Alexander Anderson

Who was Alexander Anderson?

Alexander Anderson was a Scottish poet.

Born in Kirkconnel, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland, the sixth and youngest son of James Anderson a quarrier. When the boy was three, the household moved to Crocketford in Kirkcudbrightshire. He attended the local school where the teacher found him to be of average ability. The area around Crocketford was renowned for martyrdom and Anderson seems to have taken inspiration from his walks in the hills in his later poetry. At sixteen he was back in his native village working in a quarry; some two years later, he became a surfaceman or platelayer on the Glasgow and South-western railway, and generally wrote under the name of Surfaceman.

Spending all his leisure in self-culture, he mastered German, French, and Spanish sufficiently to read the chief masterpieces in these languages. His poetic vein, which was true if somewhat limited in range, soon manifested itself, and in 1870 he began to send verses to the ‘People's Friend’ of Dundee, and subsequently his fist book ‘A Song of Labour and other Poems’, was published in 1873 by the Dundee Advertiser in a run of 1000.