'Tammas Bodkin.'

The People's Journal, 1858-1879

William Duncan Latto was born in the parish of Ceres in Fife in 1823. He started life as a weaver, then became a schoolmaster, and finally a journalist. He was editor of the People's Journal from 1861 to 1898, and under his pen-name, 'Tammas Bodkin', the most famous vernacular essayist in Victorian Scotland.

The original text runs to more than three-quarters of a million words, making it difficult in the space available to give more than a hint of its striking range and quality. The selection printed below highlights one or two of the more obvious aspects of Latto's many-sided talent. Firstly, his social concern:his life-long struggle to improve the condition of the common people of Scotland which sprang from personal experience of poverty, and many years in the editorial chair of a crusading popular newspaper. Secondly, his role as a political commentator at the forefront of Scottish advanced Liberal opinion throughout the period, giving memorable voice to its characteristic anti-Imperialist fervour. Thirdly, his gift as a humorous observer of men and manners whose sparkling comic talent delighted two generations of Victorian Scots.

His powerful prose is saturated in the scriptures and the Scottish poets and ranges at need from explosive idiomatic directness to a comic elaboration of Gothic proportions. Best of all, perhaps, he is a brilliantly resourceful and inventive phrase-maker. Look, for example, at the way he transforms a conventionally dismal subject like the 'flu:

'The sudden cheenge o' the temperature i' the end o' last week completely nirled my neb an' sent the cauld shivers shootin' like arrows through my very banes an' marrow. A' Saturday an' Sabbath I was juist at deid's door, scarcely able to wingle a'e leg bye the ither. My head-piece was completly stappit up, an' as douf an' fushionless-like as an auld foggie turnip; an' an attempt to blaw my nose garred a' the internal organization thereof crack an' fizz like a ginger-beer bottle castin' the cork. My throat was like an open sepulchre in a literal sense, as it was a' red flesh, an' was as dry as a whistle. I couldna lat ower my spittle withoot doin' violence to my feelin's. My respiratory machinery, too, was as stiff as a rusty lock, an' the words cam' up frae the bottom o' my chest wi' a hoarse an' raspin-like soond, as if they had been generated in the interior o' a bass fiddle, or the drone o' a bagpipe...'
[9 November 1861]

'Tammas Bodkin', the central character of the column, is a manufacturing tailor in Dundee with an apprentice called Willie Clippins who later becomes his partner, and a varied career which includes foreign travel and the inheritance of great wealth. He is elderly, childless, and married to a headstrong wife called Tibbie with whom he has an affectionate if stormy relationship. Between them Bodkin and Tibbie provide comment on a whole range of contemporary issues as seen by a couple of shrewd well-informed upper-working class Scots.

(Reproduced from the excellent The Language of the People: Scots Prose from the Victorian Revival, by William Donaldson (Aberdeen University Press, 1989), which together with its companion volume, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland: Language, Fiction and the Press (also AUP), deals quite effectively with the vile vile lie that there is no significant continuous prose tradition in Scots. It ain't Welsh, but it's a great deal better than fuck aw.)

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