Ellen Johnston

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Standard Name: Johnston, Ellen
Birth Name: Ellen Johnston
Pseudonym: Factory Girl
EJ is one of the few working-class Victorian women whose poetry made it into print in volume form. Along with her autobiography, her poems provide invaluable evidence of the limited opportunities—material, social, and discursive—available to an independent and articulate woman of the industrial working classes at that time in Scotland, as well as testimony to the powerful sense of pride in her community and her own abilities that sustained her will to write. Her work has recently received serious critical attention after more than a century of neglect.

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Timeline

March 1848: Six men were killed when troops opened fire...

Building item

March 1848

Six men were killed when troops opened fire on riots against the Poor Law in Glasgow.
Klaus, H. Gustav. Factory Girl: Ellen Johnston and Working-Class Poetry in Victorian Scotland. Peter Lang, 1998.
24

By 23 November 1861: A hosiery-maker from Leicester, Ruth Wills,...

Women writers item

By 23 November 1861

A hosiery-maker from Leicester, Ruth Wills , published Lays of Lowly Life.
Boos, Florence S. “The ’Queen’ of the ’Far-Famed Penny Post’: ’The Factory Girl Poet’ and Her Audience”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
10
, No. 3, 2003, pp. 503-26.
Boos 526
Boos, Florence S. “The ’Queen’ of the ’Far-Famed Penny Post’: ’The Factory Girl Poet’ and Her Audience”. Women’s Writing, Vol.
10
, No. 3, 2003, pp. 503-26.
Boos 521

Texts

Johnston, Ellen. Autobiography, Poems, and Songs. William Love, 1867.
Johnston, Ellen. Autobiography, Poems, and Songs. 2nd ed., William Love, 1869.