William Alexander Clouston

Contributed by Gareth Whittaker

William Alexander Clouston (1843-1896) was regarded as among the "giants" of nineteenth-century folklore. In The British Folklorists (1968) Richard Dorson placed him in his "Great Team" alongside Andrew Lang, George Laurence Gomme, Alfred Nutt, Edwin Sidney Hartland and Edward Clodd. He was praised for bringing "within the sphere of folklore science two species of oral narratives ..., the romance of the East and the humble jest" and for anticipating the twentieth century concepts of folktale types and motifs. Summing up Clouston's contribution to folklore studies, Dorson states: "The achievement of William Alexander Clouston in rendering visible the network of popular tales and fictions between Asia and Europe has never received proper due, and that field still today remains largely his own".

Clouston was born in 1843 at Stromness of an old Orcadian family. He was the fourth of five children of Captain John Clouston, a ship-master from Stenness. His mother was from Forfar, Montrose. His father died when he was ten and it was probably then that the rest of the family moved to Glasgow where he was to live and work for the rest of his life. At age seventeen Clouston was working as a clerk in marine insurance and at twenty-seven, in the 1871 Census, he is still listed as a mercantile clerk. He was engaged in commercial pursuits in Glasgow and London, but relinquished these to engage in journalism and literature. From 1871 to 1879 he edited several Scottish provincial newspapers and was a writer for the Glasgow Herald, Evening Times etc.

From 1873 he began publishing books and articles on literary topics and by about 1879, after reading Sir William Jones’ translation of the "Hitopadesa", he had formed an interest in European narrative folklore items such as jests, anecdotes, legends, tales and their parallels in the East in oral tradition and literature. He also showed an interest in the possibility that the former were causally connected to the latter by way of diffusion or migration westward.

He published seventeen books and contributed valuable annotations to such works as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Sir Richard F. Burton's Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night and Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus as well as other books published by the Chaucer Society and the Early English Text Society. Many of his better known books such as Popular Tales and Fictions, The Book of Noodles, A Group of Eastern Romances and Flowers from a Persian Garden are still in print.

In 1892 he published an article "Norse Tales and their Eastern Analogues," in The Orkney Herald which was later read before the Viking Club of which he was a member. And in the same year he contributed "Notes on the Folk-lore of the Raven and the Owl" to Jessie M. E. Saxby's Birds of Omen in Shetland.

He died at the early age of fifty-three in October 1896. Edwin Sidney Hartland said in his obituary that he was "generous in his appreciation of the labours of others," that he "never refused assistance to fellow students," and that "unfortunately, life to him was throughout more or less of a struggle, in which he secured but few of the rewards that wait on worldly success".