Scottish Authors > John Gibson Lockhart Novelist & Biographer 1794-1854

John Gibson Lockhart was born in Cambusnethan in Lanarkshire in 1794, and received his university education (like his friend and contemporary John Wilson, ('Christopher North') at Glasgow and Oxford. Like Wilson, he settled in Edinburgh, one of a circle of bright young Tory lawyers, alert, intelligent, well-read and mischievous. The launching of Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine in 1817 was a golden opportunity for their talents, and Lockhart and Wilson took over the ailing magazine after half-a-dozen dull issues and transformed it in October 1817 into the most shocking (and best-selling) review of its time. The lampooning of contemporary writers (particularly Keats and Leigh Hunt) is savage caricature, the deliberate practical jokes and mystification, and the bad-taste parody of the Chaidee Manuscript (a not very opaque description of contemporary Edinburgh in Old and New Testament language) hard to defend. Right or wrong, Lockhart and Wilson (with the help of Hogg among others) catapulted Blackwood's to the head of critical writing, alongside the Whig Edinburgh review, and made themselves considerable national literary figures. The partnership was to last till 1825, when Lockhart was tempted to London to edit the Quarterly review.

This apart, Lockhart was a writer of considerable merit. Like his future father-in-law Walter Scott he was keenly interested in German literature, and translated Schlegel; independent of Wilson, he wrote Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk in 1819, a fictional account of a visit to Lowland Scotland, describing the great men he met in innocent terms whose satire was easily interpreted by those in the know. The book remains one of the most engaging introductions to the Edinburgh of the time.

Lockhart's solid achievement as a writer is twofold. One is as a novelist, with Valerius (1821), Adam Blair (1822), Reginald Dalton (1823) and Matthew Wald (1824) to his credit. The other is as biographer, with lives of Burns (1828, the inspiration of Carlyle's immortal essay on Burns), Napoleon (1829) and, most importantly, Scott in 1837-8. Lockhart was close to Scott from his marriage to Sophia Scott in 1820, and very close at Scott's death. He was close, too, to Scottish country religious life (the son of a minister) and his enduring fictional success lies (in Adam Blair) in probing the psychology of a country minister in a sexual predicament. When Adam, a widower (his name no coincidence) is tempted by the visit of an old friend - now a married woman estranged from her husband - to solace his loneliness, he falls prey to temptation and for one night of pleasure imposes on himself a heavy and lifelong burden of guilt and penance. The novel breaks new ground in honestly asking what pressures the ministry brings, and endures. If the sexual content is stunted and if it ducks many questions, it remains an impressive attempt to open a taboo subject.

Lockhart died in 1854, having for many years divided his life between London and the Borders. He died in Abbotsford, and is buried, fittingly, at Dryburgh Abbey.

Ian Campbell

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