Whether we would want to claim him is a question for another day, but it seems that the famously bad Scottish poet William McGonagall, who was born 200 years ago this month, may in fact have been Irish.
He was certainly of Irish stock, as noted in his autobiographical writings, which are marked by some of the same eccentricity as his verse:
“My dear readers of this autobiography, which I am the author of, I beg leave to inform you that I was born in Edinburgh. My parents were born in Ireland, and my father was a handloom weaver ...”
He has something in common, therefore, with James Connolly, if in mirror image. Although Connolly was born in Edinburgh, he recorded his place of birth on a British census as “Monaghan”, where his parents originated.
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By contrast, the adult McGonagall always claimed an Edinburgh birth, whereas the 1841 census records him having been born, like his parents, in Ireland.
Biographers suggest there may have been economic motivation for his version, since a native Scot was entitled to better treatment under the Poor Law (Scotland) Act of 1845.
It was poverty, or at least the scarcity of weaver’s work in Dundee where he then lived, that drove McGonagall to poetry in middle age. And yet, as he told it, the late vocation came to him in an epiphany not unlike St Paul’s on the road to Damascus.
“I seemed to feel a strange kind of feeling stealing over me, and remained so for about five minutes,” he recalled. “A flame, as Lord Byron has said, seemed to kindle up my entire frame ... It was so strong, I imagined that a pen was in my right hand, and a voice crying, `Write! Write'!”
That was 1877. Two years later, he composed the epic for which he remains most notorious and which, like many of his works, concerned a disaster.
Where WB Yeats drew from Celtic mythology, McGonagall was inspired by shipwrecks – at least 20 feature in his work. Conflagrations were another favourite theme. And Dundee being full of highly flammable textile warehouses, his muse was as busy as the fire brigade.
But it is for his description of a rail crash, The Tay Bridge Disaster, that he is best (or worst) remembered. The opening verse encapsulates his unique style: “Beautiful railway bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!/Alas! I am very sorry to say/That ninety lives have been taken away/On the last Sabbath day of 1879,/Which will be remembered for a very long time.”
The poem even features what could be a consultant’s report on the disaster, recommending reforms:
“I must now conclude my lay/telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,/That your central girders would not have given way,/At least many sensible men do say,/Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,/At least many sensible men confesses,/For the stronger we our houses do build,/The less chance we have of being killed.”
The mention of hearing “voices” in his epiphany might suggest psychiatric problems. And like many awkward historical figures, McGonagall has been posthumously diagnosed with something on the autism/Asperger spectrum, at least.
But whatever the reason, he seems to have been unaffected by any amount of criticism. He nurtured such a high opinion of himself that when the then poet laureate Tennyson died in 1892, he sought to replace him. Tactfully, Queen Victoria was not in when he called.
McGonagall’s public performances drew raucous crowds. His fans seemed to consider him a stand-up comic, although he also sang and acted – Shakespearean tragedy being a speciality. Whether audiences were laughing with him or at him is not always clear. Either way, he played along.
An 1879 review in the Dundee Courier described a concert where he performed his Irish ballad The Rattling Boy from Dublin: the narrator of which eulogises his girlfriend (“Her eyes they were as black as sloes/She had black hair and an aquiline nose.”), then fights off a rival suitor with his “darlin’ shillelagh”.
McGonagall followed that up with a recital of Hamlet and, having neglected to include his classic in the regular programme, acceded to demands for the Tay Bridge Disaster as an encore.
At the end, audience members “crowded on the platform and almost tore the Poet to pieces in their enthusiasm. A number of ardent spirits also lingered in the court outside, determined to carry him shoulder high to his home.”
Most mediocre poets are mercifully forgotten. McGonagall may have lacked even the modicum of talent that would have guaranteed such long-term obscurity. He was so bad, as the Book of Heroic Failures puts it, “he backed unwittingly into genius”.
But his strange immortality was foreshadowed by one of his early theatrical roles when, in 1858, he played the title role in Macbeth. In the climactic fight with Macduff, he was noticeably reluctant to die, ignoring as jealousy the prompts to get on with it from an enraged actor opposite.
The crowd encouraged him until an upset threatened. and Macduff muttered: “Fool! Why don’t you fall?” Then McGonagall did finally fall, as required by the script. But his persistence had paid off in audience acclaim and, as he later boasted, “I had to come before the curtain and receive an ovation”.
