Robert Williams Buchanan

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Robert Williams Buchanan (18 August 1841 – 10 June 1901) was a Scottish poet, novelist and dramatist. Some of his works were later made into films.

He was born in Caverswall, Staffordshire, England, the son of Robert Buchanan, an Owenite lecturer and journalist from Ayr. He grew up and was educated in Glasgow, attending the high school and the university. He and the poet David Gray were contemporaries there. A friend, James Mackintosh Kennedy, later wrote about Buchanan’s trips to America in the 1880s.

Buchanan’s earliest books were poetry written while he lived in Glasgow. His first book is thought to be Poems and Love Lyrics (about 1857). His second book, Mary and other Poems, appeared in 1859. He also published Storm-beaten, or Christmas Eve at the Old Anchor Inn (with Charles Gibbon) in 1862, before Undertones (1863). This began a string of verse collections—Idyls and Legends of Inverburn (1865), London Poems (1866), and North Coast and other Poems (1868)—showing his gift for narrative poetry and an interest in ordinary people’s lives. In 1870 he published The Book of Orm: A Prelude to the Epic.

Buchanan became known for more than poetry. In 1871 he wrote an article under the pen name Thomas Maitland called The Fleshly School of Poetry, which was turned into a pamphlet in 1872. The piece provoked sharp replies from Dante Gabriel Rossetti and, in particular, Algernon Charles Swinburne. Buchanan later regretted the harsh attacks.

He also worked in prose and drama. The Shadow of the Sword (1876) was one of his best-known novels. He wrote several plays, including Lady Clare (1883) and Sophia (1886), an adaptation of Tom Jones; A Man’s Shadow (1890) and The Charlatan (1894). He collaborated with Harriet Jay on Alone in London. His later poetry included The Outcast: a Rhyme for the Time (1891) and The Wandering Jew (1893), which criticized certain aspects of Christianity.

Around 1896 he published his own works and faced financial difficulties later in life. In 1894 he publicly campaigned for the release of James Canham Read, a convicted murderer and bigamist; Read was hanged anyway. In 1900 Buchanan suffered a paralytic seizure and never recovered. He died in Streatham in 1901 and was buried in Southend-on-Sea, Essex.

Buchanan’s poems were collected several times, including volumes in 1874, 1884, and Complete Poetical Works in 1901. Some of his poems inspired musical works, such as Meg Blane, a cantata by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and Fra Giacomo, used in a dramatic piece by Cecil Coles. Several of his works were adapted into films.