Scottish Authors > William Alexander Novelist, Social Historian & Journalist 1826-1894

Alexander was born on 12th June 1826 at the farm of Westerhouses, Rescivet, in the Garioch, the first son of Anne Wilson of Old Rayne and James Alexander whose family had been tenant farmers in Aberdeenshire since the seventeenth century. His career as a farmer ended at the age of twenty, when a serious accident led to the loss of a leg. Through membership of the Mutual Instruction Union he met the writer William McCombie and in 1852 became the reporter on his newspaper, the North of Scotland Gazette, shortly afterwards entitled the Aberdeen Free Press.

Alexander's novel Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk, begun as a serial in the Free Press on 28th September 1869, won fame as a classic of vernacular Scots. It was re-published in book form in 1871 and has seldom been out of print since.

But Alexander shunned self-publicity so effectively that the full extent of his writing has only recently been appreciated. This included five further novels which were published as serials in his own paper between 1852 and 1877, including The Laird of Drammochdyle, Ravenshowe and the residenters therein, and My Uncle the Baillie. These discoveries establish Johnny Gibb as the central novel in an epic sequence covering more than a century of social and economic change.

Alexander abandoned standard literary Scots in favour of demotic spoken forms, and his political outlook was similarly radical. He tackled the burning issues of the day - exploitation of the workers, unemployment, public health, the evils of landlordism and corruption in local government. In My Uncle the Baillie, a young apprentice is quizzed about his prospects in an obviously venal environment:

"We're jist settin' on to hatch a new brodmill o' toon cooncillors, but ye've nae public spirit ava; fat greater object o' public ambition can be set afore an apirin' youth than to busy 'imsel' I' the toon's affairs, win into the Cooncil, takin' fat share he can get o' the scran, an'. Feenally sit doon wi a baillie's chyne aneth's chowks?"

His work demonstrates the presence of a sophisticated literary realism in a tradition previously dismissed as having dwindled into Kailyard sentimentality. It is central to the revaluation of nineteenth century Scottish literature now taking place.

William Alexander became editor of the Free Press in 1870, and later vice-president of the Institute of Journalists. He was a council member of the New Spalding Club and the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, and was active in many projects for the benefit of the City. In 1886 he was awarded an LLD by the University of Aberdeen. He died in Aberdeen on 19th February, 1894, and is commemorated by a handsome monument in Nellfield Cemetery.

William Donaldson

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