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History of the RSM - January 2010

Albert J. Edmunds
Donald MacAlister's note
Donald MacAlister's note.
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In 1963 Donald MacAlister, the son of Sir John MacAlister (see Feature of the Month December 2009) donated to the Society several items from his father's collection of memorabilia including a bound volume of verse in manuscript by Albert J. Edmunds, a young librarian friend of Sir John.

Shown here is Donald MacAlister's note pasted into the volume giving some information concerning its history.

The poems all date from the mid-1880s and show, perhaps, some attempt to emulate the work of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the then poet laureate. It must be said that they are of their time, tending to an extreme romanticism and pomposity of diction that may seem risible to modern readers. Child-Love: a fragment of Heart-History, for instance, concerns the poet's affection for the "droll and winning Winny." Its nine closely-written pages contain lines such as:

"Now we neared
A city dense, and shall I tell its name?
The bard may sing of Bath and Exeter,
But seal his lips at Birmingham and Leeds.
Well, it was Leeds, and in a dusky spot,
A noisy railway terminus, (but called
By a new name in heaven's topography,)
Winny by me was promised to be left
Upon a bench beneath a portly clock.
No dial in a Syrian garden e'er
Marked the high noon of love in holiness
To priest and vestal, more than did that clock
For what it now was witness of."

The volume contains further similar tributes to Julia, Little Nellie, A City Fairy, Annie Firth, Minnie, Lizzie Ann, Dora, Dora's Cousin, Madeline, Colinette, The Gardener in Queensland, Annie and Caroline, Agnes, Sally, and Sister Jennie.

Despite his apparent embarrassment at such modern industrial cities as Birmingham and Leeds, Edmunds appears to have spent much of his time in the North of England particularly at Sunderland where he wrote several poems including Town Thoughts; or, A Saturday Afternoon in Sunderland, and Victoria Hall, a lengthy lament for the tragedy that befell the town on 16th June 1883 when, following a variety show, a large number of children leaving the theatre were trapped behind a narrow exit doorway. That day 183 children died of asphyxia.


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