Alexander Smith (poet) - Middle Age Life

Middle Age Life

On 24 April 1857 Smith married Flora Macdonald (1829/30–1873) at Ord House on the Isle of Skye, a part of the world he had been introduced to by Sheriff Alexander Nicolson and also by Horatio McCulloch who had painted a number of studies of the Cuillins, visible from the Macdonald house. Flora, related indirectly to the saviour of Bonnie Prince Charlie, also had relatives in Edinburgh. The couple had to return to Edinburgh soon after the wedding (via a steamer trip to Oban), but it was to Skye that they would return every August for the nine remaining years of the poet's life. These visits, as well as providing the raw material for his best-known work, were to prove essential to sustaining his creativity.

The latter years of his life were characterized by extreme financial worry. A large house at Wardie, overlooking the Forth (bought for them by Flora's uncle, a Skye-dwelling nabob with an indigo works near Calcutta), must have been a drain and by 1866 Flora had borne four children. Smith began to complain of giddiness and spots before the eyes as his literary labours increased. When Smith complained to some of his closest friends of feeling debilitated few believed him. David Masson described him in 1865: ‘Latterly he became stouter about the shoulders and more manly-looking, with a tendency to baldness over the forehead which gave a better impression of mental power. But the most remarkable thing about him was his wonderful quietness of demeanour’. Smith contracted diphtheria in November 1866 and, although he seemed to have recovered by Christmas, he was struck down by typhus that proved too much for his weakened constitution. He died at home on 5 January 1867 at the very beginning of his thirty-seventh year, and was buried six days later in Warriston cemetery, Edinburgh.