Dorothea Primrose Campbell

Isobel Grundy

    Dorothea Primrose Campbell was born in the Shetland Isles (which she calls Zetland) on 4 May 1792. Her parents were called Duncan and Elizabeth; she was the eldest of a large family. The family had debts going back a generation, and her father died when she was sixteen. That was when she thought of earning money by publishing, and made an approach to J. Young, a publisher at Inverness. In 1811 he published her first collection of Poems for her, by subscription. She had a second, revised edition produced at London in 1816, having meanwhile set up a school and become a correspondent of Walter Scott. This time her publisher went bankrupt. Her mother became addicted to opium. Her own school failed, but she went on teaching, supporting with her earnings her mother and (until his education was complete) a younger brother.

In 1841 she received an invitation to move to England to a governess position, but these employers in their turn went bankrupt. She found it hard or impossible to find another job in England (as teacher, housekeeper, or matron or sister in a hospital): apart from her background, her age was against her. She applied to the Royal Literary Fund in 1844, having used up all her money while unemployed. (One of her referees argued her literary merit; she herself argued only need.) They paid her £30 and she found a job teaching at Sevenoaks; but when she died, on 6 January 1863, she was an inmate of an Aged Governesses' Asylum in Kentish Town.

    The poems in Campbell's first volume are remarkable work for a teenager. She writes in the forms popular with poets of the last couple of generations, producing traditional and invented narratives, addresses to actual and fictional people, and meditative descriptions of natural scenery. (The work of James Thomson is an influence.) She turns easily from traditional local belief in the Bokies or "Spirits of the Hill", to congratulate a friend on her leaving school, or lament another who has died. Her poems of personal introspection, however, reveal conflicting attitudes. On the one hand she expresses pride in the beauty of Zetland (the Shetlands), sometimes in conventional terms, praising the "green rob'd plain," "dimpled brook, and leafy grove" which she probably found in books rather than round about her, and sometimes from direct observation of "misty hills and humid vales." On the other hand she voices the longings of the romantic soul for scope and extension, with the desparing question, "Still must these barren plains and hills, / These rugged rocks and scanty rills, / My narrow prospect bound?" Of the various ways in which these poems may be grouped into categories, the most fruitful is perhaps the grouping into those which express a social identity, securely centred amid home, female friendship, and traditional beliefs and social practices, and those which express a poetic identity, sensitive to beauty and passion, yearning for love, or fame, or travel.

    Campbell's second collection reprints many of her early poems. Her two identities have drawn closer together, and poems about everyday reality become preoccupied with change, with melancholy, the loss of places cherished in childhood, the prospect of death, and the bitterness of poverty, which destroys social relationships and makes the speaker an outcast even within her own social circle.

    Dorothea Primrose Campbell was not yet twenty-five when her second poetry collection was published. Her life circumstances, living in personal anxiety and emotional pain in a remote place among scenes of striking natural beauty, fitted perfectly into available patterns for her writing. She cannot be said to have found what would have been her mature voice, but Francis Jeffrey hit the nail on the head when he said (not in a contemporary review but when, years later, he came to recommend her to the charity of the Royal Literary Fund) that those early poems had "much promise and originality." Her poetic voice is strong and musical, her range broad, her diction never predictable.

    Her single identified novel, Harley Radington. A Tale, is a greater tour de force of imagination than her poems. She assumes the voice of a male protagonist-narrator, in whose story she has found a means of heightening and dramatising her own ambivalent feelings about being a Shetlander. Harley is the only child of a woman born in poverty in Shetland, who has emigrated to England and made a well-to-do marriage. At the beginning of the novel he knows nothing of his mother's origins, which she keeps hidden as a guilty secret from him as well as from her English husband. The opening chapters would lead the reader to expect a tale of a man coming to terms later with personal defects caused by being spoiled by a capricious mother.

    Campbell smoothly mimicks the self-assurance of a male, English, gentry voice. Harley says that he "write[s] this history of myself, to please myself. ... If my reader will go with me hand-in-hand to the end of my journey, well and good; if not, why he can let it alone." He carelessly reflects his education in quotations from Horace, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, and Goldsmith. An alert contemporary reader might have noticed that he quotes also a number of relatively obscure women writers: Eliza Fay (a traveller), Anne Bannerman (a Scot), and Margaret Chalmers (a Shetlander).

    The invention of the "National Tale" genre, generally ascribed to Sir Walter Scott although arguably the invention of Maria Edgeworth (Castle Rackrent, 1798, "Ennui", 1809), Jane Porter (Thaddeus of Warsaw, 1803, The Scottish Chiefs, 1810), or Sydney Owenson, later Lady Morgan (The Wild Irish Girl, 1806), was vital to Campbell's conception of her novel. But it is a national tale with a difference, since the Shetlands have no national military heroes (as in Porter), no relation with alien colonial expropriators (as in Castle Rackrent and The Wild Irish Girl), no surviving memories of a separate history and culture. Campbell supplies footnotes and a glossary treating Shetland customs and superstitions, but these make the place seem more like a "barbarous" land ripe for annexation and colonisation than a potential partner in Enlightenment Britain, which is what Edgeworth and Morgan claim for Ireland, and Scott and Christian Isobel Johnstone claim for Scotland.

    Campbell's narrator grows up in fashionable London, not knowing (though clues are dropped) that his mother is in origin a 'female adventurer'. Her shame about this is a moral defect like her maltreatment of governesses and her deplorable second marriage after the death of Harley's father. The hero's coming to manhood is marred by the discovery of his ignoble descent. He then goes to sea and suffers shipwreck. His life is saved by the rough-and-ready attentions of a race of savages, living in huts which stink of fish and are full of smoke and farm animals. As Gulliver recoiled when he discovered that the Yahoos were of human shape, so Harley recoils when he discovers that he is in Shetland, and that his hosts are closely related to him.

    This version of a contact moment between primitive people and 'civilized' explorers is beautifully handled, and deserves the attention of critics. On the one hand the distinction between savage and gentleman collapses, since they share their parentage though not their nurture. Very interesting in this light are the poor Shetland women, who not only practise charms and spells, but do it with the intention of wrecking ships or otherwise taking violent action against their enemies or their potential prey. On the other hand Harley's gentry status continues to shape his course, and he soon reaches the towns of Shetland and discovers a more educated and cultivated life in progress. "In this poor place I was astonished to find an agreeable and polished society, he says of Lerwick. (2: 37) he rejoins his class equals, and the plot-line becomes considerably less original and too eventful by half. Harley survives two more shipwrecks, and lives to be knighted and to close his penitent mother's eyes. The beautiful and gentle young wife he marries in Shetland dies, leaving him free to prove he has overcome his ignorant dislike of women of sense, by marrying one, the younger sister of a dead comrade's beloved. The book even traces their offspring to the second generation.

     It is if, after her splendid discovery episode, Campbell does not know how to reconcile traditional life in Shetland with the expectations of her readership. She does return her attention there in the end, with a lengthy footnote on the little fish called "sillic", which Shetlanders eat fresh, dried, and half-and-half, and from which they get oil to give them light. Therefore, says the author, "in the mud-walled cottage of the Zetlander, the providence of God is as conspicuous, and as surely felt, as in those favoured lands which flow with milk and honey." (2: 233-4) She has produced an eloquent plea for English or Scottish readers to interest themselves in their Shetland sisters and brothers, but her own description of their traditional life did not feature much gratitude to God, and did feature wiliness, paranoid suspicion, and self-reliant, amoral energy which she seems to wish to be rid of, or to seal safely into the scholarly recognition of the footnote.

Bibliography

Campbell, Dorothea Primrose, Poems, Inverness: J. Young, 1811.

-, Poems, London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1816.

-, Harley Radington. A Tale, London: A. K. Newman, 1821.

British Library copy of Campbell, Poems, 1816, with cutting pasted inside.

 National Library of Scotland MSS 3278. 102, 3888.20, 3890. 89, 208, 261.

Royal Literary Fund MSS (available on microfilm) 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, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

The Orlando Project (unpublished but forthcoming electronic text)