, Alexander (1829–1867), poet and essayist, was the eldest of six children born to John Smith (fl. 1800–1890) and Christina née Murray (fl. 1810–1880), only two of whom outlived them. Alexander was born on 31 December 1829 in Kilmarnock, where his father designed printing blocks for calico and muslin. Shortly after the birth of a daughter the family moved to Paisley, where Smith's brief education commenced, and about 1838 they arrived in Glasgow.
Little is known about Smith's formal education except that by the age of eleven he had left John Street School, Glasgow, and was working alongside his father, learning the art of pattern drawing for the burgeoning muslin trade. He summed up his schooling as ‘reading, writing, arithmetic never could learn, and English Grammar imperfectly with a slight knowledge of Geography, and a considerable stock of Biblical History. Whatever the shortcomings of a parish-school education it must have provided Smith with the basic tool of literacyHis wide knowledge of English poetry in particular was commented on by many of the literary and academic figures whom he encountered in later life.
The next twelve years were spent working long hours in ramshackle premises in the centre of an early Victorian manufacturing city during the cotton boom of the 1840s. Smith later wrote evocatively about the highs and lows of growing up in such an environment. More about the working conditions as well as his annual trades fortnight, usually by paddle steamer to a Clyde resort, can be gleaned from the largely autobiographical ‘A Boy's Poem’ (City Poems, 1857).
Smith was self-taught and he set about the task systematically. Along with a dozen or so young apprentices and others aspiring to middle-class mores he instituted and was the first secretary of the Glasgow Addisonian Literary Society. The minute book of this avowedly evangelical young men's improvement society has survived, showing that it met on a Saturday evening in the upstairs room of a Candleriggs coffee house between 1847 and 1852. It was here that Smith learnt to compose and deliver essays on such diverse topics as ‘Earnestness’ and ‘Whether has the poet or legislator the greater influence on the community?’
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