To the end of his days he remained Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burmah.

His time in Perth seems to have been relatively peaceful, although he found it harder to sell enough poems to this smaller population. Still, it was a base from whence he could travel to Glasgow, Inverness and Edinburgh to give his performances. Whilst doing a show in the Scottish capital, he was visited by Henry Irving and Ellen Terry and was reported to have received his fellow tragedians graciously.

In 1895 he left Perth and moved to Edinburgh. The period that followed was the most successful one of his career. He became a cult figure amongst the students of the capital and was in much demand for entertainments. Even if they were laughing at him behind his back, at least they weren’t throwing anything at him – a great improvement over Dundee.

However, such fashions do not last for ever, and as the twentieth century dawned he was once again in desperate straits. Now nearly eighty years of age and troubled by deafness and bronchitis, he was no longer able to tramp the streets selling his works. Donations from friends kept the wolf from the door, but he was embarking on the last chapter in his life.

His writing continued unabated, motivated as ever by the news of the day. Queen Victoria’s death in January 1901 inspired a “gem”, which was followed by an address to her successor Edward VII. The coronation, which took place in August 1902, was the seed for another poem (now lost); it was to be his last. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 29 September 1902 and was buried in an unmarked grave.

*

 

McGonagall’s choice of subject matter was a lot wider than he is often given credit for. His best known poem (at least to modern audiences) commemorates a railway disaster, and he has a reputation for concentrating on such subjects. In fact his range of subject matter was a lot greater. He wrote of local beauty spots and other places, of famous people and of current events – particularly the battles constantly being fought to maintain Queen Victoria’s empire. Disaster poems made up barely 10 per cent of his output.

One subject area, however, is conspicuously absent from his work – he rarely wrote anything that touches upon his own feelings for those around him. We have a few poems commemorating particular poetic performances or announcing his intention to leave Dundee, but there is nothing addressed to his wife or to his children.

If McGonagall’s poetic works tell us nothing of his personal life, the same cannot be said of his autobiographical writings. In many ways they resemble the Grossmiths’ Diary of a Nobody, and by reading between the lines we can see how the world saw McGonagall as well as how he saw himself. He shared many of the faults of Mr Pooter, being pompous, self-important, humourless and the butt of jokes he didn’t understand.

From the day divine inspiration to write poetry descended upon McGonagall, he was addicted to rhyme and the same rhyme pairs would often appear in his writing – if a poem involved the queen, she’d be somewhere “green” or “wondrous to be seen”. If there was an uplifting story to be told, it would be engraved in letters of gold. Even when McGonagall was supposed to be writing prose, the rhyming demon sometimes got the better of him:

[There was] a merry shake of hands all round, which made the dockyard loudly resound. Then when the handshakings were o’er the steam whistle began to roar. Then the engine started, and the steamer left the shore, while she sailed smoothly o’er the waters of the Tay, and the passengers’ hearts felt light and gay.

 

Although rhyming was a compulsion with McGonagall, scansion was completely alien to him. The long rambling lines, ending with that vital rhyme, are the most recognisable feature of his work and sometimes reach prodigious proportions:

On one occasion King James the Fifth of Scotland, when alone, in disguise,

Near by the Bridge of Cramond met with rather a disagreeable surprise.

The third element in McGonagall’s poetic technique – or lack of it – is his extraordinary ability to puncture whatever pathos he may have been able to create by the addition of some extraneous fact or an inappropriate phrase, as here in the “Albion Battleship Calamity”:

Her Majesty has sent a message of sympathy to the bereaved ones in distress,

And the Duke and Duchess of York have sent 25 guineas I must confess.

And £1,000 from the Directors of the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company,

Which I hope will help to fill the bereaved ones’ hearts with glee.

Was McGonagall really that bad, or was he deliberately writing that way for comic effect? It’s a question that his contemporaries posed, and it is still asked today. Was he, as some writers suggest, a satirist – deliberately sending up the views that he was purporting to espouse?

The satirist argument is difficult to sustain. It is based on extracts like this, from “The Funeral of the Late Ex-Provost Rough”:

And when the good man’s health began to decline

The doctor ordered him to take each day two glasses of wine,

But he soon saw the evil of it, and from it he shrunk,

The noble old patriarch, for fear of getting drunk.

And although the doctor advised him to continue taking the wine,

Still the hero of the temperance cause did decline,

And told the doctor he wouldn’t of wine take any more,

So in a short time his spirit fled to heaven, where all troubles are o’er.

Is McGonagall making fun of the rather too enthusiastic temperance supporter, or is the comic effect an unintentional by-product of his own zeal from the cause? If such cases were common, we might have cause to wonder, but McGonagall wrote literally hundreds of poems with no possible satirical intent. Why would he waste time writing “Beautiful Balmerino” or “Forget-Me-Not” if satire was his aim?

If not a satirist, was he a comedian, a poetic version of Tommy Cooper? This too seems unlikely for several reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, he was so unsuccessful. Apart from a brief period in Edinburgh, his writing never yielded him any serious money or recognition. If he wasn’t making a decent living from his “art”, why persist with it?

Secondly, if his poems are read with care, his technique can be seen to improve somewhat over the years. If we look at an early work like “The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay” (written in 1878), we see a series of stanzas of irregular length, with as many rhymes thrown into each one as he can think of:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay!

With your numerous arches and pillars in so grand array

And your central girders, which seem to the eye

To be almost towering to the sky.

The greatest wonder of the day,

And a great beautification to the River Tay,

Most beautiful to be seen,

Nearby Dundee and the Magdalen Green.

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay!

That has caused the Emperor of Brazil to leave

His home far away, incognito in his dress,

And view thee ere he passed along en route to Inverness.

If we compare this with a later work, such as “The Storming of the Dargai Heights” (written in 1897), we see that he has adopted a regular four-line stanza and an AABB rhyme scheme, although his characteristic disregard for scansion remains:

’Twas on the 20th of November, and in the year of 1897,

That the cheers of the Gordon Highlanders ascended to heaven,

As they stormed the Dargai heights without delay,

And made the Indian rebels fly in great dismay.

“Men of the Gordon Highlanders,” Colonel Mathias said,

“Now, my brave lads, who never were afraid,

Our General says ye must take Dargai heights to-day;

So, forward, and charge them with your bayonets without dismay!”

If he was deliberately writing for laughs, surely we’d expect his work to get technically worse over the years, as he sought for more outrageous comic effect? If he was putting on an act, it was one of the most impressive feats of acting of all time.