Scottish Authors > Ian Maclaren Novelist 1850-1907

"Ian Maclaren" was the pseudonym used for fiction writing by John Watson, who was born in Manningtree, Essex, on 3rd November 1850. The family moved to Perth in 1854, and Watson was educated at Edinburgh University and the Free Church of Scotland college in Edinburgh. Ordained as a Free Church minister, he spent some years in Logiealmond, Perthshire, and in Glasgow, before beginning a long career in Liverpool.

He published a number of religious works under his own name, but as Ian Maclaren was a leading member of the Kailyard School of Scottish fiction which came into being towards the end of the nineteenth century. Maclaren's first work in this genre, Beside the bonnie brier bush (1894) takes its title from Burns: "There grows a bonnie brier-bush in our kail-yard. ..."

Beside the bonnie brier bush is a collection of "idylls" or stories, set in the fictional village of Drumtochty. The village is thought to be based on Logiealmond, where Maclaren began his ministerial career, but the picture of rural life, in common with most Kailyard works owes more to nostalgia than to the reality of Maclaren's time, or perhaps of any time. The narrator, though he may be a returned exile, is an "outsider" by virtue of his education and experience, so that he is able to observe the simple Scots-speaking villagers from a somewhat patronising height. Church affairs are at the centre of Drumtochty life, and the climax of a story is often a pious deathbed scene, where a brilliant young man or a saintly veteran goes to his eternal reward.

It was a low-roofed room, with a box-bed and some pieces of furniture, fit only for a labouring man. But the choice treasures of Greece and Rome lay on the table, and on a shelf beside the bed College prizes and medals., while everywhere were the roses he loved. His peasant mother stood beside the body of her scholar son, whose hopes and thoughts she had shared, and through the window came the bleating of distant sheep.

The Kailyard School has attracted much unfavourable criticism over the years for its sentimentality and its perceived misrepresentation of Scottish life, but some re-evaluation has recently taken place. Gillian Shepherd's essay The Kailyard in The History of Scottish literature, vol.3 (Aberdeen University Press, 1988) supplies a balanced view of Maclaren and the other Kailyard authors, with a useful reading list.

Maclaren's other works of fiction, which include a second collection of stories, The Days of Auld Lang Syne (1895), and the novel Kate Carnegie and those ministers (1896), generally follow the Kailyard formula, and were extremely popular in their day, selling well in both Britain and America. Maclaren, a gifted preacher, became sought after as a public speaker, and was on his third lecture tour of America when he died in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, on 6th May 1907.

Moira Burgess

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