Appendix: Ellen of Ayr

Summary

Ellen of Ayr is a lightly fictionalised autobiography in which a Scottish soldier's wife recounted her life story to Charles Neill. Ellen was a domestic servant living in Edinburgh when she met her future husband. Neill was a working-class autodidact who was employed as a compositor in Edinburgh until an accident resulted in the loss of his hand. He subsequently became a school master and a published poet. Ellen of Ayr was published in 1856, and was well received. In the preface, Neill said that ‘the substance of the following pages was taken down in notes from the lips of her whose name they bear’. He admitted that he had taken ‘some liberty’ with the facts communicated in order to make the story more interesting, but insisted that,

in no case has he willingly perverted the truth for the purpose of exciting sympathy or promoting amusement. In the whole volume there is only one fictitious character introduced, who shall be nameless; – all the others, military and non-military, had each a genuine prototype, although the former are not to be found in the Army List.

Officers’ names were not to be found in the Army List because Neill changed surnames to protect those whom Ellen criticised; he consistently, however, retained actual first names or the first letter of surnames. The fictitious character Neill referred to is very likely Mrs Oldham, the saintly officer's wife who suffered domestic abuse, but still offered Ellen moral guidance. In tropes beloved of Victorian authors, Ellen attended her deathbed and was visited by her ghost.

Neill did adhere closely to the facts, and much of what he describes in the book can be verified. On page 102, Ellen says that an earthquake struck the island of Zante on 29 December 1821 at 4 a.m.; this information is verified and Ellen's regiment identified in a report which appeared in the Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review:

Earthquake – Zante has been destroyed by an earthquake.