Poems, Literary Prose, and Journalism of Alexander Wilson
by
Introduction
Over the course of a life shaped by economic and political upheaval and curtailed by poverty and illness, Alexander Wilson fashioned himself from a manual laborer into a popular poet and then into one of the pre-eminent men of science, art, and letters in the early American republic. Most famous today for his nine-volume work on American birds (The American Ornithology, 1808-1813), a monumental achievement that has led many historians to call him “the father” of the long and deep tradition of American ornithology, Wilson as a young man also played a unique and significant supporting role in the development of Scottish literary culture at the end of the eighteenth century. Considered in isolation, each of Wilson’s two careers deserves (and has attracted) careful consideration by specialists in Scottish Studies, literary history, labor history, and the history of science. Conjoined as they are in his life—consider the continuities, for example, between his early stint as a peddler around Paisley and his scientific and literary travelogues in the service of American natural history—they yield even more valuable insight into the character and fate of Scottish nationalism and the origins and aims of early national science in the U. S. His transatlantic body of poetry, journalism, and science draw together strands of folk poetry, democratic advocacy, and love of the Scottish and American landscapes like no other figure of his era.
Wilson was born to Alexander (“Saunders”) Wilson and Mary M’Nab, both of whom were struggling to leave behind their families’ traditional professions of illicit distilling and smuggling of goods from Britain’s overseas colonies into the domestic market. The trade in silk gauze, over which Paisley held the monopoly, was booming in the 1760s and early 1770s, and the elder Wilson went to work as weaver in one of the many “mills” (usually a shed with a loom or two) in Paisley and neighboring towns. Weaving was well-paid work at the time, with average wages roughly triple those of a tradesman and more than twenty times those of a domestic servant, and during Alexander’s childhood the Wilson family enjoyed a materially comfortable existence. This economic stability translated into cultural and intellectual refinement, notably through the many weavers’ societies that formed to discuss fields of common interest (particularly literature, politics, natural history, and outdoors pursuits) and build libraries and other infrastructure of civil society. Little “Sandy” or “Sannie,” the youngest of five children, spent his days rambling through the countryside, swimming and fishing in the River Cart, and training for a life in the church ministry at the Paisley Grammar School. Among his closest schoolboy friends were relatives of Reverend Dr. John Witherspoon, the foremost Presbyterian minister in the country, a well-known advocate for democratic reform in the Church of Scotland, and later the president of Princeton College (then the College of New Jersey) and a signer of the American Declaration of Independence. Reverend Witherspoon had been induced to leave Scotland in 1767 in part by a series of humiliating experiences with the legal system, where he lost a libel suit brought against him by local young men whom he had denounced from the pulpit and in the press for participating in an antireligious prank. Moral, political, and economic changes had begun to undermine the church’s authority within Scottish society, and Wilson’s own career far from the seminary would eventually bear witness to all of these shifts. The association with the Witherspoons was also the first of many indications that Wilson’s fate was linked to America. His tenth birthday was marked by the death of his mother and by the signing of the Declaration of Independence, both of which in the short term led to a steep drop in his fortunes. The beginning of the war interrupted trade with the colonies, and the Paisley silk weavers suffered from the loss of their most dependable customers. Wilson’s father, who had quickly remarried a widow and was now saddled with eight children, pulled Alexander out of school and sent him to work as a cowherd on a farm ten miles from town. The three years of lonely work in uninhabited fields around Beith gave the young Wilson ample time to read, daydream, and hunt, and sharpened his practical and literary attachments to the natural landscape and its wild inhabitants.
In the summer of 1779, Wilson was indentured as an apprentice in the weaving shed of his brother-in-law, William Duncan, in his first formal initiation into a profession he would come to loathe. A stanza written on the back of his indenture papers sheds some light on the regime of repetitive manual labor and corporal punishment that characterized his teen years.
Be’t kent to a’ the warld, in rhyme,
That wi’ right meikle wark an’ toil,
For three lang years I’ve ser’t my time.
Whiles feasted wi’ the hazel oil.
August, 1782
As soon as his three-year contractual obligation was fulfilled, Wilson rejoined his father’s new family, who were now living in the ruins of the ancient Tower of Auchinbathie (once home to William Wallace) and had taken up their old livelihoods of smuggling and distilling. Throughout the 1780s, Wilson continued his self-education while he worked as a journeyman weaver in shops around Renfrewshire, first in the small town of Lochwinnoch and then back in Paisley. In Paisley, Wilson had the good fortune to work alongside David Brodie, a good-humored young man interested, like Wilson, in educating himself to the end of escaping the loom for good. Brodie proved a valuable conversation partner for Wilson, and he was among the first to encourage Wilson’s attempts at poetry writing. Wilson eventually returned to the employ of his brother-in-law and former master, William Duncan, this time less as a weaver than as a peddler carrying woven goods to customers throughout the Scottish countryside. These long rambles allowed Wilson to indulge his interest in the various personalities of rural Scotland, and he often made side trips to learn from the local botanists, poets, and musicians. The spirit of these expeditions is preserved in Wilson’s “Journal as a Pedlar,” a prose piece included in his first book of poems and an important harbinger of the socially and scientifically sensitive travel narratives to come.
Wilson’s earliest poetic influences were Milton and Pope, whose works he committed to memory and imitated in the largely derivative verse of his youth. The lugubrious work of the “Graveyard Poets”—Robert Blair, Edward Young, and Thomas Gray in particular—left its mark on many of his early reflections on mortality and perhaps induced him to add to his large collection of grave rubbings on his peddling trips. Later he studied Oliver Goldsmith’s poetry closely, one indication of a growing interest in village themes. The greatest influence on Wilson, however, was the 1786 publication of Robert Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. The example of Burns encouraged the use of Scottish diction and native subject matter, and soon an entire generation of Scottish poets were finding a new means of expressing not only their native tongue but also their native experiences, relatively free from translation into the forms and conventions of English precursors. Paisley came to be a particular center of this literary explosion, and Wilson stood amidst other local talents—John Robertson, Alexander Tait, Thomas Crichton, George MacIndoe, William Finlayson, James Yool, John MacGregor, David Webster, John Mitchell, Alexander Borland, John Wilson, Gavin Turnbull, James Scadlock, William M’Laren, and Robert Tannahill—in the growing throng of Paisley poets. [1] In addition to witnessing the publication of Burns’s Poems, 1786 marked the near total collapse of the silk industry. As fashions changed, many of the looms in Paisley switched to producing linen, but the independent weavers in surrounding towns who had once supplied Paisley with piece-work were cut off from virtually their entire income. The first major industrial strikes in the weaving industry occurred in Glasgow the following year. Wilson’s unusual poetic focus on not only the agrarian and village scenes of Burns’s poetry but also the quasi-urban intrigues of Paisley and its weaving sheds stands as some of the earliest insider literary treatments of eighteenth-century industrial upheaval. Combining conventional regard for the countryside with evident approval of the mechanization then sweeping over the mill towns, Wilson would frequently return to a vision of rural industry as the ideal economic arrangement.
During the late 1780s, Wilson continued to weave, work as a peddler, and compose poetry. He approached Thomas Crichton, Paisley’s acknowledged leading man of letters, with a manuscript collection of poetry. Crichton was deeply impressed with Wilson’s talent and recommended him to local printer John Neilson. In 1790, Wilson arranged for Neilson to print 700 copies of his first book, entitled simply Poems, complete with an engraving of the Battle of Largs as the frontispiece, hoping to sell them by subscription along his peddling route in the countryside. This volume is evenly divided between poems written in standard poetic English and those written in the Scottish dialect. For the most part, the English poems hewed very close to the originals they imitated: the elegies of Thomas Gray, the seasonal poems of James Thomson, the rural verse of William Cowper and Oliver Goldsmith, Alexander Pope’s verse epistles, and the pastoral odes of Milton and William Collins. In other cases Wilson seems a harbinger of literary events to come. “Hardyknute; or, The Battle of Largs” mines Scottish history for epic subject matter as Sir Walter Scott would later do in prose. Both “Thunder-storm” and “Lines Written on a Summer’s Evening,” in which the author “feels emotions words can ne’er express” in the presence of a sublime natural landscape, can be seen as faint precursors of Wordsworth emanating from the same eighteenth-century roots. Wilson did manage to break free of English classical tradition at a few points. “Lochwinnoch,” a descriptive poem about a town near Paisley, proceeds largely according to pastoral conventions, but mixed in among the swains are unprecedented and positive descriptions of contemporary industry from a man who knew the value of labor-saving machinery:
Wheels turning wheels in mystic throngs appear,
to twist the thread or tortur’s cotton tear,
While toiling wenches songs delight the list’ning ear.
One other poem, “Address to Calder Banks,” reveals Wilson’s more conventionally Romantic attraction to unstoried wilderness. “Strayed e’er a bard along this hermit shore?” the poet asks the remote brook:
Alas! Methinks the weeping rocks around,
And the lone stream, that murmurs far below;
And trees and caves, with solemn hollow sound,
Breathe out one mournful melancholy ‘No.’
The Scottish poems in this first collection are considerably more personal. Many are epistolary addresses to friends and patrons in and around Paisley, a crucial nexus in the 1790s Scottish literary world. Others cast in verse local events and scandals. “Elegy on the Long-Expected Death of a Wretched Miser,” for example, tells the sordid tale of the marriage of 75-year old John Craig, an unloved local landlord, to the unscrupulous 15-year old Meg Duncan (who may have had a sexual relationship with Wilson as well). A small number of moral fables drawn from local experiences give some indication of Wilson’s sensitivity to the ethical questions surrounding human labor in the natural world. “Verses on Seeing Two Men Sawing Timber,” for instance, warns against attempting to defy the power of nature. “Rabby’s Mistake,” about a relentless hunter who accidentally kills his own sow, argues for restraint in light of the fact that “short is the far’est fouk can see.” Many of the remaining poems in the volume—in particular “The Pack,” “Daybreak,” “Achtertool”—are complaints about the impoverished and difficult life of the weaver and peddler, which grew ever more chafing to Wilson over the 1780s. Donald Craig marks Wilson as a particularly good example of the “dependent workman” who made his way into Scottish poetry after the economic collapse of the 1780s and 90s (89-90). The only bird poem in this earliest collection, “The Disconsolate Wren,” is a transcription of a wren’s lament at the loss of her brood when their nest fell to earth. It reveals a sympathetic Wilson steeped in bird lore but as yet without much ornithological knowledge.
Because the economic trouble had penetrated into the Scottish countryside in the 1790s, Wilson found it exceedingly difficult to gain new subscriptions to his book and even to peddle his manufactured goods. In debt to his printer and supplier and with little hope of emancipation from the loom, Wilson fell into a depression and serious physical illness. Wilson’s fortunes soon took several turns for the better. He acquired a patron in William M’Dowell, heir to a large sugar-plantation fortune and resident of Semple Castle in Lochwinnoch. Even more encouraging was the acclaim that came to Wilson after his performance in an Edinburgh contest in oratory. Wilson’s address, later printed as “The Laurel Disputed,” defended the merits of Robert “Rab” Fergusson, who wrote in the Scottish vernacular and had been a major influence on Robert Burns. Soon after his appearance in Edinburgh literary society, material he had previously submitted to The Bee, a high profile magazine edited by James Anderson, was published. “The Solitary Philosopher,” which sketches the life of an untutored hermit of “universal genius…at once by nature botanist, philosopher, naturalist, and physician” who is able to draw morals from the “common occurrences of nature,” appeared in 1791. Having gained a measure of notoriety in the capital, Wilson arranged to have the unsold copies of his 1790 collection reissued with a few changes in a new edition, which were soon sold out.
Taking his cue from the homespun vernacular realism of Fergusson and Burns, especially the latter’s “Tam o’ Shanter,” Wilson next wrote what would become his most popular poem. “Watty and Meg” tells the story of a shrewish wife whose husband threatens to enlist in the army to escape her nagging. The poem eventually sold over 100,000 copies, though Wilson himself saw little profit from its success beyond the retirement of his printing debts. Frequently reprinted throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, “Watty and Meg” was often attributed to Robert Burns himself. Upon hearing the poem ascribed to him by a ballad-crier, Burns is reported to have shouted “that’s a damned lie! But I would have been very proud to have acknowledged it.” [2] Wilson eventually republished this poem nearly twenty years later in an American periodical.
In the midst of his growing literary reputation, Wilson remained something of a heroic defender of his colleagues in the weaver’s unions around Paisley. In 1790, Wilson had written, printed (via John Nielson), and anonymously posted three satirical handbills around the weaving sheds of Paisley. One of these, “The Insulted Pedlar,” depicted a dispute about property rights in the form of dialogue between a peddler defecating in the woods and a property manager bent on turning him away. Another, “Hab’s Door,” mocks a local silk-buyer notorious for nitpicking weavers’ products in order to justify a lower price. The third, “The Hollander, Or Light Weight,” was a thinly-veiled and caustic attack on Paisley silk manufacturer William Henry. The poem accuses Henry of cheating his laborers out of their rightful pay. Mindful of revolutionary events in France and concerned about unrest in his factories, Henry eventually lodged charges of libel and incitement to unrest against Wilson. For unknown reasons, these charges were later withdrawn, but not before Wilson had made a name for himself as a rabble-rousing, working-class poet at a time when the industrial order was just coming into being.
In May of 1792, just as his prospects were brightening, Wilson committed a lapse of judgment that landed him in jail and eventually forced him to leave Scotland forever. Wilson had become involved in political activities, perhaps even having a hand in the composition of a call for Scottish constitutional reform modeled after Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791) that was published in The Glasgow Advertiser on 8 February 1793. His pseudonymously published “Address to the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr” (1792) took explicit aim at the Church of Scotland’s complicity in the state suppression of Paine and his many sympathizers. At the same time, he apparently resumed his attacks on corrupt silk manufacturers in Paisley with the composition of “The Shark; Or Lang Mills Detected.” This time his target was William Sharp and the charge was the shortchanging of mill workers paid by the piece. Perhaps at the urging of local reformers James and William Mitchell, Wilson took the wholly uncharacteristic step of using the inflammatory poem to extort money from Sharp. Sharp retaliated with a legal complaint, and the next two years of Wilson’s life were spent in the courts and jails of Paisley. Though Wilson was fined, jailed, and forced publicly to burn the remaining copies of “The Shark,” he was much more fortunate than some other Scottish reformers of his day, many of whom were more seriously harassed by legal authorities, often brought up on dubious charges of sedition and exiled to penal colonies. [3] After several subsequent tangles with the law over his participation in reformist activities, including additional jail time for the distribution of the Glasgow Advertiser call, Wilson resolved to protect himself and the friends and family members who had signed bonds for him over the previous two years. After writing one final anonymous attack on British anti-republicanism (“The Tears of Britain”), Wilson set sail from Belfast to Philadelphia in late May of 1794 together with a young cousin, William Duncan. Their path away from Scotland reversed the Chesapeake-to-Glasgow smuggling routes that had sustained the Wilson and Duncan families for generations.
Because of the 1793-4 yellow fever epidemic, all ships bound for Philadelphia were required to unload at Newcastle on the shores of the Delaware. After disembarking and looking in vain for work in Wilmington weaving shops, Wilson and Duncan continued by foot to Philadelphia. The thirty-five mile walk to America’s then-capital city was Wilson’s first introduction to the American landscape, and it happened to coincide with the period of highest activity among resident birds and spring migrants on the Atlantic flyway. Wilson took his first specimen on this journey, a brilliant Red-headed Woodpecker.
After brief stints in engraving and weaving shops and an unsuccessful venture to Virginia, Wilson took up his peddler’s pack once again and made a tour of New Jersey that left him richer both in money and in knowledge about American society and natural history. His journal from this period, an extension of his Scottish journal and a forerunner of his later travel reports, has been lost. In 1796 Wilson settled in Milestown, Pennsylvania and began a new career as a schoolmaster, staying up late to keep one lesson ahead of his pupils. During the five years he stayed in Milestown, Wilson also helped his cousin establish a farm near Ovid, New York, to which other family members could emigrate from Scotland (see “Poetical Letter to William Duncan”). His writings and letters from this time period are sparse and deal with just two main subjects: the hardships of life as schoolmaster (“The Solitary Tutor,” “The Domini”), and Republican politics and the election of 1800 (“Jefferson and Liberty,” “Oration on the Power and Value of National Liberty,” “The Aristocrat’s War-Whoop”).
His time in Milestown came to an abrupt and mysterious end in 1801, when Wilson fled in anticipation of a scandal (which never materialized) over a love affair with either a married woman of the town or a student in his school. [4] He took up a brief post as a teacher in Bloomfield, New Jersey, before returning to Philadelphia. Shortly thereafter, he found his way to a new post at the Union School in Gray’s Ferry outside the city. The foremost naturalist of the day, William Bartram, lived and kept his famous garden nearby, a fortuitous circumstance that allowed Wilson to undertake his great ornithological work.
The precise point at which Wilson resolved to catalog the birds of America is not clear. He had apparently begun to admire them as soon as he arrived in the country, perhaps beginning a more systematic study during his tenure as schoolmaster in Milestown. It was only in Gray’s Ferry, however, that Wilson let his interest be publicly known. At first he enlisted the aid of his students in collecting specimens for examination, even keeping a number of live animals (including a hummingbird and a woodpecker) for study. Later he approached William Bartram, a major authority on matters ornithological as well as botanical, for information about bird names and guidance with bird illustration, which Wilson was teaching himself nights with the help of a small owl he had stuffed and mounted for the purpose. Bartram’s romantic view of nature and sensitivity to the living animal in its native habitat reinforced Wilson’s own predisposition, and under Bartram’s tutelage Wilson soon became the unrivalled master of bird observation in America. He often astonished visitors, for instance, with his ability to mimic the calls and songs of almost all eastern North American birds. It is this kind of intimacy with the living creature that accounts for Wilson’s continued popularity among readers and bird lovers.
Wilson’s first explicit birding trip, a 1200 mile journey via the family farm in Ovid to Niagara Falls, was modeled on Bartram’s own famous expeditions to the South. Wilson chose to document his trip, undertaken with William Duncan and Isaac Leech, not in prose but in a painstakingly-detailed poem, The Foresters, that was eventually published in installments in The Port Folio magazine. The experience Wilson had acquired during his periods of itinerant salesmanship in Scotland and New Jersey served him well on this trip, and his 2,200 line poem—unexampled elsewhere in American literature—is crammed with the details of social life and natural history gleaned along his route, as in this early description of a country tavern just outside Philadelphia:
Here two long rows of market folks were seen,
Ranged front to front, the table placed between,
Where bags of meat and bones, and crusts of bread,
And hunks of bacon all around were spread;
One pint of beer from lip to lip went round,
And scarce a crumb the hungry house-dog found;
Torrents of Dutch from every quarter came,
Pigs, calves, and saur-craut the important theme;
While we, on future plans revolving deep,
Discharged our bill, and straight retired to sleep.
Back at Gray’s Ferry after completing his trip, Wilson circulated the bird drawings he had made on his Niagara trip among interested naturalists. One of these was President Jefferson, whom Wilson pressed in vain for a position on the Pike expedition to the Red River country of what is now Oklahoma. Disappointed in that attempt, of which Jefferson later said he had no memory, Wilson was nevertheless honored with the responsibility of describing and painting the few bird specimens from the Lewis and Clark expedition that had survived the return trip. Around this time the publishing house of Bradford and Inskeep hired Wilson as an assistant editor for natural sciences on Ree’s New Cyclopaedia. The generous salary allowed Wilson to quit his post at the Union School and move to Philadelphia. More than that, he found in Samuel Bradford a publisher with both the technical capability and the enthusiasm to publish his grand American Ornithology, which he projected at ten volumes illustrated with ten hand-colored engravings each. Bradford agreed to publish 200 sets of the series provided that Wilson could come up with 200 subscribers.
Wilson’s first thought was to assess interest in the project before any work on the publication itself had been completed. With his ornithological notes and a hastily cut and colored plate of illustrations under his arm, he set out on a trip to New York City to canvas for subscriptions. There he had limited success, gaining pledges only from the faculty of King’s College (later Columbia University) and from steamboat inventor and operator Robert Fulton (a fellow Scot). A similar trip to Albany came up completely dry. Wilson’s devotion to his cause might have stumbled at this point, had he not found a subscription order from his idol President Jefferson awaiting him in Philadelphia upon his return. From this date forward, nearly all of Wilson’s waking hours were consumed in bringing his grand project to fruition.
A sense of the sheer magnitude of work Wilson accomplished over the last five years of his life can be gained by comparing his pace with that of Mark Catesby, whose Natural History of the Carolinas required 35 years to complete, and of Audubon, whose Birds of America was the product of 25 years of pre-publication work. Wilson by contrast spent no more than three and a half years of concentrated effort on his massive compendium, despite the need for him to conduct field research, consult other naturalists, sketch and paint specimens, compose and edit the text, supervise the engraving, and even perform some of the coloring of the plates himself. In his last five years, he combined five long birding and canvassing expeditions to areas stretching from Maine to Georgia with visits to knowledgeable naturalists up and down the seacoast and along the Mississippi Valley. In between these busy trips he worked long hours in Philadelphia carefully revising his verbal accounts, tending to the visual images, and resolving the financial problems associated with so large an undertaking.
In late 1807 and through most of 1808, however, Wilson’s immediate concern was to complete the first volume of his series in preparation for a more ambitious capital-raising trip. For nearly a year Wilson labored to master the many skills needed to produce an illustrated and hand-colored volume excellent enough to persuade institutions and individuals to pledge the $120 ($12 per volume) price and allow him to incur further travel and publishing expenses. The result fulfilled its promise of scientific thoroughness and painterly precision, to which was added the considerable bonus of Wilson’s first-hand, folksy, and loving writing about birds. In September the first volume was finally ready, and within a fortnight Wilson departed on a scientific, artistic, and commercial tour on a scale far larger than the peddling trips of his youth. His first foray with the completed first volume was to Princeton, where he found no willing subscribers, and thence to New York, where he had more success, gaining the pledges of Federalist Rufus King, Bishop Benjamin Moore, Rev. John Mitchell Mason, polymath Dr. David Hosack, and, most significantly, Samuel Latham Mitchill, the pre-eminent American scientist of the period. (Tom Paine, whom Wilson had celebrated in his youthful verse, also signed up.) The remainder of his trip through New England yielded a total of 41 subscriptions, many of them from denizens of the hinterlands rather than the metropolis of Boston, where Wilson was received coldly.
Wilson’s hopes were dampened at the first stop of his next expedition, this one on horseback through the southern states. In Maryland, he was able to enter a resolution in the legislature for the purchase of his work, but it was unanimously rejected by the lawmakers, including the original sponsor. Inquiries in other corners of polite Annapolis society likewise yielded meager results. As in New England, however, the professional and mercantile classes evinced a much greater interest. In Washington, Wilson met with Thomas Jefferson, who had already subscribed in response to a printed advertisement. Their meeting was brief and superficial, but Jefferson was extremely enthusiastic about the project, and in the wake of their meeting Wilson had a much easier time finding willing buyers throughout the capital, Virginia, and North Carolina. While traveling in the latter state, he captured alive an ivory-billed woodpecker, the famed “Lord God Bird” presumed extinct since the 1930s and only recently (and controversially) rediscovered, nursing it and keeping it with him in the country inns where he boarded. Stopping in Charleston, he met with enormous success, emerging from the city with a total of more than 125 subscriptions. From there, he continued to Georgia, spending considerable time at the estate of the amateur naturalist Stephen Elliot along the Ogeechee river. Here at last he met the brilliant though obscure painter and naturalist John Abbot, to whose existence Jefferson had first alerted him. Abbot supplied Wilson with a wealth of knowledge of southern birds as well as numerous specimens; in return, Wilson paid him better than he had ever received from his naturalist patrons in England and made certain to credit him in the text of the American Ornithology.
Returning again to Philadelphia, Wilson took time to complete his essays on the hummingbird and the mockingbird, two of the most common and beloved birds of the eastern seaboard. At the same time, he agreed to complete his long poem, The Foresters, for publication in The Port Folio. Despite the regional and national tumult surrounding the exposure of General Wilkinson as a Spanish spy and the death of Meriwether Lewis, then governor of the Louisiana Territory, Wilson the resolved to travel by river through the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. After stopping in towns throughout central Pennsylvania on his way to Pittsburgh, he purchased a rowboat—christened “The Ornithologist”—and set out as soon as the ice broke on the Allegheny river. Reaching Louisville after a three-week float, Wilson attempted to sell subscriptions before setting out on the rest of his voyage. It was here that he had his famous meeting with John James Audubon, who defensively mischaracterized it in a recollection many years later as a discouraging (to Wilson) encounter with a superior artist and naturalist. In fact, Audubon had little grounds at this point in his career to claim precedence over Wilson; quite the contrary, he was likely motivated by Wilson’s success to eventually pursue his own even grander aesthetic natural history projects.
From Louisville, he set out by foot towards Nashville. Near Shelbyville, Wilson encountered the phenomenal flocks of passenger pigeons that stretched across the sky for miles and destroyed the woodlands where they came to roost. By a careful calculation, Wilson estimated the population of one massive flock at around 2 billion birds. Arriving at last in Nashville after more than a hundred-mile journey in unsettled territory, Wilson quickly set out again to travel southward along the Natchez Trace, an ancient aboriginal trading highway improved further a few years prior on Jefferson’s order. Stopping at Grinder’s Stand, one of the primitive inns for travelers and the site of Meriwether Lewis’s apparent suicide, Wilson took the time to interview and record the accounts of witnesses to the Governor’s last days, particularly the story of the innkeeper, Mrs. Grinder. Wilson’s detailed account, published in The Port Folio, is the only historical source of information on Lewis’s strange demise.
Upon reaching Natchez, Wilson was invited to the “Forest,” the plantation of prosperous Indian trader, planter, scientist, and Scotsman William Dunbar. The generosity of the Dunbar family allowed Wilson some time to recuperate from his hard journey and to investigate the bird life of the Mississippi bayous. Dunbar’s knowledge of native lore concerning the plants and animals of the region gave Wilson an additional insight into the natural history of the region, and his essays in the American Ornithology after this date begin to show a greater engagement with indigenous knowledge. Dunbar also introduced Wilson to a variety of scientifically-minded Mississippians, who hosted him as he continued southward. Upon reaching New Orleans he received a hero’s welcome and a large batch of new subscribers from all ranks of society, and he began his return by sail to New York greatly pleased with the scientific and business success of his six-month expedition.
Apart from a few short trips to the New Jersey coast and the northern New England border with Canada (where he was arrested and briefly detained as an English spy), Wilson spent all of his time locked in his rented room seeing to the completion of the remaining volumes of his work. At last attaining the highest degree of respect from the Philadelphia scientific and cultural establishment, Wilson was inducted into both the American Philosophical Society and the Columbian Society. Just as the financial and social rewards of his long toil were about to be realized, Wilson took ill and died of dysentery on 23 October 1813, at the age of 47. The ninth (and last) volume of The American Ornithology was completed under the direction of Wilson’s associate and first biographer, George Ord. [5]
Despite its premature conclusion, Wilson’s grand career had a major impact on the natural science of both the United States and Europe. His work presented 264 of the 343 species of birds now believed to have existed in the United States of his time period, 48 of them new to science. His technical life histories became the standard descriptions for 94 species well into the 19th century. The eminent French anatomist Cuvier credited Wilson with having “treated of American birds better than those of Europe have yet been treated.” Later scientists often concurred with the rigorous praise of ornithologist Elliot Coues that “no other work in ornithology of equal extent is equally free of error.” Such technical accuracy in both the visual renderings and the verbal descriptions set the American Ornithology apart from later 19th-century compendia, particularly the showy and sometimes sensationalist work in John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-1838), which explicitly consulted and tried to outdo Wilson’s work. Although Birds of America is in many ways a greater artistic achievement than Wilson’s American Ornithology, even by aesthetic criteria the latter sometimes shows to advantage. Wilson’s first-hand knowledge of avian behavior, his immersion in bird folk-knowledge, his sympathetic enthusiasm for his subjects, and of course his significant literary talents make reading his work an unusual experience combining edification, spiritual reflection, and sheer pleasure. Some of the best bird lyrics in early American letters are sprinkled throughout The American Ornithology (see especially the learned “Tyrant Fly-Catcher,” the folksy “Fish-Hawk,” and the bedazzled “Hummingbird”), and Wilson’s prose is likewise the most accomplished nature writing in the period. As an immigrant polymath working at the intersection of cutting-edge science, letters, and the arts, Alexander Wilson was unrivaled in 19th-century America.
[1]See Radical Renfrew: Poetry form the French Revolution to the First World War, ed. Tom Leonard (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990); Robert Brown, ed., Paisley Poets, 2 volumes (Paisley: J. & J. Cook, 1889); and William Motherwell, ed., The Harp of Renfrewshire (Paisley, 1819).
[2]Life and Works of Robert Burns, ed. P. Hately Waddell (Glasgow: Wilson, 1867) xxv.
[3]For details of the suppression of dissent after the publication of Paine’s Rights of Man in 1791 and again when his acquittal on charges of sedition was handed down in 1794, see John Barrell and Jon Mee, eds, Trials for Treason and Sedition, 1792–1794, 8 volumes (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006-2007) and John Barrel, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[4]Early biographers speculate that the love affair involved his landlady, Mrs. Isaac Kulp, but this is unlikely for a number of reasons. More probable is that Wilson had a relationship with one of his students. Sarah Miller, the 16-year old daughter of his friends and neighbors, is one possibility, though Wilson’s indiscretions were apparently not great enough to stand in the way of renewed intimacy with the Millers later in the decade. Wilson left his entire estate to Sarah, suggesting perhaps the depth of his affection for her. One other plausible candidate is Nancy De Benneville, daughter of Dr. George De Benneville and a student at the Milestown school during Wilson’s tenure. See Annie De Benneville Mears, The Old York Road and Its Early Associates of History and Biography (New York: Harper, 1890).
[5]Ord’s contribution to Wilson’s legacy is a mixed one, to say the least. A pedant by nature, Ord had little of Wilson’s taste for empirical study, preferring windy polemic to close observation. His tireless attacks on Audubon served mainly to position Wilson and Audubon in the public mind as antagonists rather than precursor and heir. Ord’s exceptionally lazy biography of Wilson certainly did the posthumous reputation of the latter no favors.
[6]The Canongate Burns, ed. Andrew Noble (Edinburgh: Canongate Classic, 2001) 845-851. The poem was first published from the Mosesfield Manuscript in Robert Chambers, eds., The Poetical Works of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1839) IV.87.
Acknowledgments
I was helped significantly by funding provided by the University of California, Davis Committee on Research. Frank Egerton, with whom I have collaborated on a yet unpublished edition of Wilson’s American Ornithology, was of great assistance in collecting some of the secondary documents on which this edition is based. I am grateful to graduate assistants April Boyd, Jessica Howell, Kyle Pivetti, Julie Wilhlem, and Melissa Bender for shouldering some of the most tedious aspects of this editorial project. Key assistance was provided by the Bancroft Library, the Philadelphia Public Library, the Newberry Library, the United States Library of Congress, the Edinburgh University Library, the Paisley Museum, the Widener Library of Harvard University, the Harvard Musuem of Comparative Zoology, and the Shields Special Collections at the University of California, Davis.
Alexander Wilson Chronology
| 1766 | Born July 6th at Paisley Abbey into a family of silk weavers and former smugglers and bootleggers. Christened four days later by the local minister, Dr. John Witherspoon, later president of Princeton University. Lives happily with his two siblings and parents for the first ten years of his life, attending Paisley Grammar School and wandering through the local woods as a self-described “bird of passage.” |
| 1776 | Mother dies, father remarries a widow with five children. The tumult resulting from the American Revolution damages the Paisley silk trade and causes widespread economic hardship. Wilson removed from school and sent to work as a cowherd on a farm ten miles out of town. |
| 1779 | Indentured as an apprentice for three years in his brother-in-law William Duncan’s weaving shop. |
| 1780s | Works as a journeyman weaver in shops around Paisley and as a peddler carrying goods from family looms throughout the Scottish countryside. |
| 1790 | Attacks the silk manufacturer William Henry for exploiting workers in his locally circulated poem, “The Hollander, or Light Weight.” On June 10th, a summons was taken out against Wilson for libel and incitement to criminal unrest. Publishes first book, Poems. |
| 1791 | Publishes “The Solitary Philosopher” in The Bee magazine. Wins acclaim in an oratory contest in Edinburgh before a crowd of 500 people. Reissues collected poems as Poems, Humorous, Satirical and Serious. Composes “Watty and Meg.” |
| 1792 | Becomes politically active on a wider scale, perhaps even having a hand in the composition of a call for Scottish constitutional reform modeled after Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791). Falls into legal trouble for writing “The Shark; or Lang Mills Detected,” a poem critical of the silk manufacturing system and one man in particular, William Sharp. |
| 1794 | Sails aboard the Swift from Belfast to Philadelphia in May with nephew William Duncan. Lands at Newcastle, Delaware on July 14th and walks to Philadelphia. Works with John Aiken, printer, Philadelphia. |
| 1794-95 | Weaves at Pennypack Creek, Pennsylvania and Sheppardstown, Virginia. Completes a peddling excursion in New Jersey. |
| 1796-1801 | Settles in Milestown, Pennsylvania and begins a career as a schoolmaster. During his five years in Milestown, he helped his cousin establish a farm near Ovid, New York, the place to which other family members eventually emigrate from Scotland. |
| 1801 | Gains notoriety in Milestown for his March 4th speech celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration, “Oration on the Power and Value of Natural Liberty.” Suddenly leaves Milestown in anticipation of a scandal over a love affair with either a married woman of the town or a student in his school. After a brief interlude as a schoolteacher in Bloomfield, New Jersey, ends up at a new post at the Union School, in Gray’s Ferry outside Philadelphia. |
| 1802-03 | Approaches the foremost naturalist of the day, William Bartram, to share information about bird names and illustrations. |
| 1804 | Successfully petitions to become a citizen of the United States on June 9th. From October to December 1804, travels on foot to Niagara Falls, a 1200-mile journey documented in The Foresters. Publishes several poems in the Literary Magazine (Philadelphia). |
| 1806 | Applies to President Jefferson for appointment on Pike’s Expedition. Hired by the publishing house of Bradford and Inskeep as an assistant editor for natural sciences on Ree’s New Cyclopaedia. Salary at this position allows him to quit his post at the Union School, move to Philadelphia, and begin work on The American Ornithology. |
| 1807 | Begins traveling through Pennsylvania |
| 1808 | Prints the first of nine volumes of The American Ornithology with the support of Samuel Bradford. Begins five years of vigorous travel up and down the eastern seaboard in an attempt to study bird populations. |
| 1808-09 | Travels southward along the coast as far as Georgia. |
| 1809-10 | Journeys through the interior by way of Pittsburgh to New Orleans. |
| 1810 | Second volume, American Ornithology. |
| 1811 | Third and fourth volumes, American Ornithology. |
| 1812 | Fifth and sixth volumes, American Ornithology. Last ornithological trip, as far north as Maine. Elected member of American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia and of the Columbian Society of Artists of the United States. |
| 1813 | Seventh volume, American Ornithology. Taken sick with dysentery after taking cold from exposure. Dies in Philadelphia on August 23rd. Buried at Gloria Dei Church (The Old Swedes’ Church), Philadelphia. |
| 1814 | Eighth volume, American Ornithology. May: posthumous ninth volume, American Ornithology, edited and with a life of Wilson by George Ord. |
Note On the Text
Alexander Wilson published two collections of poetry during his lifetime, both of them in Scotland before he emigrated to the United States. The first, an octavo entitled simply Poems, was printed for Wilson in 1790 by James Neilson of Paisley. Only 200 of the original 700 printed copies were disposed of, and in 1791 Wilson used the remaining sheets as the basis for a new collection, which he retitled Poems, Humorous, Satirical, and Serious (Edinburgh: P. Hill, 1791). All of the poems and prose of the first collection are included in the second, with the exception of “Address to Calder Banks,” “Epistle to a Brother Pedlar,” “The Cruelty of Revenge,” “Achtertool,” “Epitaph on Auld Janet,” the Second and Third Epistles “To Mr. William Mitchell,” “To the Curious,” “Verse to a Stationer,” and “Ode” (“Loud roaring winter now is o’er”). Wilson added the following: “Despondence: A Pastoral Ode,” “Epigram” (“I asked a poor favourite of Phœbus t’other night”), “Eppie and the Deil,” “Ode on the Birthday of our Immortal Scottish Poet,” “Ossian’s Lament,” “The Laurel Disputed,” “To the Hon. William M’Dowal of Garthland,” “Elegy” [“Beneath a range of elms, whose branches throw”], “Elegy Addressed to a Young Lady,” and an extension of the narrative drawn from his journal as a peddler. For these Scottish poems, the text below is based primarily on the first collection, with the additional poems drawn from the second. Where a collected poem also exists as a single publication—”The Laurel Disputed” and “The Loss of the Pack”—the reading text is the collected version unless otherwise noted.
Many of Wilson’s most important poems, including all of those first published in the United States, were never collected during his lifetime. For these poems, the first (and often the only) broadside, newspaper, or journal publication provides the base text. For newspaper verse, differing versions have been compared and an educated guess made about which best reflects Wilson’s original composition, usually based on the date of publication and the presence or absence of printer’s errors that may indicate the publisher’s care in remaining faithful to the original. In the few cases where Wilson revised previously published work—as in the American version of “Watty and Meg”—the latest printed version from his hand is reproduced.
The present text is the most recent posthumous edition of Wilson’s literary works since 1876, superseding all others produced after his death. Several early collections refer to an 1814 Paisley collection, Wilson’s Minor Poems (apparently at the direction of Robert Smith, Paisley bookseller), but an exhaustive search of library catalogs in Scotland, England, and the United States has failed to turn up any surviving volume matching this description. Poems by Alexander Wilson, Author of American Ornithology, with an Account of His Life and Writings was published by John Neilson of Paisley for H. [sic] Crichton and T. Auld in 1816. This is sometimes referred to as the “Crichton edition,” in reference to the extensive biographical headnote proved by Thomas Crichton. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Paisley: John Neilson, 1816) is very similar, and an identically-titled edition was published the same year by Longman, Hurst of London. In 1844 a substantially new edition was published as The Poetical Works of Alexander Wilson, edited by Thomas Smith Hutcheson (Belfast: John Henderson, 1844) and reissued in 1853 and again, in corrupt form, in 1857. These last three editions are often lumped together as the “Belfast edition” in secondary literature. Henderson was the first to publish the poems that make up The Spouter, issuing them separately in 1847 (see note on attribution). The single catalogued surviving copy of The Spouter has gone missing from Harvard’s Widener Library. Gordon lists an 1857 Paisley edition, Poems of Alexander Wilson, but no copy survives. In 1876, Alexander Grosart published a new comprehensive edition that he claimed was based on earlier editions, manuscripts, and US periodical publications. His The Poems and Literary Prose of Alexander Wilson, the American Ornithologist (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1876) is the last, best, and most widely available edition. Comparison of Grosart’s text with the two volumes published under Wilson’s supervision, however, shows that Grosart introduced many small (and some not so small) changes that, in the absence of Wilson’s manuscripts, cannot be assumed to come from the author’s hand. Grosart’s emendations do not appear in this edition for all poems that exist in other sources. In those few cases where original publications or manuscripts could not be located, Grosart’s collection provides the text.
Wilson occasionally included verse within his prose writings and correspondence, most significantly in the American Ornithology. These poems have been included here in their original published form. Three poems from Weaver’s Magazine uncertainly ascribed by Grosart to Wilson—”An Auld Scottish Sang,” “Song—The Sun Shone O’re Loch and Lea,” and “Ode”—are reprinted here with the standard caveats. It has been suggested that Burns’s The Tree of Liberty was in fact written by Wilson, but Andrew Noble’s linguistic argument against this attribution is compelling, and the poem is not included here. [6] Finally, there is a small collection of unpublished verse from the manuscript holdings at the Harvard Library of Comparative Zoology, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and the Paisley Museum.
In preparing the text, no changes were made to Wilson’s ordering, spelling, spacing or capitalization. Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected, and obsolete typological conventions distracting to the modern eye—long s and the -ct- ligature, running quotes, etc. —have been removed. Original prefaces are included in all cases.
Scots-English Glossary
A’: all
Aback: at a distance, aloof
Abee: let alone
Aboon: above
Ae: one
Aff: out of
Aff: off
Aft: oft
Aften: often
Ahint: behind
Aiblins: perhaps
Aiken: oaken
Ain: own
Air: early
Airt: to guide
Airns: irons
Aith: oath
Ait-farle: oat-cake
Alang: along
Ale-cap: ale-jug or mug
Amaist: almost
Amang: among
Ance: once
Ane: one
Aneath: beneath
Anither: another
Antrin: occasional
Baul’, bauld: bold
Bauldly: boldly
Bawbees: half pence
Beagles: police-men
Beating: thread used to repair defects in a web
Beekin: basking
Bedeen: immediately
Begoud: began
Belang: belong
Behin: behind
Beild, bield, biel: house shelter
Beinly: comfortably
Ben: into
Bent: filled-full
Belly-flaught: suddenly and eagerly
Bethankit: be thanked
Beuks: books
Bien: comfortable
Bigget: erected
Biggin: building
Billies, Willies: lads
Binna: be not
Birk: birch.
Birky: forward (young) person, cleverness implied
Birring: whirring
Bi ten’: biting
Bizzon: a fly
Bizzing: buzzing
Blackfoot: match-maker
Blae: blue (from cold)
Blades: fellows
Blash: dash
Blastit: blasted
Blate: bashful
Blatterin, blattrin, blattering: rattling
Blattert, blattered: rattled
Blauds: large pieces
Blaw: blow
Blawing: blowing
Bleeze: blaze
Bleezin: blazing
Blether: nonsense, bladder
Bletherin’ and blethering: speaking nonsense
Blethert: spoke nonsense
Blin: blind
Blinfu: blind-drunk
Blink: instant
Blue: whiskey
Bluid, blude: blood
Bluidy: bloody
Blustry: blustering
Blowt: to throw out with great force
Bockit: vomited
Bock in, bockan: vomiting
Boddam: bottom
Bodle: small coin
Bole: recess in the wall near fireplace
Bonny: beautiful, lovely
Bool: bully
Bookit: engaged
Bore: the action of a weaver turning round his beam with woven cloth upon it
Bordert: bordered
Boss: empty
Bottlie: bottle
Bouster: bolster
Bout-gates: round about
Bra’, braw: large,
Brae: hill-side
Brak: broke
Braid: broad
Branks: breeches
Branchin’: branching, budding
Braw, bra’ly: well, nicely, handsomely
Bree, brue: juice, sauce
Breeks: breeches
Bricht: bright
Brislt: bruised
Brimstane: brimstone
Brither: brother
Breeks: breeches
Broad: table
Broucht: brought
Brock: badger
Brod: tailor’s sewing board
Brogs: awl (for boring)
Broomy: broom-clad
Brooze: contest
Brownie: in Folk-lore, a spirit
Brust: burst
Buckled: joined in marriage
Buckv, buck: gay young fellow
Bug: built
Buik: book
Bums: makes a noise
Bunneuchs: bunions
Burdies: little birds
Burn: stream
Burnie: little burn
Burrel: barrel
Buskin’: adorning
Butt: opposite of ben, other end
Buttl’t: bundled, made up
By: aside
Byding: residence
Ca’: call
Ca’d: called
Cade, cud
Ca’f: calf
Caft, coft: bought
Ca’s: calls
Cairns: stone-heaps
Callans: boys
Ca’na, canna: can not
Cam: came
Cainsheuch: cross-tempered
Cannels: candles
Canker: grow crabbed and envy
Canty: cheery
Canny: wisely, niggardly
Carena: care not
Carles: persons
Carlines: feminine of carles
Catter: cash
Caul, cauld: cold
Cauler: colder
Causey: road
Cape, cope: top
Capstane: copestone
Chaist: chased
Chafts: the chops
Chanler: lean, meagre
Chap: knock
Chaps: fellows
Chappin’: knocking
Chappet: knocked
Chatterin’: shaking
Cheek: side
Cheeps: chirps
Chaunter: musical instrument, (e.g., bagpipe)
Chaunerin: murmuring, grumbling
Chaunting: chanting
Chiel’: young fellow, person
Chimly: chimney
Chirts: squeezes
Chirtin’: squeezing
Chirle: comb (of cock)
Chucky: hen
Ciners: cinders
C’anty: happy
Cheek: side of fire
Clachan: village
C’lack: loud din
Claes, Claise: clothes
Claith: cloth
Clam: climbed
Clash: din
Chappit: chapped
Clashes: lies
Clashing, clashing: din and gossip-talk
Clautet: cleaned or cleared out
Clauts: hands, as by the clauts ; or clatts, an instrument for teasing wool
Claughan, claughin, clachan: village
Cleart: cleared
Clift: cliff
Clinch: catch
Clink: money
Clinket: clinked
Clippet: clipped
Cloitet: plunged (awkwardly)
Cloorin: wounding
Clootie: Devil (hoofed)
Closses: lanes
Closs: lane
Closs-mouth: lane mouth
Clouts: rags
Cloots: ankles
Clout: white cloth
Cloutet: hard knock
Cloutin’: wounding
Cluds: clouds
Cluded: clouded
Clues: clews
Clung: starved and empty
Coblin: cobbling
Cock, cocks: hearty fellows
Cockin: cocking
Cock: erect
Cock: push up
Cockernonies: cap, gathering of a woman’s hair when it is tied up with a snood
Co’er: cover
Co’ers: covers
Co’ering: covering
Cog: a wooden dish
Cole: cash
Confoundet: confounded
Coof: foolish fellow
Core: company
Cork: small manufacturer
Cornrig: corn-ridge
Corps: company (of a regiment)
Corp-like: corpse-like
Coudna: could not
Coup: couped, tumbled
Cowl: night-cap
Cowins: cut-off portions
Crack, cracks: chat
Crackin’: chatting
Crackit: chatted
Cracky: chatty
Craig: crag
Craig-neuk: corner of a crag
Craft: croft
Cram’t: filled full
Crawin’: crowing
Craws: crows
Cried: proclaimed (for marriage)
Creels: baskets
Creesh: grease
Creeshy, creeshie: greasy
Crouds: crowds
Crouse: happy
Crously: happy
Creuk and heuk: by hook and crook
Crump: to chew hard bread
Crumpin: sound of snow trodden on
Cuft: cuffed
Cuffets: blows
Curlers: Scotch ice-game
Cut his stick: took his departure
Dab: proficient
Dading: knocking loudly
Dadlin: going idly about
Daffin: fun
Daft: full of fun (also insane)
Daft’s: as full of gladness as
Dang, beat: reopened
Dark: day’s work (before dark)
Darna: dare not
Dar’t: dared
Dauded: dashed, knocked
Daudron: slovenly, dirty
Dauner: wander
Dauners: wanders
Daunerin’ and daunering: wandering
Daunert: wandered
Daughty: well, able
Dautet: fondled, caressed
Dawds: large pieces
Deals: pieces of sawn wood
Deean: dying
Decoy’t: decoyed
Deed: indeed
Deevil, deil, deel: devil
Deil-be licket: be licked by the devil
Deil-mak-mattcr: devil-make matter
Dem: damn
Deuk: duck
Devore: devour
Didna: did not
Dight: wipe
Dighted: wiped
Digget: digged
Ding: dash, knock
Dinna: do not
Dinsome: noisy, deafening
Direfu: direful
Disputet: disputed
Dizen and dizens: dozens
Doited: stupid
Doitert: most stupid
Doits: (smallest coin)
Dool: sorrow
Doolfu’: doleful
Door: obstinate
Doos: doves
Dorty: pettish
Douce, dowse: wise, grave
Douk: dip
Douf: dull
Dously: wisely, gravely
Dowin: doing
Doyt: small coin
Draigl’t: draggled
Draff: chaff
Drap: drop
Drappan: dripping
Drapped, drapt: dropped
Dree: endure long
Dreein: lengthened out
Driven’t: driven it
Drifted: snow in wreaths
Drog: drug
Drookit: drenched
Droon: drown
Drucken: drunken
Drousy: sleepy
Dryster: the person who has charge of drying the grain in a kiln prior to grinding
Duddie, duddy: ragged and dirty
Durk: dirk
Dung: beat, defeated
Dugs: dogs
Duket: dipped
Durstna: dared not
Dwallin: duelling
Dyke: wall
Dyvour: shabby, drunken fellow
E’e: eye
Een, e’en: evening
E’ning: evening
Eerie: lonely, timid
Eerocks: chickens
Eild: old age
Eith: easy, easily
Eldin: fuel
Eldren: aged
Eldritch: ghostly (and ghastly implied)
Ell wan: measuring-rod
Embrugh: Edinburgh
Empro: lamprey
En’: end
Erls: earnest-money
Fa’: fall
Fa’s: falls
Fab: fob
Fac’t: faced
Faes: foes
Fain: fond
Fa’ing: falling
Faintive: faintly
Fair: clearly
Faith: minced oath
Fallow: fellow
Fallow’d: followed
Fan: found
Fan’ and fun’: found
Fa’n: fallen
Farm town: farm steading
Farer: farther
Farest, farthest
Farm-town: farmhouse
Fash: trouble
Fassent: fastened
Fa’t, faut: fault
Faught: tight
Feath’rin’: feathering
Fegs: faith (exclamation)
Fell: keen, biting, vigorous
Fenny: comfortable entertainment
Ferlies: wonders, strange things
Ferly: wonder
Fernyear: last year
Fiel’, fiel’s: fields
Fient a ane: none
Fin: seek, find
Finisht: finished
Firms, forms: long seats
Fit: bottom
Fitches: moves
Fizz: fury, fire
Flea: lice
Flang: flung
Flate: scolded
Fleean: flying, departing
Fleech: supplicate
Fleesome: frightful
Flighter’t: fluttered
Flinners: flinders
Flitherin: fluttering
Flounge: flounder, in a rage
Flyte: scold
Flytin’: scolding
Foistest: next of age
Forbye: besides
Fore-door: front door
Forgather’t: meet together
Forgie: forgive
Form: sea
Forret: forward
Fother’t: fathered
Foul: not one
Frae: from
Fricht: fright
Frichtet: frightened
Frien’, frien’s, freen: friend
Frien’ly: friendly
Frythin’: foaming
Fu’: full
Fug: moss
Fuggy: mossy
Fung: thump, kick
Fursday: Thursday
Furl’d: furled, folded
Ga’ and ga’d: gall and galled
Gab: mouth, speech
Gabby: chatty
Gae: to go
Gaed and gade: went’n, gaun, going
Gane, gaen: going
Gang: go
Gangs: goes
Gangrels: tramps (beggars)
Gant and gaunted: yawned
Gars: compel
Gars: compels.
Gart: compelled
Gat: got
Gate: way
Ga’t: galled
Garse: grass
Gapet: gaped
Gaudie: high-sounding
Gausey: jolly, large
Gavel: gable
Gay: very
Gayen, gyen: very, quite
Gear: goods
Gentles: well-born
Ghaists: ghosts
Gie: give
Gied: gave
Gien: given
Gies: gives
Gif: if
Gigle: laugh
Gill: quarter pint drink-measure
Gillie: dimunitive of gill
Gin’t: if it were
Gin: if
Gled: kite, hawk
Gleg: quick
Glen: vale
Glibby-gabbet: quickly-talked
Glint: peep
Glinted: peeped out
Gloaming: twilight
Gloits: dults
Gloom: frown
Glowan: glowing
Glow: feel hot
Glowre: glower, stare, gaze
Glow’ring: staring, gazing
Glowert: gazed
Gluts: bellyfulls
Gorge: devour
Goud and gowd: gold
Gouk: tool
Goustly: ghostly
Gowan: daisy
Gowden: golden
Graip: dung fork
Graith: working utensils
Gran: grand
Graue: groan
Graned and gran’t: groaned
Girdle: flat circular plate hung above the fire
Girn: grin
Girning: grinning
Girnt: grinned
Girr: hoop
Gleefu’: gleeful
Glum: gloomy
Glancin’: glancing
Glasco’: Glasgow
Graped: groped
Grappleairns: arms, embraces
Grat: wept
‘Gree: agree
Gree, bear the, get the; the best of
Grit: great
Groo: shudder, hate
Groosome: frightful
Grum’le: grumble
Grumphy: pig
Grun: ground
Gruppit: gripped
Grutten: wept
Gude and guid: good
Guide’s: God-guide-us
Gude-fegs: good-faith
Gude-for-naething: good-for-nothing
Gude-man: good-man
Gude-sake and gude’s-name: God’s-sake, God’s-name
Gude-wife: good-wife
Guid-faith: good-faith
Gurle: growl
Gurl’d: growled
Ha’, ha’s: hall
Hab, hab’s: Albert
Hade: hold
Hadna: had not
Hae: have
Haen, haena: have no
Ha’f: half
Haffets: sides of the head
Ha’flins: half
Haill: whole
Hainches: haunches
Haith: faita
Hale: whole, healthy
Halesale: wholesale
Hallan: outer door
Hallow: hollow
Hallowfair: Hallowmas Fair
Halter’t: hanged
Haly: holy
Haly Beuk: Bible (Holy Book)
Hame: home
Hamely: homely
Hamewards: homewards
Hammart, hameart: belonging to home
Hammocks: swung beds
Han, haun: hand
Handy: convenient
Hap: hop
Happin’: hopping
Happet: happed
Harl: drag
Harlt and harl’d: dragged
Harnishes: shawls of a particular pattern
Harns: brains (head)
Hash: sloven
Has’t: has it
Haud: hold
Haud: retain
Haudin: holding
Haul: drag
Hault: dragged
Haun: hand
Haurlet: harled
Havings: dung
Headlang: headlong
Heapet: heaped
Hear’t: heard
Hearty: cheery
Hech: faith
Hech’s: exclamation
Hechin’: exclaiming
Hech’t: recalled
Heicht: height
Heigh: high
Heigh’s: as tall as
Heeze: lift up
He’11: he will
Herd, shepherd
Herdies: shepherd lads
Herse: hoarse
Hersel’: herself
He: hot
Heuk: hook
Heys: exclamations
Hie: high
Hielan, Highlan: Highland
Hirnsel: himself
Hinee: honey
Hinder-en’: at close
Hindmaist: hindmost, last
Hing: hang
Hingan and hingin, hanging
‘Hint: behind
Hinnymoon: honey-moon
Hippen: child’s cloth
Hirplin’: crawling, creeping
Hog: shilling
Hogmonae: last night of the year
Hornings: law papers
Hoo: how
Hools: husks
Hoot: exclamation (‘tut)
Hov’t: hoved
Hotch: fat person’s movements
Hotchin: moving
Hotch’t: moved
Houps: hopes
Howe: hollow
Howk: dig
Huggers: old stocking-legs
Huggert taes: toes covered with old stockings
Hum’elt: humbled
Humle, &c: imitative sound
Hun’er and hunder: hundred and hundred
Hunkerin: crouching
Hunker’t: crouched
Hurdies: buttocks
Hurry-burry: hurley-burley
Hutch: indefinite quantity
Huthron: hurriedly, confusedly
I’: in
Ilk: each
Ilka: every
Ill-leukin’: ill-looking
Ingle: fire-place
Ingle-cheek: fire-side
Ingon: onion
In’t: into it
Ise: I shall
Isna: is not
Ithers: others
Jaw: impudence
Jaud: jade
Jennock: girl’s name (Jane)
Jaunnering: talking idly
Jinglin’: rhyme-sounding
Jink: turn suddenly
Jinkin’: turning suddenly
Jougs: iron collar fastened by a chain to the wall
Jumpit: jumped
Kail: broth
Kame: comb
Kechan: yeast
Kecklin: cackling
Keek: peep
Keekin’: peeping
Keel or keels: end of the web
Keeking-glass: looking-glass
Keepit and keeping: keeping
Ken, kens: know, knows
Kent, kend: known
Kentna: knew not
Kepp: catch
Kicket: kicked
Kimmer: woman, wife
Kin’ling: kindling
Kinle: kindle
Kintra: country
Kintra fouk: country people
Kirk: church
Kirkyard: church-yard
Kippled: married
Kirnan-iung: staff of churn
Kist: kissed
Kist: chest
Kittle: tickle
Kittled: tickled
Knoitet: knocked
Knowe, knows: hillock, hillocks
Knuckled: endured
Koots: ankles
Kussen: thrown, cast
Kytes: bellies
Labrod: mill-stream at work
Laddie: lad
Lade: load
Lade: mill-stream
Lad’ent: loaded
Laft: loft
Laird: proprietor
Lallan: lowland
Lam’s: lambs
Lamies: little lambs
Lamp: long step
Lampin’, lampit: stepping with long stride
Lan: land
Lanc’d: lanced
Lane: alone
Lanely: lonely
Lanesome: lonesome
Lang: long
Langer: longer
Langsyne: long-ago
Lap: jumped
Lapfu’s: lapfuls
Lashin’: lashing
Late and air: late and early
Lauchin and laughin: laughing
Laught: laughed
Lave: rest
Lavrocks: sky-larks
Lay: part of a loom
Lea: leave
Lea: meadow
Lear: learning
Leart: learned
Leathing: lath
Leath’ring: castigation
Lee: lie
Leein’: lying
Leel: true
Lee’t: lied
Len’: lend
Leugh: laughed
Leuk and leuks: look
Leukin: looking
Licket: licked
Libels: enters in book
Liftin: lifting
Licht: light
Lift: sky
Lilt: sing
Limestane: limestone
Limmers: frolicsome girls
Lin, linn: waterfall
Lingle: thread
‘Listet: enlisted
Live-lang: live-long
Lizures: selvages
Lochs: lakes
Lo’ed: loved
Loes: loves
Lon’on: London
Loof: palm
Loon: fellow
Loot: did let
Looves: palm
Losin: window-panes
Lounder: severe blow
Loup: jump
Lout: stoop
Loutin and louts: stooping
Lowins: whiskey of first distillation
Lowse: loose
Lows’d, lowst: loosened
Lozens: window-panes
Lucky: widow-woman, a hen
Lug, lugs: ear, ears
Luke: look
Lum: chimney
Lum’er: lumber
Lumple: limp
Mae: more
Mair: more
Muirs: moors
Maist: most
Mak: make
Mak’s: makes
Maksna: makes not
Man: manage
Mane: moan
Mang: mong
Maun: must
Ma’t: mowed
Maukin: hare
Mauna: must not
Maunt: managed
Maw: mow
Measurt: measured
Meikle: much
Mem: madam
Mell: mallet
Men’: mend
Met: meted
Mete: measure
Micht: might
Midding: dunghill
Min: mind
Mirk: dark
Mirran: woman’s name
Mirley: spotted
Misca’d: miscalled
Mist: missed
Mistak: mistake
Mistaen: mistaken
Mither: mother
Mony: many
Mortclaith: corpse-cover, pall
Mosses: muirs
Mou’: mouth
Mouthfu’: mouthful
Muckle: much
Mum’ling: mumbling
Muirs: moors
Murnfu: mournful
Mutchkin: drink-measure
Muckworms: misers
Na: no
Nae: none
Naething: nothing
Nail’d: fixed
Nain: own
Nainsels: myself
Nane: none
Neb: nose, bill
Needfu’: needful
Needna: need not
Neive, nieve: fist
Newfangl’t: new-fancied, fond of new things
Newk and neuks: corner and corners
Nicht: night
Niest: next
Noddle: head
Noo: now
Norlan’: northern
Num’er: number
Nowt: oxen
Och: exclamation
O’d: minced oath for God
O’m: of him
On’t: on it
Ony: any
Ordour, ordure: excrement
O’s: of his
O’t: of it
Owk: week
Owre: over
Owr’t: over it
Oxtering: carrying under arm-pits
O’er’t: over it
Pack: the packman’s or chapman’s load
Packman: chapman
Painches: bowels
Pair: poor
Paper spot: a kind of gauze, of a spotted pattern
Parritch: porridge made of oatmeal
Pash: head, wig
Pass’t: passed
Pat: pot
Pate, Patie: diminutive of Patrick
Pats: pots
Paughty: proud, haughty
Pawky: sly, sagacious
Pawkily: slyly
Pechin: panting
Peel: castle-tower
Peepit: peeped
Peerie: boy’s plaything, a top
Pested: annoyed
Phrazin: flattering with fine phrases
Piping: steaming
Pirns: reed or quill in a shuttle
Pith: strength
Plaiding: plaid cloth
Plaister: plaster
Plaisteret: plastered
Planestanes: pavement
Plash: wading with a plunging sound
Plate: basin or plate in which church money-offerings are taken
Platefu: plateful
Pleugh: plough
Pocks: bags
Poortith: poverty
Poon, poind: seize property against a debt
Pouches: pockets
Poucht: pocketed
Pouther: powder
Pouthert: powdered
Pow: head
Prent: print
Prentit: printed
Preses: president, chairman
Preserve’s: preserve us
Prest: urged, pressed
Pricket: pricked
Prins: pins
Punds: pounds
Pu’s: pulls
Putten: put
Pyles: crumbs
Quait: quiet
Quat: quit
Quirty: quirky
Quo’, quoth: says, saith
Rab, Rob, Rabby, Rabbie’s: Robert
Racket: racked
Rade: rode
Raggy: ragged
Raiket: raked
Rais’t: raised
Rake: two ‘stoups’ of water, or as much as is fetched at a time
Ram’t and ram’d: rammed
Rampaugin: raging
Ranket: ranked
Rape: rope
Rappet: called for
Rattons: rats
Raw: row
Rax: reach
Ree: stupid with drink (whiskey)
Reek: smoke
Reekie: smoky
Reekin: smoking
Reekt: smoked
Reels: bobbins or quantity of work to be done
Reests: rests
Ribs: bars of a fire-grate
Richt: right
Riggin: ridge
Rin: run
Ringan: man’s name, Rowland
Ringe: rush
Rink: curling-space along which the stones slide
Rinnin’: running
Rive: tear
Rivan: tearing
Roart: roared
Rock: distaff
Roorny: spacious
Roose: raise, exalt
Roun: round
Routed: defeated
Routh: plenty
Rowan: rolling
Rowe, rowes: roll, rolls
Row’t: rolled
Rowth: plenty
Rue: repent
Ruffin: applauding with the feet
Rug: tug
Rugged and tugged: pulled and better pulled
Rurnle: rumble
Rumlin: rumbling
Rumple: to rump
Rump: back-side
Rung and rungs: stick, cudgel
Run: rivulet
Runkly: wrinkled
Sab: sob
Sabbing: sobbing
Sae: so
Saft: soft
Saftest: softest
Saftly: softly
Sair: sore
Sairly: sorely
Sairt: served
Sal: shall
Salms: Psalms
San’-blin’: sand blind
Sang: song
Sappier: jollier
Sa’r: serve
Sarks: shirts
Sauchs: willows
Saul: soul
Sautet: salted
Save’s: save us
Sawing: sowing
Sax: six
Saxpence: sixpence
Saxteen: sixteen
Saxty: sixty
Scal’: scold
Scales: weighing-basins
Scances: scans
Scannint: scanned
Scart: scratch
Scarted: scratched
Scarting: scratching
Sca’t: scabbed
Scawling: scolding
Scklates: slates
Scons: scones
Scoun’rel: scoundrel
Scower: polish bright
Scowry and scowery: shabby
Scraichin’: screeching
Screwt: screwed
Scrimp: lessen, or come short
Scrive: scribe or write
Scruntet: grunted
Scunners: loathes
See’t: see it
Sell: self
Sen’: send
Ser’t, ser’d: served.
Ser’ ye: serve you
Sert’s: set us
Sey’d: tried, thought of
Shanket: departed
Shanks: legs
Shapet: shaped
Shaw: woody glen
Shine: a rumpus or noisy quarrel
Shift: adventure
Shins: feet
Shiteing: easing nature
Shoelin’: shuffling
Shoolfu’: shovelful
Shoon: shoes
Shor’d: threatened noisily
Shortsyne: short time since
Shottle: shabby like, dilapidated
Shouthers: shoulders
Sic: such
Siccan: such a
Sicht: sight
Sicker: sure
Sight: crowd
Silken: silk
Siller: money
Simmer: summer
Sin’: since
Sinfu’: sinful
Sinny: sunny
Sinty: seventy
Sipet: supped
Skeigh: high, spiritedly
Skelf: shelf
Skelping: whipping
Skelpit: whipped
Skiff: skim
Skiffin’: slimming
Skift: skip
Skillie: ski11
Skinklin’, skinklan: sparkling
Skirles: loud laughter
Skirle: laugh loud
Skirlin’: loud, shrill laughter
Skit: cuff
Sklate: slate
Skrewt: screwed
Skyl:, scattering
Skytchers: skates
Slade: slid
Slairy’d: slobbered
Slaw: slow
Slee: sly
Slee-tongued: sly-tongued
Sleek: polished
Sleeness: slyness, sagacity
Sof’s: save us!
Sogers: soldiers
Sonsy: jolly
Sonsier: jollier
Sooket: sucked
Soom: swim
Soon’s: soon as
Sleepin’: sleeping
Sleepit: slept
Slichtet: slighted
Slippet: slipped
Sloken: quench thirst
Sma’: small
Smoket: smoked
Smo’ering: smouldering
Sna’: snow
Snaw-ba’s: snowballs
Snawy: snowy
Snaw-wreathes: snow wreaths
Snawy: snowy
Snecks: latches
Sneeran: sneering
Snell: keen, sharp
Snellest: most keen
Sniftering: scent-tracking
Snod: tidily dressed
Snuffy: snuff-defiled
Soss: sit at ease
Souchin’ and suchin’: sighing
Soun: sound
Soucht: sought
Soun’: perfect
Soun’s: sound as
Sowing-brod: tailor’s board on which the dressing-paste is prepared
Sowins: fine oat-meal and grain steeped in water
Sowl: soul
Sowthert: soldered
Spak: spoke
Spale: spell (of words)
Spark: fop
Spat: spot
Spate: flood
Spavy: spavin
Specks, spentacles: eye-glasses
Speel: climb
Speeling: climbing
Speelt: climbed
Speer: ask
Speering: asking
Spen: spend
Spouter: elocutionist or actor
Spoulin: spoiling
Spreadan: spreading
Sprawlin: sprawling
Spree: drunken debauch
Spring: fountain
Spue’t: spewed
Spunkie: will o’-the-wisp, ignis fatuus
Squatter: spattering
Squattert: bespattered
Squeaket: squeaked
Stab and stabs: paling
Stan: stand
Stang: sting
Stannin, stanin: standing
Stane: stone
Stane-dykes: stone walls
Stap and staps: stop and stops
Stapped: stopped
Stark: mad-like, strong
Starkly: strongly
Starns: stars
Staucherin’: stumbling, staggering
Staucher: stumbles, staggers
Stechin: panting, breathless
Steck: shut or close
Steekit: closed
Steerin: stirring
Steers: stirs
Steeve: strong
Stells: stills
Stinning: standing
Stoitet: stumbled
Stoppet: stopped
Stoups: a kind of mug or jug
Stoupfu’: fill of jug or mug
Strae: straw
Strang: strong
Stranger: stronger
Streekit, streek’t: stretched
Stively: strongly
Sucket: sucked
Sud: should
Surroundet: surrounded
Swack: whack
Swalt: swelled
Swankie: youth
Sweer: unwilling
Swith: swiftly
Swither: hesitate
Swor’t: swore it
Sync: then, soon, immediately, since
Synt: washed
Tackets: nails
Ta’en: taken
Taes: toes
Tafts: cot-houses
Tak: take
Tak’s-aff: takes off
Tam, Tammy: Thomas
Tangs: tongs
Tankers: tankards
Tanle: heaped up quantity
Tap, taps: top, tops
Tassle: tussle
Tattert: tattered
Tauld: told
Tel’t: told
Tempin’: tempting
Tent: observe
Tenty: observant
Thack: thatch
Thae: these
Than: then
Thegither: together
Thinkna: think not
Thir: these
Thocht, thoucht: thought
Thole: endure
Thol’t: endured
Thow: thaw
Thrang: throng
Thrangs: throngs
Thrang’t: thronged
Thraw: twist
Thrawart: contrary
Thrawn: cross-grained
Thretty: thirty
Thriftless: improvident
Thronie: throne
Thumle: thimble
Thumpit: thumped.
Thump-the-deil: a minister
Thun’er: thunder
Thund’ren: thundering.
Till’t: to it
Tim’er: timber
Tine: lose
Tinkler: tinkcr.
Tint and tynt: lost
Tirl: tap
Tirred: stripped off
Tither: other
Tok: took
Toom and tooms: empty
Toom’s: empty as
Toop: tup
Toothfu’: taste
To’t: to it
Tormentet: tormented
Tout: to sound
Towmont: twelvemonth
Town: farm-house
Towrin’: towering
Trampit: tramped
Trance: lobby-entrance
Trig: neat
Troke: buy-and-sell, trade
Trouth: truth
Trow: believe
trowther: harum-scarum, reckless
Trunl’t: rolled or tumbled
Try’t: try it
Tubfu: a vessel so-called, full
Tum’t: emptied
Tumphy: blockhead
Turn: job or bit of work
Twa: two
‘Twad: it would.
Twa-inch: two-inch
Twalls: twelves
Twas: twos
Twa-three: two or three
Twigle-twigle: imitative-sound
Twitter’t: twittered
Tyke and tykes: dog
Tyken: cloth for beds and bolsters
Tyning: losing
Ugsome: loathsome
Unco: very
Unhaunty: unhandy
Upo’: upon
Verra: very
Vow: I declare
Wa’: wall
Wab and wabs: web, webs
Wabsters: weavers
Wad: would
Wadna: would not
Wae: woe
Wae be till’t: woe be to it
Wae’s: woe’s
Waefu’: woeful
Waft: weft
Wame: belly
Wan’s: wands, twigs
Wanted: wonted
War and waur: were.
Wark: work
Warklooms: weaving machines
Warl: world
Warldly: worldly
Warsled: warsle: wrestled
War’ly: worldly
War’t: were it
Wasna: was not
Was’t: was it
Wat: wot
Wat-shod: wet-shod
Wauk: to walk
Waukened: awakened
Waukent: awakened
Wauket: hardened
Waur: worse
Waunner: wander
Weans: children
Weanies: little children
Weather’t: weather it
Wearying: longing
Weel: well
Weel-a-weel: well-a-well
Weel-boilt: well-boiled
Weel-swalt: well-swelled
Weel-a-wat: well I wot
Weet: wet
Weel-kent: well-known
Werena: were not
We’se: we are
Wha: who
Wha ‘d: who would
Wha ‘ll: who will
Whae’er: whoever
Whan: when
Whane’er: whene’er
Whang: slice
Whare: where
Whareabouts: whereabouts
Whar-awa’s: where-away
Whase: whose
Whatna: what
Whauks: lumps
Wheedle: cheat
Wheest: hush
Wheese: wheedle
Whilk: which
Whiles: sometimes
Whinge: whine
Whist and whisht: be silent
Whitent: whitened
Whitret: weasle
Whum’le: overturning
Whuppet: whipt up
Whyle and whyles: sometimes
Whyle (a): sometime
Wi’: with
Wident: widened
Wimplin and wimplan: winding
Wi’m: with him
Win: get
Wins: winds
Winles: windlass
Winna: will not
Winnocks: windows
Winnock-brods: window-boards
Winnock-sole: window-sole
Wist: thought of
Wi’t: with it
Withouten: without
Woner: wonder
Wonnerin: wondering
Woner’t: wondered
Won’rous: wondrous
Woodings: woods, plantations
Wordy: worthy
Wrack: wreck
Wrang: wrong
Wrannie: wren
Wreathe: drifted snow
Wreath’d: drifted
Wud: a wood
Wudna or woudna: would not
Whare’er: where’er
Wylie, wyly: sly
Yaumour: murmur
Yaummers: murmuring
Yeer: your
Yellochan: out-cry
Yer: your
Yersel: yourself
Ye’re: ye are
Yestreen: yesternight
Yill: ale
Yird: earth
Yirth: earth
Yett: gate
Yon’s: yon is
Yoursel, yoursels: yourself, yourselves
Yowling: howling
Bibliography
Manuscripts
Andrew Crawfurd, The Cairn of Lochwinnoch. 46 manuscript volumes held in the Paisley Central Library. Substantive material relating to Alexander Wilson and his family found in volumes 1, 4, 5, 6, and 7
American Philosphical Society, Papers, 1806-1813. 9 items, including “The Last Wish.” OCLC #122523476
Paisley Museum, Monument Scrapbook. Materials on Wilson collected during the drive to raise funds for the statue erected in his honor in 1876
Houghton Library, Museum of Comparative Zoology Manuscripts ca. 1700-1936 (inclusive). 150 volumes. Includes Wilson’s letterbook, notebooks, drawings, watercolors, and other writings OCLC #122643262
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Collection of Historical Manuscripts, 1736-1908 (inclusive), 1810-1870 (bulk). Approximately .75 linear feet. OCLC #122593629
Parochial Registers, County of Renfrew, Paisley. Register General’s Office, Edinburgh
Treasonable Practices in Scotland, 1792-94. Collection of British intelligence reports on seditious activities
Primary
Collected Poetry
Alexander Wilson, Poems (Paisley: J. Nielson, 1790)
— Poems, Humorous, Satirical, and Serious. Second edition. (Edinburgh: P. Hill, 1791)
— Wilson’s Minor Poems (Paisley 1814)
— Poems by Alexander Wilson, Author of American Ornithology, with an Account of His Life and Writings (Paisley 1816)
— Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect by Alexander Wilson with an Account of His Life and Writings (Paisley: J. Nielson, 1816)
— The Poetical Works of Alexander Wilson, ed. Thomas Smith Hutcheson (Belfast: John Henderson, 1844)
— The Poetical Works of Alexander Wilson, with a Memoir (Belfast, 1853)
— The Poetical Works of Alexander Wilson with an Extended Memoir of His Life and Writings (Belfast: J. Henderson, 1857)
— Poems of Alexander Wilson (Paisley, 1857)
— The Poems and Literary Prose of Alexander Wilson, ed. Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, 2 volumes (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1876)
Individual Poems
“Address to the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr, by Laurie Nettle” (Paisley, 1792)
“An Auld Scottish Sang,” Weavers Magazine (n.d.) [Attributed to Wilson]
“Connel and Flora,” American newspapers (n.d.)
“Dirge (in Memory of Washington),” American newspapers (1799)
“The Dominie or The Teacher,” American newspapers (n.d.)
“The Foresters, Descriptive of a Pedestrian Journey to the Falls of Niagara, in the Autumn of 1803” The Port Folio, I (January-June 1809): 538; II (July-September 1809): 70, 141, 273, 367, 452, 561; III (January-June 1810): 159, 177
“The Foresters,” (Newton, Penn., 1818)
“The Foresters,” (Paisley, 1825)
“The Foresters,” (West Chester, Penn., 1838)
“The Foresters,” (Philadelphia, 1853)
“Hab’s Door, or The Temple of Terror” (Paisley, 1793)
“The History of Watty and Meg,” (Cupar-Fife, 1801)
“Hollander, or Light Weight” (Paisley, 1793)
“Hymns I-VII, The Psalm-Singer’s Assistant,” ed. Robert Gilmore (Paisley, 1791)
“In Memory of Captain Lewis,” (American Newspapers, 1810)
“The Invitation,” Literary Magazine II (July, 1804)
“Jefferson and Liberty” (American newspapers, 1801)
“The Laurel Disputed; or the Merits of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson Contrasted,” Two Poetical Essays, ed. E. Picken and A. Wilson (Edinburgh, 1791)
“The Laurel Disputed” (Paisley, 1827, 1832)
“Lavinia,” American newspapers, n.d.
“The Loss of the Pack” (Edinburgh, 1791)
“My Landlady’s Nose” Newark Centinel (August 24, 1801)
“Ode by the Late Alexander Wilson,” Weaver’s Magazine (n.d.) [Attributed to Wilson]
“On Seeing the Portrait of Robert Burns,” Literary Magazine, IV (1806)
“The Pilgrim, A Poem: Descriptive of a voyage and journey from Pittsburgh to New-Orleans, in the Spring of 1810,” The Port Folio, II, III (January-June, 1810) 512
“Prayer Addressed to Jove, the God of Thunder, during the Late Hot Weather” Newark Centinel (September 22, 1801)
“Rab and Ringan, A Tale” to Which is added “Verses Occasioned by Seeing Two Men Sawing Timber in the Open Field, in Defiance of a Furious Storm” (Paisley, 1827)
“A Rural Walk,” Literary Magazine II (1804) 533-536
“A Rural Walk,” The Port Folio (April 27, 1805)
“The Shark, or Lang Mills Detected” (Paisley, 1793)
“The Solitary Tutor,” Literary Magazine, II (October, 1804)
“Song—The sun has shown o’re loch and lea,” Weaver’s Magazine (n.d) [Attributed to Wilson]
“The Spouter, a True Tale” (Belfast: J. Henderson, 1847)
“The Tears of Britain,” American newspapers, n.d.
“Verses in the Philadelphia Public Library,” Thomas Westcott’s The Historic Mansions and Buildings of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1877)
“Watty and Meg, or the Taming of the Shrew” (Paisley, 1792)
“Watty and Meg” (no place, 1795)
“Watty and Meg, or The Wife Reformed” (Glasgow, 1800, 1828)
“Watty and Meg” (Newcastle, 1801)
“Watty and Meg” (Falkirk, 1802, 1820)
“Watty and Meg, or The Wife Reformed,” The Port Folio, IV (July-December 1810) 368-377
“Watty and Meg” (Stirling, 1810)
American Ornithology
Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology, 9 volumes (Philadelphia: Bradford and Inskeep, 1808 1814)
— American Ornithology: or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, 9 volumes (Philadelphia: J. Laval and S.F. Bradford 1824-1825)
— American Ornithology: or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, 3 volumes (New York: Collins & Co. and Philadelphia: Harrison Hall, 1828-1829, London, 1839)
— and Charles Lucien Bonaparte, American Ornithology: or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, ed. by Robert Jameson. 4 volumes. (Edinburgh: Constable & Co., 1831)
— American Ornithology or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, with a continuation by Charles Lucien Bonaparte, 3 volumes. (London: Whittaker, Treacher & Arnot; Edinburgh: Stirling & Kenny, 1832)
— Illustrations of the American Ornithology of Alexander Wilson and Charles Lucien Bonaparte (Edinburgh: Frazer & Co., 1835)
— American Ornithology or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States; reduced from the original work of Alexander Wilson, (London: William Spooner, n.d.)
— Wilson’s American Ornithology, 1 volume (Boston: Otis, Broadus, and Company, 1840)
— Wilson’s American Ornithology, 1 volume (New York: H.S. Samuels, 1852) (New York: Charles L. Cornish, 1854), 2 volumes (Philadelphia, 1856)
— and Charles Lucien Bonaparte, American Ornithology: or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, 3 volumes (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1871)
— and Charles Lucien Bonaparte, American Ornithology: or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, 3 volumes (London: Chatto and Windus, 1876)
— and Charles Lucien Bonaparte, American Ornithology: or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, 3 volumes in 1 (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates 1878)
Other Prose Pieces
“Answer to Myrtillo (Dr. Nathaniel Potter of Baltimore)” The Port Folio II (August 1809) 151-153
“Oration on the Power and Value of National Liberty,” American newspapers (1801)
“Journal,” Poems, Humorous, Satirical, and Serious. Second edition. (Edinburgh: P. Hill, 1791)
“Letter from Lexington, April 4, 1810,” The Port Folio III (June 1810) 499-518
“Letter from Nashville, April 28, 1810,” The Port Folio IV (October 1810) 310-321
“Letter from Natchez, May 28, 1810,” The Port Folio VII (January 1812) 34-47
“Letter to the Editor of The Port Folio, July 16, 1811, (answering Incola of Lexington),” The Port Folio VI (August 1811) 109
“Letter to Thomas Jefferson. Washington, December 17, 1808” in James Southall Wilson, Alexander Wilson, Poet-Naturalist: A Study of His Life with Selected Poems (New York: Neale, 1906) 85
“Letter to Thomas Jefferson. Washington, December 24, 1818” in James Southall Wilson, Alexander Wilson, Poet-Naturalist: A Study of His Life with Selected Poems (New York: Neale, 1906) 86
“The Naturalist, No. II (Alligators),” The Port Folio II (July 1809) 51-55
“The Naturalist, No. III (Milkweed),” The Port Folio II (August 1809) 61-62
“The Naturalist, No. IV, Observations of the Nighthawk and Whipporwill of the United States,” The Port Folio II (September 1809) 197-199
“The Naturalist, No. V, On the Existence of Native Antimony in the United States,” The Port Folio II (November 1809) 426-429
“On the Study of Natural History, No. 1,” The Port Folio I (June 1809) 511-513
“The Solitary Philosopher,” Glasgow Bee (March 17, 1791)
“The Solitary Philosopher,” Collection of Ancient and Modern Characters (Paisley, 1805)
“Some Unpublished Letters of Alexander Wilson and John Abbot,” (“To William Bartram, Philadelphia, May 22, 1807,” “To Messrs. Bradford and Inskeep, New York, October 2, 1807,” “To John Abbot, Philadelphia, January 23, 1813”), The Auk XXIII (1906): 361-368.
Secondary
(* denotes work of major significance to the study of Wilson)
John Abbot, The Natural History of the Rarer Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia, 2 volumes (London: T. Bentley, 1797)
— “Notes on My Life,” ed. C. L. Remington, Lepidoterist News 2, 3 (1948).
“Alexander Wilson,” Allibone’s Dictionary of English Literature, III, 2765-66
“Alexander Wilson,” Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, VI, 545-546
“Alexander Wilson,” Encyclopaedia Americana, (1927)
“Alexander Wilson,” Encyclopaedia Brittanica, (1927)
“Alexander Wilson,” Museum of Foreign Literature, XI, 399
“Alexander Wilson,” National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, (1892)
“Alexander Wilson,” New International Encyclopaedia (1916)
*Elsa Guerdrum Allen, “The History of American Ornithology Before Audubon,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, XLI, No. 3 (October 1951) 387-591
—”The American Career of Alexander Wilson,” Atlantic Naturalist, VIII, No. 2 (1952) 61-76
— “John Abbot, Pioneer Naturalist of Georgia,” The George Historical Quarterly 4, 3 (1957)
Sara Travers Lewis Anderson, Lewises, Meriwethers, and Their Kin (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1938)
William Anderson, “Alexander Wilson,” The Popular Scottish Biography (1842)
— The Scottish Nation, Edinburgh, 1880
Archaeological and Historical Collections County of Renfrew, Parish Lochwinnoch, 2 volumes (Paisley: Alex Gardner, 1890)
John James Audubon, The Birds of America, 4 volumes (London, 1827-1838 and New York: Macmillan Company, 1937)
— The Life and Adventures of J. J. Audubon, the Naturalist (New York: 1868)
— The Original Water-Colour Paintings by John James Audubon for the Birds of America, introduction by Marshall B. Davidson. (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., and the Connoisseur, 1966)
John Bakeless, Lewis and Clark (New York: 1947)
William Bennett, A Practical Guide to American Nineteenth Century Color Plate Books (New York, 1943)
James Leander Bishop, History of American Manufactures, 1608-1806, 2 volumes (Philadelphia, 1863-1867)
Matthew Blair, The Paisley Shawl (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1904)
— The Paisley Thread Industry (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1907)
Michael Branch, “Indexing American Possibilities: The Natural History Writing of Bartram, Wilson, and Audubon,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996) 282-302
- Lucy Brightwell, Difficulties Overcome: Scenes in the Life of Alexander Wilson the Ornithologist (London, 1860)
David Brodie, A Short Set of Book-Keeping by Double Entry (Paisley: Nelson & Hay, 1831)
*Robert Brown, Paisley Poets, 2 volumes (Paisley: J. & J. Cook, 1889)
—- Paisley Burns Clubs 1805-1893 (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1893)
— The History of Paisley, 2 volumes (Paisley, J. and J. Cook, 1886)
Robert Buchanan, The Life and Adventures of John James Audubon, third edition (London: Sampson, Low, Son & Marston, 1869)
Frank L. Burns, “Alexander Wilson” The Wilson Bulletin, no. 20 (1908) 1-18; no. 22 (1910) 79-96
— “Alexander Wilson: The Unsuccessful Lover,” The Wilson Bulletin, no. 64 (1908) 130-145.
— “The Mystery of the Small-Headed Flycatcher,” The Wilson Bulletin, no. 22 (1908) 63-79
— “The Making of the American Ornithology,” The Wilson Bulletin, no. 20 (1908) 165-185
— “The Completion of American Ornithology” The Wilson Bulletin, no. 21 (1909) 16-35
— “His Nomenclature” The Wilson Bulletin, no. 21 (1909) 132-151
— “Biographia, Portraits, and a Bibliography of the Various Editions of His Works” The Wilson Bulletin, no. 21 (1909) 165-186
— “His Early Life and Writings,” The Wilson Bulletin, no. 22 (1910) 79-96
— “Miss Malvinia Lawson’s Recollections of Ornithologists,” The Auk, no. 34 (1917) 275-282
Robert Burns, The Canongate Burns, ed. Andrew Noble (Edinburgh: Canongate Classic, 2001)
— Robert Burns’ Literary Correspondence, ed. William Wallace (London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1938)
— Robert Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, Correspondence, ed. William Wallace (London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1898)
- H. Butterfield, John Witherspoon Comes to America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953)
Dr. Charles Caldwell, Autobiography (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo and Co., 1855)
James Thomson Callendar, The Political Process of Britain (Edinburgh, 1792)
— The Trial of James Thomson Callendar for Sedition (Richmond, 1800)
Sir Rom de Camden, “Memorable Facts in the Lives of Memorable Americans,” Potter’s American Monthly and Illustrated Magazine (January-June, 1875) 263-267
*Robert Cantwell, Alexander Wilson: Naturalist and Pioneer (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1961)
Albert Pruden Carman, Thomas Carman and Phoebe Prudence Carman (Urbana-Champaign, Ill: 1935)
Daniel K. Cassell, History of the Rittenhouse Family (Germantown, Pa., 1849)
Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands: Containing the Figures of Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, Insects, and Plants, third edition, 2 volumes, (London: 1771). (First edition of each volume 1731 and 1743).
Robert Chambers, “Alexander Wilson,” A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen, IV (1814) 514
— “Alexander Wilson,” Cyclopaedia of English Literature, II (Edinburgh: 1844, 1876) 812-813
John Chancellor, Audubon—A Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1978)
Bayard Christy, “Wilson’s Ohio River Journey,” The Cardinal, no. 6 (July, 1925) 6-12
— “Wilson’s Pittsburgh Subscribers,” The Cardinal, no. 6 (July, 1925) 13-15
Daniel Clark, Proofs of Corruption of General James Wilkinson (Philadelphia, 1809)
DeWitt Clinton, “Alexander Wilson,” American Medical and Philosophical Register, IV (1814) 514
Varnum Lansing Collins, President Witherspoon, 2 volumes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1925)
Contemporaries of Burns and the More Recents Poets of Ayrshire, (Edinburgh: Paton, Carber and Gilder, 1840)
Lane Cooper, “Travellers and Observers, 1763-1846,” Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume 1, Book II, Chapter 1 (New York, 1917)
- S. Cotterell, “The Natchez Trace,” Tennessee Historical Magazine (April 1921)
Elliott Coues, “Private Letters of Wilson, Ord and Bonaparte,” Penn Monthly 10 (1879) 443-455
Edward J. Cowan and Mike Paterson, Folk in Print: Scotland’s Chapbook Heritage, 1750-1850 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007)
Henry Coyle, “Alexander Wilson, the Great Naturalist,” The Chautuaquan, New Series IX (October 1893-1894) 180-184
David Craig, Scottish Literature and the Scottish People, 1680-1830 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961)
Andrew Crawfurd, “Some Incidents in the Life of Alexander Wilson, Collected in the Parish of Lochwinnoch,” The Paisley Magazine I.11 (November 1828)
George Crawfurd, The History of the Shire of Renfrew, continued by William Semple (Paisley: Alex Weir, 1782)
— A General Description of the Shire of Renfrew, continued by George Robertson (Paisley: J. Nielson, 1818)
*Thomas Crichton, “The Life of the Author,” Poems by Alexander Wilson, Author of American Ornithology, with an Account of His Life and Writings (Paisley: 1816)
— “Memoir of Wilson,” The Weavers Magazine and Literary Companion, volume 1 (Paisley: John Nielson, 1819)
— “Memoir of the Life and Writings of John Witherspoon D D, late president of the College of New Jersey,” Edinburgh Christian Register (n.d.)
— “Biographical Sketches of the Late Alexander Wilson. Letters to a Young Friend” Weaver’s Magazine and Literary Companion, II (Paisley: J. Neilson, 1819)
Robert Hartley Cromek, “Alexander Wilson,” Select Scottish Songs, 2 volumes (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1810) 211-225
Robert Cummings, Essay Delivered at the Pantheon on Thursday, April 14, 1791, on the question “Whether the exertions of Allan Ramsay or Robert Fergusson have done most to honor Scottish Poetry” (Edinburgh, 1791)
— Poems on Several Occasions, with The History of Mrs. Wallace (Edinburgh, 1791)
John Cunningham, The Church History of Scotland, 2 volumes (Edinburgh, 1882)
William Darlington, Memorial of John Bartram and Henry Marshall (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakison, 1849)
John Bathurst Dickson, The Life, Labors, and Genius of Alexander Wilson (Paisley: James Cooke, 1856)
William Dunlap, History of the Arts of Design in the United States (Boston: Goodspeed, 1918)
Evart A. Duyckinck, “Alexander Wilson,” Cyclopaedia of American Literature I (Philadelphia, 1856, 1881) 565-575
Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997)
Ernest Earnest, John and William Bartram, Botanists and Explorers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940)
Bela Bates Edwards, “Alexander Wilson,” Biography of Self-Taught Men (Boston, 1846) 594
George Edwards, A Natural History of Uncommon Birds, 1743-1751: Gleanings of Natural History, 1750-1764, 7 volumes in 3. London, in 4 parts between 1743 and 1751 (1743, 1747, 1750, 1751); in 3 parts between 1758 and 1764.
Frank N. Egerton, “Wilson, Alexander (1766–1813),” Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2004), http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/29634.
Andrew Ellicott, Journal (Philadelphia, 1797)
Major Charles Winslow Elliot, Winfield Scott (New York: Macmillan, 1937)
Harold Milton Ellis, Joseph Dennie and His Circle (University of Texas, 1915)
Joseph Fulford Folsom, Bloomfield Old and New (Bloomfield, New Jersey, 1912)
Wurthington Chauncey Ford, Thomas Jefferson and James Thomas Callendar (Brooklyn: Historical Printing Club, 1912)
Joseph Foster, Members of Parliament—Scotland, 1357-1882 (London, 1882)
Colonel Fullerton, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Ayr (Edinburgh, 1793)
Dorsey Gardner, “Alexander Wilson, Ornithologist,” Scribner’s Monthly, XI (1876) 690-703
David Gilmour, Paisley Weavers of Other Days (Edinburgh, 1898)
The Glasgow Advertiser (1793)
Henry Grey Graham, The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1964)
Rufus Wilmot Griswold, “Alexander Wilson,” Prose Writers of America (Philadelphia: 1847) 187
Francis Groome, ed., Ordnance Survey (London: Mackenzie, 1902)
Alexander B. Grosart, “Memorial—Introduction,” The Poems and Prose of Alexander Wilson” (Paisley, 1876) xvii-lv
Alexander Hamilton, Observation on Certain Documents written by Himself (Philadelphia, 1796-1800)
William Maxwell Hetherington, Memoir of Alexander Wilson, (Edinburgh: Constable, 1831)
William Hector, Selections from the Judicial Records of Renfrewshire (Paisley, J. & J. Cook, series 1, 1876; series 2, 1878)
- F. Henderson, “Burns and Lesser Scottish Verse,” Cambridge History of English Literature XI (n.d.) 224-270
Francis Hobart Herrick, Audubon the Naturalist, 2 volumes (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1917)
Lawrence E. Hicks, “An Account of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Wilson Ornithological Club Held in Pittsburgh, December 28-30, 1934, with the Details of an Exhibition of Wilsoniana.” The Wilson Bulletin, n.d.
Philip Marshall Hicks, The Development of the Natural History Essay in American Literature (Philadelphia, 1924)
Thomas O. P. Hiller, “Alexander Wilson,” English and Scottish Sketches (London, 1857) 277-284
Clark Hunter, “Alexander Wilson: Paisley Poet and American Ornithologist,” Scotland’s Magazine 68, 6 (June 1972)
*— The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983)
Thomas Hunter, “Notes on the Literature of Paisley an District,” series of articles in Paisley and Renfrewshire Gazette, February to November 1952.
*Thomas Smith Hutcheson, “Memoir of Wilson,” The Poetical Works of Alexander Wilson (Belfast, 1844, 1845, 1853, 1857)
Clarence J. Hyslander, American Scientists (New York: Macmillan, 1935)
- J., “Bi-centenary of a Naturalist: Alexander Wilson—Paisley’s Most Gifted Son.” Paisley Daily Express (6 July 1966)
John W. Jorner, ed. Colonial Families of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1911)
James Ripley Jacobs, Tarnished Warrior: Major General James Wilkinson (New York: Macmillan, 1938)
Charles William Janson, The Stranger in America (London, 1807)
*William Jardine, “Life of Alexander Wilson,” Wilson and Bonaparte’s American Ornithology I (London, 1832) ix-cv
—”Memoir of Wilson,” The Naturalist’s Library, volume 40 (Edinburgh, 1843)
—”Memoir of Wilson,” Birds of Great Britain and Ireland, volume 4 (London, 1876)
Thomas H. Johnston, Oxford Companion to American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966)
Joseph Kastner, A World of Naturalists (London: John Murray, 1978)
John Kay, A Series of Original Portraits, 2 volumes (Edinburgh: Hugh Patton, 1837, 1842).
- Cameron Lees, The Abbey of Paisley (Paisley, 1878)
Tom Leonard, ed., Radical Renfrew: Poetry from the French Revolution to the First World War (Ediburgh: Polygon, 2001)
Charles Robert Leslie, Autobiographical Recollection, ed. Tom Taylor, 8 volumes (London, 1860)
“Life and Writings of Alexander Wilson,” Renfrewshire Magazine (April 1847) 283
“List of Pieces Written by Alexander Wilson, Now in Philadelphia,” Paisley Repository, no. 20 (1810)
Benson John Lossing, “Alexander Wilson,” Eminent Americans (New York, 1857) 181
William MacKean, Letters Home During a Trip in America 1869 (Paisley, 1875)
Norman MacKeen, An Eighteenth Century Lodge in Paisley (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1909)
- T. Mann and H. D. Traill, Social England (London: Cassell, 1909)
Park Marshall, “The True Route of the Natchez Trace,” Tennessee Historical Magazine (September, 1915)
Catherine van Cortland Mathews, Andrew Ellicott, His Life and Letters, (New York: 1908)
William Smith McClellan, Smuggling in the American Colonies (1912)
Liam McIlvanney, Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (East Lothian: Tuckwell, 2002)
Robert Meek, A Biographical Sketch of the Life of James Tytler (Edinburgh, 1805)
Henry Meikle, Scotland and the French Revolution (Glasgow, 1912)
— Scotland (New York: Nielson, 1947)
“Memoir of Wilson,” in Poetical Works of Alexander Wilson (Paisley, 1859)
Memoir of Alexander Wilson of Paisley (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1836)
Men Who Have Risen (London: J. Hagy & Co., n.d.)
William Metcalfe, A History of Paisley, Scotland, 600-1908 (Paisley: Gardner, 1909)
- H. Millar, A Literary History of Scotland (New York, 1903)
Elizabeth Montgomery, Reminiscences of Wilmington (Philadelphia, 1851)
*William Motherwell, The Harp of Renfrewshire (Paisley: J. Lawrence, Jr., 1819)
— ed. The Paisley Magazine (Paisley: David Dick, 1828)
Norman Murray, The Scottish Hand Loom Weavers, 1790-1850: A Social History (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1978)
*Andrew Noble, “Displaced Persons and the Renfrew Radicals,” in Bob Harris, ed., Scotland in the Age of the French Revolution (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2005) 196-225
Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, Philadelphia, a History of the City and its People, (Philadelphia, n.d.)
*George Ord, “Life of Alexander Wilson,” The Port Folio, Series III, II (July-December, 1813): 345-353
—”The Life of Wilson,” Rees’ Cyclopaedia, XL (Philadephia: 1814)
—”Sketch of the Author’s Life,” American Ornithology (Philadephia, 1814)
—Sketch of the Life of Alexander Wilson (Philadelphia: Harrison Hall, 1828)
—”The Life of Wilson,” American Ornithology (Philadephia, 1825)
—”Life of Wilson, Author of American Ornithology” (Philadelphia, 1828)
Paisley Directory (Paisley: Nielson, 1812)
The Paisley Magazine (Paisley: David Dick, 1828) 582-585; 632-635.
John Parkhill, The History of Paisley (Paisley: Robert Stewart, 1857)
Allan Park Paton, Alexander Wilson the Ornithologist: A New Chapter in His Life (London: Longman, Greens, & Co., 1863)
William B. O. Peabody, “Life of Alexander Wilson,” Library of American Biography, ed. Jared Sparks, volume II (Boston: Hilliard and Gray, 1839)
Ebenezer Picken, Poems and Epistles, Mostly in the Scottish Dialect with Glossary (Paisley: John Neilson, 1788)
Charles Pierce, A Meteorological Account of the Weather in Philadelphia from January 1, 1790 to January 1, 1847 (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston)
Jessie Poesch, Titian Ramsay Peale 1799-1825 and His Journals of the Wilkes Expedition. Memoirs of Amer. Philos. Soc. , volume 52 (Philadephia, 1961)
William H. Prescott, Charles Brockden Brown (Boston, 1832)
James Purdy, “A Relative of Alexander Wilson,” The Auk XII (1895) 396
Frederick Pursh, Flora Americae Septentrionalis. A Systematic Arrangement and Description of the Plants of North America, 2 volumes (London: White, Cockrane & Co., 1814)
- D. Ramsay, The Smugglers’ Trade (London: Royal Historical Society, 1952)
Philip A. Ramsay, Views of Renfrewshire (Edinburgh: Lizars, 1834)
Samuel N. Rhoads, “George Ord,” Cassinia 12 (1908)
*Laura Rigal, “Empire of Birds: Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology,” in Art and Science in America, edited and introduced by Amy R. W. Meyers (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 1998) 61-96
“Romance of Bartram’s Garden,” Philadelphia Press, (May 3, 1896) 8
- Ross, ed., The Book of Scottish Poems: Ancient and Modern (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1882)
Dunbar Rowland, Encyclopedia of Mississippi History (Madison, Wis., 1909)
Mrs. Dunbar Rowland, Marking the Natchez Trace (Mississippi Historical Society, 1910)
— Life, Letters and Papers of William Dunbar (Jackson, Mississippi: Mississippi Historical Society, 1930)
St. Andrews Society of Philadelphia, Historical Catalogue 1749-1907 (Philadelphia, 1907)
Mrs. Horace St. John, Audubon, the Naturalist in the New World, His Adventures and Discoveries (New York, 1856)
Frederick Saunders, The Story of Some Famous Books (London, 1887)
- Thomas Scharf and Thompson Wescott, History of Philadelphia (Philadelpha, 1884)
Scottish Journal of Topography, Antiquities, Traditions, Etc. , volume 1 (September 1847 to February 1848) and volume 2 (March-July 1848), esp. 228-232 and 245-247.
David Semple, The Poems and Songs and Correspondence of Robert Tannahill (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1876)
- C. B. Seymour, Self-Made Men (New York: 1858) 215-233
Elizabeth A. Sharp, William Sharp (Fiona MacLeod) (London: William Heinemann, 1910)
Henry Simpson, The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians (Philadelphia, 1859) 968-969
Sir John Sinclair, The Statistical Record of Scotland (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1793)
- Vrooman Smith, “Scenes from the Life of Alexander Wilson,” Oologist (1893-1894)
James Speed, “Alexander Wilson,” Ten Outdoor Men (New York, 1929) 73-86
Witmer Stone, “Some Unpublished Letters of Alexander Wilson and John Abbot,” The Auk 23, 4 (1906)
—”Alexander Wilson,” Leading Men of Science, ed. David Starr Jordan (New York: 1910)
—”Alexander Wilson, the Father of American Ornithology,” Nature Magazine VIII (1926) 29-30
—”A Tablet to Wilson,” The Auk XL (1923) 575
—”Note on the Hundredth Anniversary of Wilson’s Death,” The Auk XXX (1913) 622
—”Review of James Lane Allen’s The Kentucky Warbler,” The Auk XXXVII (1920) 174
—”Some Early American Ornithologists,” Bird Lore VII (1905) 265-268
Emerson Stringham, Alexander Wilson, a Founder of Scientific Ornithology (Kerrville, Texas, 1958)
Alexander Tait, Poems and Songs (Paisley, 1790)
Robert Tannahill, Poems and Songs, ed. David Semple (Paisley: Alex. Gardner, 1900)
Mrs. H. J. Taylor, “Alexander Wilson: A Sketch,” The Wilson Bulletin XL (1928) 75-84
Topographical, Statistical and Historical Gazeteer of Scotland, 2 volumes (Edinburgh: Fullerton, 1854)
Spencer Trotter, “Alexander Wilson,” Library of the World’s Best Literature” (New York, 1876) 16017-16018
Samuel Marion Tucker, “The Beginning of Verse 1610-1808,” Cambridge History of American Literature I, Chapter IX (New York, 1917)
Gavin Turnbull, Poetical Essays (Glasgow: David Niven, 1788)
John Veitch, The Feeling For Nature in Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh and London, 1887)
Joseph M. Wade, “Alexander Wilson,” Ornithologist and Oologist, Vol. XVIII, No. 5 (May 1893) 65-67
Hugh Walker, Three Centuries of Scottish Literature, 2 volumes (Glasgow, 1893)
Townsend Ward, “Second Street and Its Associations,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. IV (1880)
— “A Walk to Darby,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. III (1879)
- M. Weed, Stories from Comparison of the Writings of Audubon, Wilson, etc. (Chicago: Rand, McNally and Co., 1904)
Robert Henry Welker, Birds and Men: American Birds in Science, Art, Literature, and Conservation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955) 18-58
Francis Wharton, Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (Published by the authority of Congress, Government Printing Office, 1889)
— State Trials in the United States During the Administrations of Washington and Adams (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1849)
James Wilkinson, Memoirs of My Own Time (Philadelphia, 1816)
Samuel Cole Williams, Early Travels in the Tennessee Country (Johnson City, Tenn., 1928)
“Wilson the Ornithologist,” The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, and Sciences, London (September 3 & October 15, 1831)
Alexander Wilson, Memoirs of Alexander Wilson (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1831)
James Grant Wilson, “Alexander Wilson,” The Poets and Poetry of Scotland, 2 volumes (New York: Harpers, 1876 and London: Blackie & Son, 1877) 418-427
*James Southall Wilson, Alexander Wilson, Poet-Naturalist: A Study of His Life with Selected Poems (New York: Neale, 1906)
- B. Woodward, “Alexander Wilson,” Dictionary of National Biography (1900)
William Jay Youman, “Alexander Wilson,” Popular Science Monthly XXXVI (November 1889-April 1890) 400-407
— “Alexander Wilson,” Pioneers of Science in America (New York, 1896)
Michael Ziser, “Alexander Wilson,” Early American Nature Writers: A Biographical Encyclopedia, ed. Daniel Patterson (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008) 288-293
Theses and Dissertations
Gordon Wilson, “Alexander Wilson: Poet-Essayist-Ornithologist,” dissertation, Indiana University, 1930
William T. Hamilton, “Alexander Wilson’s America,” dissertation, University of Minnesota 1971
Elizabeth Fairhead, “Bartram’s Garden and Natural History in Philadelphia, 1790-1825,” dissertation, Michigan State University, 2005