Author: Scott, David Dundas
Biography:
SCOTT, David Dundas (1801-75: ancestry.com)
Pseudonym A pedestrian
He was born at Edinburgh, Scotland, on 6 Jan. 1801 and baptised on 18 Feb., the son of Elizabeth (Hogg) and William Scott (or Scott-Moncrieff) of Newhalls and Edinburgh. He followed his father in his profession as an accountant but also had a good literary education. About 1835 he abandoned the additional surname Moncrieff that his father had assumed. He became known as a historian for his editions of compilations and translations of French sources in The Suppression of the Reformation in France (1840) and The History of the Reformation in the Sixteenth Century (1843). Apart from the early Nugae Semitariae (1830) no poetry titles are attributed to him. The census records of 1851, 1861, and 1871 show him as a married man with at least four children. His wife was Mary Catherine Duff Brine (1810-1903); they had married at St. Pancras, London, on 30 June 1838. In 1851 they were living in Inverness, where Scott for a time had served as editor of the Inverness Advertiser (but was no longer doing so). In 1852 he offered a course of public lectures on European history at St. Andrews, with half of the proceeds to go toward the improvement of North Street, but the Fife Herald reported a disappointing turnout: “we fear that the Links have, on these fine evenings, greater attractions for our working men than the lecture-room.” Before 1859 the Scotts had settled in Briery Yards (or Brieryyards) House, Hawick, in the Borders; in Jan. 1859 he acted as host for a Burns centenary dinner at a Hawick hotel. In the 1861 census, unusually, he identified himself as a “proprietor of houses.” In 1871 he was again an accountant, but “retired.” He died on 25 Nov. 1875 and was buried in Dalmeny Old Parish churchyard, Edinburgh, where there is a monument to both him and his wife, who outlived him by over 30 years. (ancestry.com 1 Oct. 2024; findmypast.com 1 Oct. 2024; George Seton, The House of Moncrieff [1890], 128, 130; British Army Dispatch 11 Apr. 1851; Fife Herald 24 June 1852; Southern Reporter 13 Jan. 1859, 2 Dec. 1875)