John gibson lockhart biography sample

[Martineau's biography and critical assessment of Lockhart originally appeared as an obituary in the Daily News (thus the otherwise odd title of the piece). The text has been adapted from the one available on the Internet Archive, formatted, and linked by George P. Landow, who has presented the sidebar annotations, which appear in the margins of the original text, as subtitles placed before the relevant paragraphs; to avoid changing the paragraphing too frequently, several margin notes often appear in a single subtitle.

HE was a man of note on various grounds. He was an author of no mean qualifications; he was the son-in-law of Scott; and he was the editor of the Quarterly Review after Gilford. Without being a man of genius, a great scholar, or politically or morally eminent, he had sufficient ability and accomplishment to insure considerable distinction in his own person, and his interesting connections did the rest. He was a man of considerable mark.

The younger son of a Glasgow clergyman, he was destined for the Law more as a matter of course than from any inclination of his own; for he never liked his profession. He went to school, and afterward to the University at Glasgow, whence he was enabled to proceed to Balliol College, Oxford, by obtaining an exhibition in the gift of the Senatus Academicus. He was subsequently called to the Scotch Bar; but from the first his dependence was on literary effort; for his professional fees never amounted to 50£ a year.

First meeting with Sir Walter Scott. Blackwood's Magazine.

After the Peace [following the Napoleonic wars] he went to Germany a not very common undertaking at that time and saw Göthe; and his account of this incident seems to have struck Scott, when they who were to become so closely related met for the first time in private society, in May, A few days after the dinner-party at which this happened, the Messrs. Ballantyne sent to Lockhart, to propose that he should undertake a task which Scott had dela

Sir Walter Scott died in September as the leading man of letters in Europe. Yet for all his fame few particulars of his life could be gleaned from memoirs published during his lifetime. This was partly because Scott was largely successful in avoiding scandal and the attention it brought, and partly because denying his authorship of the Waverley Novels had kept biographers at bay. Driven from cover by his financial woes, Scott began relating his literary life in annotations to the collected editions published to relieve his debts. Following his death memoirs began to appear, some hostile, anticipating the official biography to be written by Scott’s son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart ()—the proceeds of which were to go towards paying off the remaining debts on the Scott estate. There would be a long wait as Lockhart sorted through the voluminous papers Scott left behind and solicited materials from Scott’s friends and correspondents. The biography was written while Lockhart was managing Scott’s literary estate, editing the Quarterly Review, and caring for a dying wife.

Lockhart was in many respects an ideal biographer: he had been intimate with Scott for a dozen years, as the editor of Scott's poetry and prose he knew the corpus thoroughly, and he was on good terms with Scott's associates from whom information and documents were to be had. He was also an experienced biographer, having early on acquired fame (and notoriety) with the character sketches in Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk () and more recently having written an acclaimed biography of Robert Burns (). He wrote to Robert Cadell, “Perhaps I may promise a volume of my own reminiscences of our intercourse and fireside talk. I never thought of being a Boswell, but I have a fair memory, and to me he no doubt spoke more freely and fully on various affairs than to any other who now survives.” Lockhart was one of the more candid writers of his generation, though there were limits to what could then be said.

Born

July 14,

Died

November 25,

Genre

Biography, Fiction

Influences

Walter Scott, William GodwinWalter Scott, William Godwinmore

Scottish writer and editor (–)

John Gibson Lockhart (12 June – 25 November ) was a Scottish writer and editor. He is best known as the author of the seminal, and much-admired, seven-volume biography of his father-in-law Sir Walter Scott: Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. He produced four novels in the early s including Adam Blair and Reginald Dalton.

Early years

Lockhart was born on 12 June in the manse of Cambusnethan House in Lanarkshire to Dr John Lockhart, who transferred in to Glasgow, and was appointed minister in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and his second wife Elizabeth Gibson (–), daughter of Margaret Mary Pringle and Reverend John Gibson, minister of St Cuthbert's, Edinburgh.

He was the younger paternal half-brother of the politician William Lockhart.

Lockhart attended Glasgow High School, where he showed himself clever rather than industrious. He fell into ill-health, and had to be removed from school before he was 12; but on his recovery he was sent at this early age to the University of Glasgow, and displayed so much precocious learning, especially in Greek, that he was offered a Snell exhibition at Oxford. He was not yet 14 when he entered Balliol College, Oxford, where he acquired a great store of knowledge outside the regular curriculum. He read French, Italian, German and Spanish, was interested in antiquities, and became versed in heraldic and genealogical lore.

Blackwood's Magazine and a literary duel

In , Lockhart took a first in classics then, for two years after leaving Oxford, lived in Glasgow before settling to the study of Scots law at the University of Edinburgh where, in , he was elected to the Faculty of Advocates. A tour on the continent in , when he visited Goethe at Weimar, was made possible when he was hired by the publisher William Blackwood to translate Friedrich Schlegel'sLectures