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Hugh MacDonald

Glasgow School of Art Archives

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Hugh MacDonald

The writer and poet Hugh MacDonald (1817-1860) photographed by Duncan Brown in 1858.

Hugh MacDonald was born in Bridgeton to Highland parents who had moved south to find work in the Glasgow cotton mills. The family was poor and MacDonald went to work when he was young, apprenticed to a block printer in a calico printing mill. He left to run a grocer's shop but the business failed and he returned to work as a printer.

MacDonald became a supporter of the Chartist movement and began to write articles and poems for Chartist newspapers. He is particularly associated with the Glasgow Citizen, a weekly newspaper founded in 1842, which first published his Rambles Round Glasgow describing walks round the city and the surrounding countryside with the Literary and Artistic Club. He became a member of staff on the newspaper in 1849, moving to the Glasgow Sentinel in 1855, and later editing the Glasgow Times.

Duncan Brown (1819-1897) was a talented amateur photographer whose work documents aspects of Glasgow life from the 1850s until the 1890s.

Reference: 90

Reproduced with the permission of Glasgow School of Art Archives

Keywords:
block printers, calico printing mills, Chartism, Chartists, Glasgow Citizen, Glasgow Sentinel, Glasgow Times, grocers, journalists, Literary and Artistic Club, newspapers, photographers, poets, political activists, Rambles Round Glasgow, rambling, writers



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