Chalmers, Margaret, 1758-?

By Isobel Grundy

Biography

Margaret Chalmers was baptised on 12 December 1758 at Lerwick in the Shetland Islands. She was the eldest child of her parents, William and Kitty (nee Irvine). Her father worked as a customs officer and as estate agent for a local land-owner. She had several sisters and a brother, William, who joined the navy and was killed, aged thirty-five, in the battle of Trafalgar. By this time the mother and one of the sisters were bedridden; the family was very poor, and petitions failed to secure them a government pension. It was in the hope of making money that Margaret arranged to publish her Poems by subscription. They appeared at Newcastle, 1813, after long delays during which many subscribers lost interest. The venture seems to have been badly managed, and the book was badly printed. It seems to have brought her the interest and correspondence of Sir Walter Scott, but it did not bring her the profit she hoped for. In 1816 she applied instead to the Royal Literary Fund, which paid her ten pounds. After this she disappears from the record.

Critical Essay

Margaret Chalmers seems not to have known that Dorothea Primrose Campbell (q.v.), more than a generation younger, had in fact beaten her for the position of "first British Thulian quill," in print, that is. Like Campbell, she expresses conflicted attitudes about her Shetland home, a blend of pride and apology, a delight in its places and habits combined with a fear that it may not be possible for one of its inhabitants to become a poet. She enjoys thinking up far-fetched titles for herself based on her remoteness, using also "madam Thulia" and "my Greenland Lady." She has a deep vein of piety, but also a spirit of poetic fun, the latter not at all what one would expect from her family circumstances. She says herself that the only one of the Muses to have any time for her is the Muse of Comedy, Thalia.

Her use of the muses trope is typical of her poetical self-constructions. She prefaces her book with an "Author's Address to the Critics" which is happily free from the self-abasement all too common in women poets of the period. She is not above blowing her own trumpet, though she chooses to stake her claims on novelty rather than poetic skill in itself: "Since Scandinavia rul'd our Isles, / We ne'er have woo'd the muses' smiles," she writes, reminding English or Scottish readers of Shetland's separate history, even while her familiarity with poetic conventions in general and those based on classical myth in particular register that she is perfectly at home in the tradition of English literature. The nearest she gets to self-abasement is to mock her own poetic ambitions with comic hyperbole which is then deflated. Getting to the top of Parnassus, she says, will be no problem for her.

When to a point I set my face,
I love to do it with a grace. ...
I'll drain Pieria's sacred spring
(By halves I hate to do a thing,)
What, though it leaves the channel dry
To the next comer, what care I?

The effect of this is mockery of standard poetic tropes, of the competitive approach to the notion of poetic fame, rather than of the skill of the writer, which in its style this poem nicely showcases.

Chalmers writes about many northern islands, not just her own, and she often does so in a tone of British patriotism. (Like Campbell, she provides explanatory footnotes.) "The Sufferings of Faro" describes a famine in the Faroe Islands, in which a boat sets out to seek British help, and Britain appears as saviour. An even more dramatic poem about danger at sea, entitled simply "Lines", describes a storm which sank one of the Shetland boats that were out in it, and how six men perished; the saving of the other five boats is as gripping as the wreck. These poems of action reflect Chalmers's sense of how society works, as do her addresses to people who may have been potential patrons (Scott, Lady Mount Keith, a local landowner named Arthur Nicholson), and her poems about the royal family.

Her best poems are complex, self-contained structures. "The Rose of the Rock" (which features highly attractive place-names from the Island of Uist) concerns a dangerous climb rewarded with the sight of a rare, remote rose. The speaker's tone is protective of a young girl who wants to make the climb - and by calling her a "daughter of Eve" suggests implicit comparison between picking a rose and picking an apple. An imitation of Burns concludes that Burns is impossible to imitate, but does so in marvellously Burnsian style (her word for herself here is "a hizzie"). Her single volume, distilling published when she was nearly sixty, reflects a lifetime practising her literary craft.

Works Cited

Margaret Chalmers, Poems, Newcastle: S. Hodgson, 1813.
International Genealogical Index.
Royal Literary Fund MSS (available on microfilm).
The Scots Magazine, 1806.
National Library of Scotland MSS.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, London: Batsford 1990.