Lockhart, John Gibson
1794-1854
John Gibson Lockhart was born in Cambusnethan in Lanarkshire. He was the son of a Church of Scotland minister. Educated at Glasgow and Oxford, he then studied law at Edinburgh. He travelled widely on the continent and met Goethe at Weimar in 1817. On his return to Scotland he settled in Edinburgh and focussed on his writing as one of the principal contributors to Blackwood's Magazine. His Peter's Letters to His Kinsfolk of 1819 satirises the polite society in which he found himself.
In 1820 John married Sir Walter Scott's daughter, Sophia. Five years later they moved to London, where he edited the Quarterly Review and worked on biographies of Burns and Napoleon, published in 1828 and 1829 respectively. His literary tour de force was the seven volume Memoirs of the Life of Scott of 1837-8.
He was deeply affected by the death of his elder son, John Hugh, in 1831, followed by that of Sophia in 1837. He was also much troubled when his daughter, Charlotte, and son-in-law, James Hope Scott, joined the Roman Catholic Church. His last remaining son, Walter, predeceased him by one year. John died at Abbotsford and is buried in Dryburgh Abbey beside his father-in-law, the subject of his greatest biography.
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