Robert Anderson (poet)

Having mastered the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, he was sent to work to help support his family at the age of ten, initially under an elder brother who was a calico printer.

In 1808, following the death of his father the year before, Anderson left for another position near Belfast, calling on the way to visit the grave of one of his principal influences, Robert Burns.

To help relieve his poverty, a new edition of his poems, The Poetical Works of Robert Anderson, was published from the city in 1820, for which he contributed an autobiographical essay.

[12] The work of these earlier writers was to be incorporated with poems by some of Anderson's contemporaries in anthologies that followed the popular reprints of his ballads, always stressing their Cumbrian affiliation.

One such collection was Ballads in the Cumberland dialect, chiefly by R. Anderson (1808, second edition 1815, Wigton),[13] which included poems by Miss Blamire and other anonymous female writers, Ewan Clark and Mark Lonsdale, as well as woodcuts in the style - or from the workshop - of Thomas Bewick.

After his death a good proportion, some 130 pieces, including extra verses and other changes by its own account, were added to Anderson’s Cumberland Ballads, published from Wigton in 1840.

[16] Mark Huggins has commented on Anderson that he "was a man of the people, and most of his songs were about real individuals, whose names appear in parish registers of the time.

"[17] He celebrated the area's small towns, farms, fairs, markets and landscape, addressing the life of the inhabitants: their work, loves, feasting, drinking, dancing and cockfights.

Adapted to the mining circumstances of southern Cumbria, it lived a life of its own, divorced from the tune Anderson wrote for it, as "The Recruited Collier".

It was, by his account, based on the story of a Halifax girl who lost her way in the snow, although a claim has also been made that he may have been remembering Christopher Anstey’s ballad, "The Farmer’s Daughter".

[23] The story of Anderson's "Lucy Gray" was related to him by a Northumbrian rustic about a village beauty who died at seventeen and was followed to the grave by her lover.

His initial impulse to write had sprung from disgust at songs "written in a mock pastoral Scottish style" that he had encountered while in London.

Indeed, beside the lyrics of his in standard English set by James Hook, several others were in Anderson's derivative Scots, including "Donald of Dundee", "Bonny Jem", "Muirland Willy", "Dearly I love Johnny O" and "The Press Gang".

Shortly after his death, some of his lyrics were published alongside those of his model in the chapbook Burns' songs and Anderson's Cumberland ballads (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1839).