Robert Anderson (poet) facts for kids
Robert Anderson (1770–1833) was an English poet from Carlisle. He grew up in a working-class family. He became famous for his ballad-style poems, which he wrote in the local Cumbrian dialect.
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Robert Anderson's Early Life
Robert Anderson was born on February 1, 1770. He was the youngest of nine children. His parents were already quite old when he was born. He went to different schools, including a charity school near the cathedral. He didn't stay at any school for very long. By the age of ten, he had learned to read, write, and do basic math. He then started working to help his family. His first job was with his older brother, who was a calico printer.
Robert had a talent for art. In 1783, he became an apprentice to a pattern drawer. This person designed patterns for fabrics. He later moved to London for five years to get more training. While there, he began writing poems. His first poem was "Lucy Gray of Allendale." Other poems he wrote that year were set to music by the composer James Hook. These songs were performed in 1794 and were quite popular.
Robert Anderson's Writing Career
In 1796, Robert returned to Carlisle to support his father. He found work with a company there. Two years later, his English poems, called Poems on Various Subjects, were published. People bought them by subscribing (paying in advance). After this, he started writing funny, lighthearted poems in the Cumbrian dialect. The first collection of these, Ballads in the Cumbrian dialect, came out in Carlisle in 1805. Robert loved music, so he even wrote the music for many of his own poems.
In 1808, after his father passed away, Robert moved to a new job near Belfast. On his way, he visited the grave of Robert Burns, a famous poet who greatly influenced him. While in Belfast, Robert published poems in local newspapers. He wrote a series of four "Enigmas" for the Belfast Commercial Chronicle. These riddles became very popular and started a short trend of similar poems.
Robert eventually had to return to England because the calico printing business was struggling. He received a warm welcome back in Carlisle. To help him financially, a new collection of his poems, The Poetical Works of Robert Anderson, was published in 1820. He wrote a story about his own life for this book. Over 1,000 people bought this edition. Famous poets like Robert Southey (who was the poet laureate at the time) and William Wordsworth were among the subscribers.
Later Years and Legacy
In his final years, Robert faced financial difficulties. However, his friends helped him, so he didn't end up in a workhouse. He died on September 26, 1833, at the age of 63. He was buried at Carlisle Cathedral. A memorial was put up there with his picture and an inscription. It said he was "the Cumberland Bard."
Later, in 1904, a special edition of Anderson’s Cumberland Ballads and Songs was published to mark 100 years since his first dialect poems. In 1933, a souvenir called Robert Anderson, the Cumberland Bard celebrated 100 years since his death. Today, you can see two pictures of Robert and his death mask at the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery. There's also a portrait of him that is thought to be by John Hazlitt.
Poems in Cumbrian Dialect
Robert Anderson helped make English dialect poetry popular. However, his 1805 Ballads were not the first. John Stagg had published his Miscellaneous Poems the year before. Because they both wrote about the region, Stagg was called ‘The Cumbrian Minstrel’ and Anderson ‘The Cumberland Bard’. But even they followed earlier writers like Susanna Blamire, who was known as the ‘Cumberland Muse’ in the 18th century. Susanna, who came from a wealthy family, wrote songs in Scots that were set to music by Joseph Haydn. Her work in Cumbrian dialect was not as well known until Robert Anderson made it popular.
Other educated writers in the 18th century also used dialect in their poems. One of the first was Rev. Josiah Relph. He wrote poems about country life around 1735. He purposefully used local language to make his poems feel more real. These poems were published after he died in A Miscellany of Poems (1747). Rev. Robert Nelson followed him with A choice collection of poems in Cumberland dialect (1780). Ewan Clark, another writer from that time, also included a few dialect poems in his Miscellaneous Poems (1779).
In 1805, the same year Anderson's Ballads in the Cumbrian dialect came out, a third edition of Relph's poems was also published. Robert Anderson himself had sent a copy of Relph's 1797 edition to a friend. Later, collections of poems called anthologies included the work of these earlier writers. They also featured poems by some of Anderson's friends. These books always highlighted their connection to Cumbria. One such collection was Ballads in the Cumberland dialect, chiefly by R. Anderson (1808). This book included poems by Miss Blamire, other female writers, Ewan Clark, and Mark Lonsdale. It also had woodcuts (pictures made from wood carvings) that looked like the work of Thomas Bewick. Many of the poems in this book were dialogues (conversations between characters), showing the influence of earlier country-style poetry. A larger collection of dialect poems, Dialogues, poems, songs, and ballads, by various writers, in the Westmoreland and Cumberland dialects, was published in London in 1839.
Robert Anderson's Poems
Robert Anderson also wrote long story poems in standard English. These were included with his dialect poems in the 1820 book Poetical Works. However, many of his handwritten poems were never published. After he died, about 130 more of his dialect poems were added to Anderson’s Cumberland Ballads (1840). He even wrote an opera called "The Chief of Skye," but it was never published and isn't well-known today.
Mark Huggins, a writer, said that Robert Anderson "was a man of the people." This means he wrote about everyday people. Most of his songs were about real individuals whose names appear in old records. He celebrated the small towns, farms, fairs, and markets of the area. He wrote about the lives of the people there: their work, their loves, their parties, drinking, dancing, and even cockfights. His ballads are full of interesting human stories and playful humor. He made fun of silly things without being mean to the people he wrote about.
A few of his ballads became so popular that people remembered them by heart and passed them down through generations. Folk song collectors found four of his poems in the early 1900s that are still considered classics: "Barbary Bell," "Sally Gray," "The Blackwell Merry Night," and "Canny Cumberland." Sometimes, when songs are passed down by word of mouth, the words change. A big change happened to "Jenny’s Complaint." It was changed to fit the mining life in southern Cumbria and became known as "The Recruited Collier." It was even sung without the music Robert Anderson wrote for it.
Robert Anderson's very first poem, "Lucy Gray of Allendale," also shows how poems can influence others. There's a bit of confusion because William Wordsworth also wrote a famous poem called "Lucy Gray." Wordsworth said his poem was based on a story about a girl who got lost in the snow. However, some people think he might have been thinking of another poem called "The Farmer’s Daughter." Robert Anderson's "Lucy Gray" was based on a story he heard about a beautiful village girl who died at seventeen. Her lover followed her to the grave. This story is similar to another of Wordsworth's "Lucy poems," "She dwelt among the untrodden ways."
The similarities between Anderson's and Wordsworth's poems are clear, especially in Wordsworth's first draft. Both poems have a similar number of stanzas and start with flower images. Wordsworth later removed some parts, making his poem shorter. In Wordsworth's poem, you only find out the speaker is Lucy's lover at the very end. But in Anderson's poem, this is clear much earlier. Wordsworth never said that Anderson influenced him. The only proof that Wordsworth knew about Anderson is that he bought the 1820 Poetical Works.
Robert Anderson started writing when poems in the Scots dialect, like those by Robert Burns, were very popular. Anderson first felt like writing because he disliked songs "written in a mock pastoral Scottish style" that he heard in London. But this didn't stop him from writing in a similar, less pure Scots dialect himself. Besides his English songs set by James Hook, he wrote several others in this Scots style. These included "Donald of Dundee," "Bonny Jem," "Muirland Willy," "Dearly I love Johnny O," and "The Press Gang." He also used this dialect later in a poem written as a letter to Robert Burns. After Anderson died, some of his songs were published alongside Burns's in a small, cheap book called Burns' songs and Anderson's Cumberland ballads (1839). Compared to his Scots writing, Anderson's own Cumbrian dialect work was more original and brought him greater success.
See also
- List of 18th-century British working-class writers
