Description:Bisset’s political views are hard to pin down. His poems suggest that he was a patriotic conservative, but he also seems to have had some reformist sympathies. He was a member of an early local political society known as the Minerva Club, which met at the Leicester Arms. Bisset’s branch boasted an exclusive twelve-strong membership known as ‘The Apostles’. It was one amongst many of such informal political societies based in the city during a time of increasing political turmoil, industrial unrest and the threat of invasion by France’s revolutionary armies.
Bisset himself was well-regarded as an affable, eccentric and generous man, even publishing verse by friends of a more radical persuasion. One poem in his manuscript notebook, ‘The Church Wardens’, speaks of a nation in which the ‘Poor People starve whilst the Church Wardens stuff’, and was composed by one A. Carpenter. This poem contrasts starkly with his patriotic verse written during the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), which included one dedicated to a local infantry regiment, the Royal Birmingham Fencibles, in which he exhorts: ‘The Loyal Lads of Birmingham, who hate all French Invaders / Whose Bosoms burn with Zeal, to check these Gallic Gasconaders.’ Another poem, the ‘Patriotic Clarion’, was published in the shadow of an invasion scare in 1803, and was dedicated to the Duke of York.
Cultural diversity has early roots in the city of Birmingham, and Bisset’s poetry provides evidence of his views on race and ethnicity. One untitled poem, beginning with line ‘Sung at the Theatre Birmingham – with great applause’, was a sympathetic tale of a ‘Negro Boy’ torn from his family ‘from de Coast of Guinea’ and sent out on a slave ship, eventually finding freedom on the streets of Birmingham. Bisset did not have a consistent degree of sympathy for other ethnic groups, and that poem may have been written to curry favour with wealthy local patrons of the anti-slavery movement.
In ‘The Fop and the Jew, a Dialogue Song’, the conversational part of Isaac is written in an exaggerated German-Jewish accent, the character revelling in the sort of negative stereotypes of Jewish people prevalent throughout history.
Meanwhile, Bisset emphasised the great love he had for his homeland in the ‘Scotch Song’, but was less flattering to other Celtic groups, such as the Irish, who he disparages three times in verse (‘Paddy’s search after the Seven Wonders of the World ’, ‘The Escape’ and ‘Drop o’Brandy’). He even wrote a ballad entitled the ‘Song on the Union with Ireland’ which celebrated the controversial Act of Union that passed through Parliament in 1801.