Author: Vedder, David
Biography:
VEDDER, David (1789-1854: ODNB)
The youngest of the four children of John Vedder and his wife, Jean Shewrie, he was born 13 Dec. 1789 at Deerness, Orkney, and baptised on 29 Dec. He was educated at the parish school but by the time he was twelve both of his parents had died and he was thrown on his own resources. He became a cabin boy on a ship, was promoted to mate within a few years and then, when he was twenty-two, he became captain of a whaling ship. He seems to have given up his captaincy in about 1813, the year he married Jean Bremner on 19 Mar. at Kirkwall and St. Ola, Orkney (they had three children). Until 1826 he served as the revenue officer on an armed cruiser. He then became a tide-surveyor, working successively in Montrose, Kirkcaldy, Dundee, and Leith. He pursued a course of study in his own time and mastered several languages including French and German. He contributed verse to periodicals; likely he had started doing so before his 1828 book was published. Owing to a quarrel with Henry Glassford Bell (q.v.), editor of the Edinburgh Literary Journal, he established a rival periodical, the Edinburgh Literary Gazette. He retired from work as a surveyor in 1852 and died on 11 Feb. 1854 from kidney disease at home in Newington, Edinburgh, survived by his wife. He is buried in Grange Cemetery, Edinburgh. His other publications include his popular Memoir of Sir Walter Scott (1832), an edition of the poems of Robert Fraser (1839), and Poems Legendary, Lyrical, and Descriptive (1842, in an elaborate edition with a dedication to Queen Victoria). He collaborated with his son-in-law, the Edinburgh lithographer Frederick Schenck, in two publications: The Pictorial Giftbook of Lays and Lithography (1848) and Story of Reynard the Fox (1852). His songs and verse were also included in numerous collections. (ODNB 4 Dec. 2020; ancestry.co.uk 4 Dec. 2020, 21 Oct. 2025; George Gilfillan, “Memoir,” Poems, Lyrics, and Sketches [1878]) SR