Janet Hamilton


Janet Hamilton was a nineteenth-century Scottish poet.

Life

She was born as Janet Thomson at Carshill, Shotts parish, Lanarkshire in October 1795, the daughter of a shoemaker and Mary Thomson. She was a descendant of John Whitelaw, the forfeited covenanter from Shotts. At the age of three her family moved to Hamilton, and then to Langloan, in the parish of Old Monkland, Lanarkshire at the age of seven. For a time her parents became farm labourers, and she span and worked at the tambour-frame. Her father at length settled down in business for himself as a shoemaker, and John Hamilton, one of his young workmen, married Janet in 1809 in High Street, Glasgow, when Janet was thirteen. They lived together at Langloan for about sixty years, and had a family of ten children, seven sons and three daughters, all of whom she taught to read, starting with the alphabet. John Hamilton's sister married Thomas Shanks, from this line of descendants Janet has many living great-great-great-grandnieces and nephews, some of whom are still being named after her.
Having learned to read as a girl, she became familiar with the Bible, with Shakespeare and Milton, with many standard histories, biographies, and essays, and with the poems of Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns. Before she was twenty years old she had written numerous verses on religious themes, but family cares prevented further composition until she was about fifty-four.
Then she began to write essays for a supplement to Cassell's Working Man's Friend, as well as poems in English and Scots and reminiscences of village and rural Scotland during her youth.
During the last 18 years of her life she was blind, and her husband and one of her daughters, Marion, read to her. A son, James, served as her amanuensis.
She died on 27 October 1873, aged 78, having never been "more than twenty miles from her dwelling".
A large crowd of people attended her funeral, and a memorial fountain has been placed nearly opposite her cottage.
She was buried in Old Monklands Cemetery in Coatbridge on 30 October 1873. Also on her tombstone is her husband James, her sons James and Archibald, and Marion with Janet's grandson through Marion, George Hamilton.

Works