Lockhart, John Gibson 1794-1854
Scottish biographer, novelist and critic

Born in Cambusnethan, Lanarkshire, the son of a Church of Scotland minister, he spent his boyhood in Glasgow, and aged 13 won a Snell exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1813 he graduated with a first in classics. Then, after a visit to the Continent to see Goethe in Weimar, he studied law at Edinburgh, and in 1816 was called to the Bar. From 1817 he turned increasingly to writing, and with John Wilson ('Christopher North') became the chief mainstay of Blackwood's Magazine. There he exhibited the criticism and caustic wit that made him the terror of his Whig opponents. In 1819 he published Peter's Letters to His Kinsfolk (3 vols), a clever skit on Edinburgh intellectual society. He married Sophia, eldest daughter of Sir Walter Scott, in 1820, and went on to write four novels - Valerius (1821), Adam Blair (1822), Reginald Dalton (1823) and Matthew Wald (1824). His other works include biographies of Robert Burns (1828) and Napoleon I (1829), and his masterpiece The Life of Sir Walter Scott (7 vols, 1837-38). In 1825 he moved to London to become editor until 1853 of the Quarterly Review. He also became auditor of the Duchy of Cornwall (1843). His closing years were clouded by illness and deep depression. He visited Italy for the sake of his health, but, like Scott, came back to Abbotsford in Scotland to die.

Bibliography: A Lang, Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart (1896)