Author: Pinkerton, John
Biography:
PINKERTON, John (1758-1826: ODNB)
The son of James Pinkerton, a hair dealer, and his wife, Mary Heron, he was born in Edinburgh but the family soon moved to Grangegateside where he attended the local school. His studies at the grammar school in Lanark marked the end of his formal education because his father was opposed to sending him to university. Instead he was apprenticed to William Aytoun, a Scottish solicitor. He completed his apprenticeship in 1780, the same year that his father died and left an inheritance which enabled Pinkerton to abandon a legal career for a literary one. He moved to London where he published some verse but also began collecting, editing, and publishing ancient Scottish ballads—work that involved him in controversy when it was discovered that he had included some of his own compositions. His 1785 Letters of Literature included an essay on literary forgery. (It was published under the pseudonym Robert Heron, and his Treasury of Wit appeared the following year as by H. Bennet.) Pinkerton pursued other activities—numismatics, history, geography, and, in later life, geography—and, through these, met various eminent men, including Horace Walpole and Edward Gibbon. However, he was never quite able to secure the kind of position that suited his notions of his abilities. For a time he worked for the Critical Review and this took him to France and led to his Recollections of Paris (1806). His domestic life was equally unsettled: he lived with or married three women and had in total four daughters and one son, but none of the relationships lasted. In about 1812 he returned to Scotland but left for France in 1815 to live out the final decade of his life in lodgings, earning some income by representing London booksellers. He died at Paris. (ODNB 8 July 2020)