Author: Tytler, James
Biography:
TYTLER, James (1745-1804: ODNB)
He was born at Fearn, Forfarshire, to Janet (Robertson) and the Rev. George Tytler, of the presbytery of Brechin. Henry William Tytler (q.v.) was his younger brother. He was educated at the parish school and Aberdeen University before being apprenticed, aged fifteen, to a Forfar surgeon. In 1763 he entered Edinburgh University to study medicine and attended lectures by William Cullen that developed his lifelong interest in chemistry. He paid for his education by serving as surgeon on two whaling voyages to Greenland. Through his involvement with the Glasite religious sect, he met and, on 27 Oct. 1765, married Elizabeth Rattray; they had five sons. He later broke with the Glasites and he and Elizabeth were divorced; he married Jean (or Jane) Aikenhead in December 1782. Contemporary biographical accounts of Tytler lament that, with all his talents, he was both imprudent and intemperate. He worked piecemeal, lived in miserable lodgings, and was frequently at risk of arrest for debt. (In the early 1770s and the late 1780s the family fled to England to escape his Edinburgh creditors.) He worked as an apothecary, supplementing his income by writing for periodicals and publishing, including when he was confined for debt to the sanctuary at Holyrood where he printed one volume of his projected abridgement of the Universal History on a press he had made. One of the ventures of which he was most proud was editing the second edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. He contributed extensively to this enlarged edition (and, later, also contributed to the third edition) but the profit went to the publishers and he earned barely enough to feed his family. He became known as “James Balloon Tytler” when, in 1784, he was the first Briton successfully to make an ascent in a balloon—one which, characteristically, he had constructed. In 1792 he joined the radical Society for the Friends of the People, established to oppose Pitt’s government. His essay, “To the people and their friends,” led to his arrest for seditious libel and he, with his second wife and their two children, fled to Belfast before travelling to Salem MA where they arrived in August 1795. In America Tytler continued to eke out a living by writing; his Treatise on the Plague and Yellow Fever, contesting theories put forward in a work on the same topic by Noah Webster, was published in 1799. He died by drowning while inebriated. His widow subsequently advertised her services as an apothecary; she died at Salem in 1834. Ranger's impartial list of the ladies of pleasure in Edinburgh (1775) is attributed to him. (Robert Chambers, Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen 3:466-68; ODNB 1 Dec. 2020; Salem Gazette 11 Aug. 1795; Salem Register 12 Jan. 1804; Salem Register 27 Aug. 1804)
Other Names:
- J. Tytler