Though not well known during her lifetime, Ellen Johnston has nevertheless found a following as scholars have become increasingly interested in both noncanonical women writers and working-class poets of the nineteenth century. While female poets such as Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon have garnered increased attention, as have poets who wrote about the working classes, such as Thomas Hood and Thomas Cooper, Johnston is a poet who transcends both categories, as a noncanonical female poet who was both working class and who wrote many poems about working-class life. As an authentic "factory girl," Johnston had a genuine working-class perspective that few other poets in nineteenth-century Britain possessed.

The details of Johnston's early life are sketchy, and even in her Autobiography the information is vague and ill defined. Born at Muir Wynd, Hamilton, Scotland, on an indeterminate date in 1835, Ellen Johnston was the only child of James Johnston, a...