Author: Scott, John
Biography:
SCOTT, John (1784-1821: ODNB)
John Scott, well known to most of the leading authors in the Regency period, was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, and baptised on 24 Oct. 1784 at St. Nicholas’s, the son of an upholsterer, Alexander Scott, and his wife Catherine Young. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and then (1796-9) at the Marischal College (where Byron, q.v., was a schoolmate), but left early to begin his working life at a sequence of clerical jobs in Glasgow and London. Through his friendship with Leigh Hunt (q.v.) in London he became the editor of Hunt’s newspaper The Statesman in 1807. This was the first of his increasingly important roles in liberal or radical publications: his own short-lived Censor (1808); Drakard’s Stamford News in Stamford, Lincolnshire (1810-13), working with Octavius Gilchrist, q.v.; Drakard’s Paper, under his ownership, in London (1813, with the name changed to The Champion 1814-17); and the London Magazine (1819-21). On 30 Sept. 1807 he married Caroline Antoinette Colnaghi (1786-1874) at St. Marylebone, London; they went on to have three children. Most of Scott’s writing was published anonymously or pseudonymously. Exceptions were a few pamphlets on current events and books inspired by his travels on the Continent after 1814, notably A Visit to Paris in 1814 (1815) and Paris Revisited in 1815 (1816); Sketches of Manners, Scenery etc., covering provincial France, Switzerland, and Italy was edited by Horace Smith (q.v.) and published posthumously. Scott began an epic poem on Waterloo with some advice from his friend William Wordsworth (q.v.) but never finished it, and the only remnants may be two poems on “England” in The House of Mourning. The Scott family was en route to Italy when the firstborn son Paul died in Paris on 8 Nov. 1816 and was buried at Père Lachaise cemetery. The House of Mourning was Scott’s emotional tribute. MR called it “strange.” A veteran in the combative world of periodical publishing, Scott nonetheless made the mistake of challenging Jonathan Christie, the London agent of the Blackwood’s critic J. G. Lockhart (1794-1854), to a duel on 16 Feb. 1821. Scott was shot in the stomach and died of his wounds on 27 Feb. He was buried at St. Martin-in-the-Fields on 9 Mar. Christie was acquitted of murder. (ODNB 2 Oct. 2024; ancestry.com 2 Oct. 2024; findmypast.com 2 Oct. 2024; MR 83 [1817], 432)