Gray, Christian, 1772-1830(?)

By Isobel Grundy

Biography

Christian Gray was born in 1772 in the parish of Aberdalgie in Perth, close to the Ochil Hills. Her parents, Janet (McDonald) and George Gray, were farmers, "not rich, but respected," living close to the Ochil Hills. She was one of two surviving children; she was deeply attached to her brother. She had smallpox as a child, and lost her eyesight at a young age, almost certainly as a result of this. She had the benefit of somebody to read aloud to her every day (the Bible and Scottish metrical psalms, as well as secular poetry), and she was able to walk up and down in the open air, knitting as she walked. When she composed poetry she would memorise it, and use the first person who turned up to write it down for her. Before the publication of her earlier volume of poems in 1808 someone had suggested she should apply to be admitted into the Asylum for the Blind at Edinburgh; she either refused, or was not granted a place. The family was ruined during the period 1816-26, which was marked by successive droughts. Probably during the earlier part of this decade, her brother, who had joined the British army, died in Africa, leaving an only child who was by then her sole relation. Lord and Lady Kinnoull were her patrons, and Lord Kinnoul provided her with a cottage in Aberdalgie on the bank of the River Earn. Her date of death is not known; it was some time well after 1827.

Critical Essay

Christian Gray's interest as a labouring-class poet is increased by the fact of her blindness, which meant that she was self-educated. She published both her volumes of poetry with her name, first in Edinburgh, then nearer home in Perth. In each case the idea of raising money, with a suggestion of appealing for charity, was present in the publication; but the devotion to poetry clearly preceded the fund-raising impulse. Gray was well read: she quotes Milton on both her title-pages, and has the confidence to associate herself with the great epic poet by applying to herself his lines on his blindness. She remodelled William Cowper's "My Mary" as "My Brother", and turned passages from Ossian (that is to say, from the versions of Henry Mackenzie) into verse. She writes equally well in standard English and in dialect Scots. She belongs also to the movement, associated with the name of Burns, to recover the Scottish traditional ballad. The works of most Scottish writers of songs and ballads during this period often show a close interweaving traditional elements with original or reworked material. Conventional ascription of authorship is often hard to do. This is true of Gray, who writes answers both to traditional ballads and to a reworked one by Carolina, Lady Nairne ("The Land o' the Leal"). The poem which stands first in her earlier collection of poetry was recorded by Elizabeth Isabella Spence on the way back from her tour of the Highlands in 1816 as having been written by a male gardener.

The poem in question, "Bessy Bell and Mary Gray," is typical of the Scottish ballad in that it incorporates the skeleton of a supposedly historical event, with fictional elements. These elements include a motif found in several women's texts of the eighteenth century, of two women in love with the same man, who, rather than pursue their rivalry, end up living as friends together, without the man. The poem is typical also in its disillusioned view of marriage: the disillusion not of romantic idealism but of hard proletarian experience. The retirement of Bessy and Mary from the world, figured as an opting-out from marriage prospects, overlaps with stories of protective retirement in times of epidemic. These women, however, do not escape the plague; when it hits the neighbourhood where they live in seclusion, they die of it, both together. Also typical is Gray's answer to the wooing poem "O Nannie will ye gang wi' me." In this the woman wooed rejects her suitor not out of personal dislike but out of a firm understanding of what marriage may involve for a poor woman: "For aft a wife maun thole the wrang, / And I sic scaith will never dree."

Gray writes that the "lowliest" of the muses has instructed her to "sing of ladies," but she also voices opinion on matters of public policy, like war, emigration, and slavery. Of the West Indies she observes that "Afric's blood the land defiles." Anti-slavery sentiment and anti-war sentiment are based on a value for the family and the local community. Public and private blend as one in "Lines composed in the time of war," where Gray uses a deliberately proletarian, common-woman voice to express political conviction. The protagonist of this poem is a girl whom one might not expect to entertain political convictions at all; Gray calls her a laughing, "dressy" character (the second adjective is a neologism, suggesting that this girl stretches the resources of language to describe her). But as she awaits the reappearance of her lover, Jamie, who has been a prisoner of war in France, she voices a political conviction which is heart-felt and dearly earned: "I'm no a deep-learn'd far-skill'd politician, / But common sense tells me that war is a fiend."

Gray uses the same Scots idiom for delightful, colloquial epistles to her friends. Some offer advice (for instance, to a young friend now transplanted from rural to urban life); others create apparently fictional dramatic situations, as she does also in non-epistolary pieces like "Sabella, A Metrical Tale." She uses English, however, for some of her autobiographical pieces ("A View of the Author's Past Life, Composed on a proposal ... for ... admittance into the Asylum for the Blind in Edinburgh," and "In a Fit of Chagrine . . . 1798") as well as for poems of religious introspection, celebrating Christ's sacrifice or worrying about her prospects of salvation. Some of the forms that she uses she also burlesques: one poem of advice is advice to a new petticoat, not to despise an old one.

Though she calls herself, deprecatingly, "a hamlet muse," Christian Gray is homespun only by stylistic intention. She is very much at home in the Scots traditions which she inhabits, but much of the pleasure of her poetry comes from the perception of an individual voice speaking out of well-pondered experience.

Works Cited

Christian Gray. Tales, Letters, and other Pieces in Verse, by Christian Gray, blind from her infancy. Edinburgh, 1808.
—. A New Selection of Miscellaneous Pieces, in Verse. Printed for the Author, Perth, 1821.
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.
Drummond, Peter Robert.  Perthshire in Bygone Days, 100 Biographical Essays. London, 1879
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Letters from the North Highlands, During the Summer 1816. London: Longman, 1817.