J. G. Lockhart

John Gibson Lockhart (12 June 1794 – 25 November 1854) 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. He produced four novels in the early 1820s including Adam Blair and Reginald Dalton.

Early years

Lockhart was born on 12 June 1794 in the manse of Cambusnethan House in Lanarkshire to Dr John Lockhart, who transferred in 1796 to Glasgow, and was appointed minister in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and his second wife Elizabeth Gibson (1767–1834), 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 1813, 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 1816, he was elected to the Faculty of Advocates. A tour on the continent in 1817, when he visited Goethe at Weimar, was made possible when he was hired by the publisher William Blackwood to translate Friedrich Schlegel's Lectures on the History of Literature.