William Edmondstoune Aytoun

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n82155081

Theodore Martin, ‘Aytoun, William Edmonstoune (1813–1865)’, rev. David Finkelstein, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2011 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/959, accessed 1 Sept 2017]

Aytoun, William Edmonstoune (1813–1865), poet, was born on 21 June 1813 in Edinburgh, the only son and youngest of the three children of Roger Aytoun (d. 1843), writer to the signet, and of Joan Keir (d. 1861). Through both father and mother he belonged to old Scottish families, his progenitors on the father's side being the Aytouns of Inchdairnie in Fife, and the Edmonstounes, formerly of Edmonstoune and Ednam, and afterwards of Corehouse in Lanarkshire, and on the mother's side the Keirs of Kinmouth and West Rhynd in Perthshire. He was also a descendant of the poet Sir Robert Ayton, member of the court of James VI, who had been friendly with Ben Jonson and Thomas Hobbes, and was the reputed author of the lines upon which Burns based ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Both of Aytoun's parents were leading figures in Edinburgh society: his father was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Academy, where Aytoun studied between 1824 and 1828, and his mother was a good friend of Sir Walter Scott. Owing to his mother's encouragement, Aytoun early on in life acquired an interest in writing ballad poetry, an interest which was to flourish in later years in his work for Blackwood's Magazine.

Aytoun studied law at Edinburgh University between 1828 and 1833, dabbling in verse poetry at the same time; his first publication was a small volume of poetry in 1832 entitled Poland, Homer, and other Poems, in which the qualities of his later style were already apparent. He thought of going to the English bar, but after a winter in London attending the courts of law he abandoned this intention. On graduating in 1833, Aytoun spent a year travelling and studying German literature. He returned to Edinburgh, and became a writer to the signet in 1835, but dedicated much time to literary work. The discipline of his legal practice was of great use in giving him a power of mastering the details of political and other questions which was of distinct service to him at a later period. In 1840 he was called to the Scottish bar, which had more attraction for him than the irksome monotony of a solicitor's practice, and made a fair position for himself there during the years in which he remained in active practice.

In 1836 Aytoun became a contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, a connection that was to last until his death in 1865. During this almost thirty-year connection he wrote over 200 poems, reviews, satires and short stories. Between 1836 and 1844 he worked together with Theodore Martin in the production of what are known as the ‘Bon Gaultier Ballads’, a series of parodies of contemporary verse, which acquired such great popularity that thirteen editions were published between 1855 and 1877. They were also associated at this time in writing many prose magazine articles of a humorous character, as well as a series of translations of Goethe's ballads and minor poems, which, after appearing in Blackwood's Magazine, were some years afterwards collected and published in a volume entitled Poems and Ballads of Goethe (1858). It was during this period that Aytoun began to write the series of ballads known as the ‘Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers’, eventually published in 1849. These ballad romances, originally featured in Blackwood's Magazine, were modelled on the works of Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Babington Macaulay, and were concerned with Scottish historical subjects and heroes. They became important texts in the romantic revival in mid-Victorian Scotland.

In 1844 Aytoun became one of the staff of Blackwood's Magazine, to which he continued until his death to contribute political and other articles on a great variety of subjects, including humorous tales such as ‘My First Spec in the Biggleswades’, and ‘How We Got Up the Glenmutchkin Railway, and How We Got Out of It’.

In 1845 Aytoun was appointed professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres in the University of Edinburgh. Here he was in his element, and he made his lectures so attractive that he raised the number of students from 30 in 1846 to more than 1850 in 1864. On 11 April 1849 Aytoun married Jane Emily (d. 1859), daughter of the writer John Wilson (Christopher North) (1785–1854). His professorial duties did not interfere with his position at the bar, and in 1852 when the tory party of Lord Derby came into power he was appointed the sheriff of Orkney and Shetland. In the following year Oxford conferred on him the honorary degree of DCL.

The duties of Aytoun's sheriffship and his work as professor, both conscientiously discharged, still left him leisure for literary work. In 1854 he produced the dramatic poem ‘Firmilian’, perhaps the most brilliant of his works, an extremely cutting parody of the so-called Spasmodic school of poetry, exemplified by Alexander Smith, J. W. Marston, and Sydney Dobell. Aytoun had been opposed to the aesthetic creed and productions of this group, who modelled themselves on the Romantic poets, but whose works he viewed as derivative and markedly inferior, characterized by verbosity, obscurity, and self-absorption. His parody began in May 1854 with a review for Blackwood's Magazine of the unpublished poetry of a fictitious young Spasmodic, T. Percy Jones. It was so effective as to lead to calls for the publication of Jones's work, and Aytoun, relishing the thought of further extending the burlesque, came out with Firmilian, or, The Student of Badajoz: a Spasmodic Tragedy in July 1854. The print run of 1048 copies sold out, and although its comic intelligence was generally recognized, it was still accepted by some as serious poetry, giving force to the remarks of reviewers such as that of The Times, who regarded Firmilian as ‘the most perfect, as it is the most elaborate and the most legitimate, parody that has ever been written’ (Weinstein, 151). The poem was influential in ending the vogue for the productions of the Spasmodic school, against whom the critical tide of opinion quickly turned.

Aytoun also produced serious poetry. In 1856 he published ‘Bothwell’, a poetical monologue, dealing with the relations between the hero and Mary, queen of Scots. It contained many fine passages, and three editions of it were published. In 1858 he published a collection, in two volumes, of the Ballads of Scotland carefully collated and annotated, of which four editions were published. In 1861 his novel Norman Sinclair appeared; it had already been serialized in Blackwood's Magazine, and is interesting for its pictures of society in early nineteenth-century Scotland, and for many passages which are, in fact, autobiographical. About this time Aytoun's health began to fail, and his spirits had sustained a shock from which he never wholly recovered in the death (15 April 1859) of his wife, to whom he had been devotedly attached. He sought relief in hard work, but life had thenceforth lost much of its zest for him. Being childless, his loneliness became intolerable, and on 24 December 1863 he married Fearne Jemima (d. 1904), daughter of James Kinnear. But by this time his health had seriously declined, and on 4 August 1865 he died at Blackhills, near Elgin where he had been living; he was buried at Edinburgh. A memoir of his life was published by Theodore Martin in 1867.

Theodore Martin, rev. David Finkelstein