Ellen Johnston
(c.1835–1874?), Scottish power-loom weaver and poet
Ellen Johnston known as "The Factory Girl" (1835 – April 12, 1874) was a Scottish power-loom weaver and poet. She is known because of her autobiography and later reevaluations of her working class poetry.
Biography
Ellen Johnston was born in Muir Wynd, Hamilton, in 1835. Her mother was Mary Bisland, a milliner, and her father was James Johnston, a stonemason employed by the Duke of Hamilton. He emigrated to America when Johnston was an infant, and it was supposed that he died there. Her mother remarried. 20 years later, when James Johnson learned of this, he took his own life. Johnston implied that her stepfather sexually abused her. She made frequent attempts to run away from home. At the age of 11, Johnston began work as a power-loom weaver.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ellen Johnston” as (c.1835–1874?), Scottish power-loom weaver and poet. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as (c.1835–1874?), Scottish power-loom weaver and poet. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18528658. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1835 and 1874.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ellen Johnston” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.