Author: Nicoll, Robert
Biography:
NICOLL, Robert (1814-1837: ancestry.co.uk)
The eldest child of a farmer, Robert Nicoll, and his wife, Grace Fenwick, he was born on 7 Jan. 1814 at Tullybelton, Auchtergaven, Perthshire. His family lost their farm when he was five, and he worked as a herdsman during the summer while attending school in winter. Apprenticed to a grocer and wine merchant in Perth (1830-32), he showed keen interest in reading and education; his precocity and determination to make the most of every available opportunity is a notable feature of biographical accounts written soon after his death. He visited Edinburgh and met the novelist and journalist, Christian Isobel Johnstone, and his first publication was a story, “Il Zingaro,” in Johnstone’s Magazine in 1833. Friends helped him to establish a circulating library in Dundee; his Poems and Lyrics, published when he was living there, proved successful with those in dialect being singled out for praise. He seems likely to have met Joseph Grant (q.v.) while living in Dundee; he wrote the memoir of Grant that prefaces his Tales of the Glens (1836). He became editor of the Leeds Times in 1836, the same year that he married Alice Griffiths Suter (Souter) of Dundee on 9 Dec. His health began to deteriorate and he returned to Edinburgh where he died at Laverockbank of tuberculosis while staying with the Johnstones. Christian Isobel Johnstone wrote the memoir that was published with a posthumous collection of his poems in 1842; this was followed much later by a biography from his friend Peter Robert Drummond. (ancestry.co.uk 14 May 2020, 2 Sept. 2025; ODNB 14 May 2020; C. I. Johnstone, “Life of Robert Nicoll” [1842]; P. R. Drummond, The Life of Robert Nicoll [1884]; Caledonian Mercury 9 Dec. 1837) SR