Reforming the Social Circle

Whistle-Binkie is a collection of poetry and song, continually reissued in different formats and with new content throughout the nineteenth century, which has often been considered to exemplify the problems with popular Scottish Victorian literature. This chapter therefore concentrates on reassessing this key text and demonstrating that it is not purely a sentimental, nostalgic, and conservative selection of verse. The chapter shows how the first edition of Whistle-Binkie was part of the culture of Reform politics, and how its radical bent was toned down in later decades. It uses unpublished manuscript material to discuss the importance of Whistle-Binkie in encouraging working-class poets into print and fostering networks between them. A long concluding session focuses on the Whistle-Binkie spin-off, Songs from the Nursery, and assesses how and why ‘nursery verse’ became so important to Scottish working-class poetics in this period.