Author: Walker, Josiah
Biography:
WALKER, Josiah (1761-1831: Rogers)
Although the title pages of The Defence of Order use Josiah, his first name is sometimes given as Josias. He was the son of the Rev. Thomas Walker and his third wife Anne Shaw and was born at Dundonald, Ayrshire. He graduated from Edinburgh University and worked as a tutor before being appointed, in 1787, as private tutor to the Marquis of Tullibardine, son of the Duke of Atholl. It was about this time that he first met and developed a friendship with Robert Burns. He went to Eton with the Marquis but they returned to Scotland because of the boy’s illness (he died in 1795). The Duke of Atholl secured Walker a position as Collector of Customs at Perth. Walker subsequently became editor of the Perth Courier and he contributed to the Encylcopedia Perthensis and to David Brewster’s Edinburgh Encyclopedia. In 1795 he married Margaret Bell of Cruvie, Dumfriesshire; they had three sons and a daughter. On the advice of Dugald Stewart, he translated the fables of the Duke of Nivernois into English verse (1799). His Defence of Order, dedicated to the Duke of Atholl, was initially very popular but, in 1803, the third edition met with a cutting review in the Edinburgh Review and, according to Rogers, its popularity precipitously declined. He contributed the memoir of Burns to James Morison’s 1811 edition of Burns’s poems. In 1815 he was appointed Professor of Humanities at the University of Glasgow and was so well-liked that his classes had to be divided in two to accommodate all those who wanted to attend. He died at Glasgow after a period of declining health. (Charles Rogers, The Book of Robert Burns 2 [1890]; ancestry.co.uk 9 Dec. 2020) SR