Scottish Authors > Hugh Miller Geologist, Journalist, Newspaper editor & Folklorist 1802-1856

Miller was born in Cromarty, Easter Ross, on 10th October 1802, in a cottage still preserved by the National Trust for Scotland. His father Hugh, a ship's captain, was lost at sea in 1807, and the influence of his superstitious mother Harriet gave him a strong sense of the supernatural which lasted all his life. A wild and unruly boy, he preferred wandering the nearby beaches to attending school, and his formal education ended in a fight with the schoolmaster. At seventeen he was apprenticed to a stonemason, a craft which led directly to his interest in fossils. Later his health was affected by the arduous life of a mason, and he turned to a career in writing.

He published a book of poems in 1829, but had more success with some articles in the Inverness courier on the herring fisheries. In 1835 he published Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland. This collection of tales is still an important source of local history and folklore, and shows Miller's story-telling abilities at their best. He combines accurate description of the real world with marvellous flights of imagination, for example in recounting a woman's dream of walking on the bottom of the ocean:

I walked as light as ever I had done on a gowany brae, through the green depths o' the sea. I saw the silvery glitter o' the trout an' the salmon shining to the sun, far aboon me, like white pigeons i' the lift; and aound me there were crimson star-fish, an' seaflowers, and long trailing plants that waved in the tide like streamers ...

In 1839 he moved to Edinburgh to become editor of The Witness, a newspaper established to oppose the Patronage Act, which allowed landowners to appoint Church of Scotland ministers over the heads of local congregations. A staunch Presbyterian, Miller was a leading figure in the Free Church after the Disruption of 1843. He wrote hundreds of articles on every subject, attacking social injustices such as child labour and the Highland Clearances. His bestselling introduction to geology, The Old red sandstone, was published in 1841, and was followed by Footprints of the Creator and The Testimony of the rocks, in which he tried to reconcile his religious beliefs with the scientific evidence of his studies.

My Schools and schoolmasters (1854), is a very readable memoir of his early years, intended to show ordinary working-class people that they could improve their circumstances by self-reliance and reading. He himself was a famous figure in Victorian Britain, but, overworked and suffering from stress, he committed suicide on 24th December 1856.

He is buried in Grange Cemetery, Edinburgh, and an imposing monument was built to his memory in Cromarty. Dickens, among others, praised him as "a delightful writer, an accomplished follower of science, and an upright and good man", but his reputation suffered because he had opposed the theory of evolution. As a journalist and folklorist, however, his writing is still fresh and entertaining.

James Robertson

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