When John Gibson Lockhart assumed
the editorship of the Quarterly Review in 1825 he inherited from William
Gifford not just a journal, but the doubtful honor of being a lightning-rod for
Whig attacks on the Tory literary establishment. Their cases were similar: like
Gifford, Lockhart had first established himself as a student of classical
literature at Oxford, and like Gifford he first came to public attention as a
satirist—what Gifford had done to the Della Cruscans in the
Bæviad, Lockhart had done to Leigh Hunt and his coterie in the
pages of Blackwood’s Magazine—not to mention his blistering
attacks on the piety and patriotism of the Edinburgh Reviewers, at the time
regarded as the more serious offense. Like Gifford, Lockhart was indifferent to the
opprobrium heaped upon him, which left his reputation, like Gifford’s,
permanently tarnished in the eyes of posterity.
Lockhart was, however, a very
different character than Gifford. Though a reliable Tory he was not a party man and
wrote no political articles for the Quarterly, leaving that side of the
business to John Wilson Croker. He also insisted upon his editorial independence,
involving himself in quarrels with John Murray and the older generation of writers
at the Quarterly Review. He was a thorough-going admirer of romantic
poetry—of Scott and Byron, Wordsworth and Coleridge—and his religious
commitments were more theological than political. Lockhart had indeed a waspish
tongue, but was not vindictive or hateful and was regarded by those who knew him as
modest to a fault. He would defer to the opinions of those he respected and admit
to being a fallible judge, at least in private. He was a brooding, melancholy man.
He was born a younger son, left to
make his own way financially. Little is recorded about the childhood or family of
this deeply pious minister’s child who found the Presbyterian clergy so
risible. We do know that his talent for caricature appeared very early. While he
worked himself hard, Lockhart was too much the polite gentleman to labor at a
career or pursue sordid wealth. He adopted the law by default before finding a
patron in John Wilson, his collaborator in Blackwood’s Magazine and
Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819). Their withering attack on
the Edinburgh Whigs ruined any prospects for Lockhart’s professional
advancement in the law and even put his life at risk when he felt compelled to call
out those who retaliated by casting aspersions on his character.
The satirists were taken in by Sir
Walter Scott who tried to wean them from Blackwood’s by obtaining for
Wilson the professorship of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University (1820) and by
accepting Lockhart as a son-in-law (1820). That father and daughter would be drawn
to the handsome, shy, reckless Lockhart is understandable; that they would take him
into the family points to elements in his character not yet visible to others. In
the event, he would give himself wholly to his new-found patron and devote his
remaining life to looking after Scott and his progeny. While Sir Walter was unable
to find employment for his son-in-law, he and Sophia did succeed in settling him
down. When the offer of the Quarterly Review was made in 1825 the Lockharts
departed for London only a few months before Scott’s financial crash.
Lockhart was well suited for the
task, being a gentleman-scholar knowledgeable about many things and capable of
mixing, if not always willingly, with persons in government, society, scholarship,
and business. He was a better administrator than Gifford had been and the
Quarterly flourished during his long tenure (1825-53). But his happy
years were behind him as he struggled with the infirmity and deaths in quick
successions of his father-in-law, his son Littlejohn, his parents, his sister, and
his wife, as well as the waywardness of his surviving son Walter who inherited
Abbotsford in 1847. Lockhart shouldered the responsibility for paying off
Scott’s enormous debts, assisting him with his late works, editing the poems
and essays, writing the biography, and managing the literary estate. By the 1840s
his own health was broken, and like Gifford in his later days, he began living like
a recluse. He died at Abbotsford at the age of sixty.
Lockhart had the failings but also
the virtues of the Tories of his class; in general he was prejudiced against
outsiders, parvenus, and change, but would set his prejudices aside when duty or
talent beckoned. He was not an amiable man, adopting a facade of cold hauteur to
conceal his shyness, and perhaps for the same reason cultivating his public persona
as an unpleasant character. He was seemingly impervious to abuse, holding himself
as well as his critics in low esteem. A “hero-worshipper” in his friend
Carlyle’s sense, he distinguished genius from mere cleverness and as his
cares mounted withdrew himself altogether from fashionable society. In his
biography Andrew Lang underscores the gulf between the sardonic critic and the
emotionally vulnerable private man.
Andrew Lang (1844-1912) undertook
his biography as preparation for a never-completed edition of Lockhart’s
Life of Scott. Lang was a diligent researcher and had access to
Lockhart’s family correspondence and the letters he exchanged with his
life-long friend Jonathan Christie, and his latter-day friends Thomas Carlyle and
Henry Hart Milman. He was, however, denied access to two vital sources of
information, the Murray archive and the Blackwood’s archive—with
the result that his biography, though still the standard work, has long been in
need of updating. Like other Victorian biographers Lang suppresses names and
touches lightly on matters that might give offense to the families of the
long-departed, in particular the Blackwoods and the Murrays whose publishing houses
were still at the height of their influence in the 1890s. He gives considerable
attention to Lockhart’s review of Tennyson’s Poems (1832), an
essay now assigned to John Wilson Croker.
The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart depicts the life of a man torn
between a good and evil genius, Sir Walter Scott and John Wilson respectively. Like
other Victorian writers Lang regards the “personality” in Regency
periodicals as beyond the pale of social decency, and while he defends Lockhart in
almost all other matters, in the case of the Blackwood’s satires he
merely points out that the Whigs were guilty of leading by example. We hear a great
deal about Lockhart’s relationship with Sir Walter Scott and very little
about his relationship with John Wilson and not much more about his relationship
with John Wilson Croker. In part this is due to lack of information, though one
wonders whether more might have been forthcoming had Andrew Lang elected to pursue
the matter.
Where Lang does delve into a
controversy he is admirably thorough and lawyerly. In the case of the
“Cockney School” essays he points out that Lockhart’s remarks
about Leigh Hunt accord with what had been said by Keats himself in letters
recently published by H. Buxton Forman. To the accusation that Lockhart had abused
a confidence in the review of Endymion, Lang is able to demonstrate that
Lockhart and Keats had at least three friends in common and that therefore Lockhart
had multiple sources of information about Keats’s personal life. Lockhart was
afterwards remorseful about what he had written (the remarks on Hunt apparently
excepted); he recommended the republication of Keats’s poems and supported
the career of Benjamin Robert Haydon whom he came to regard highly. The
Blackwood’s attacks on Coleridge and Wordsworth were the work not
of Lockhart but of Wilson, who like Byron was given to abusing his friends.
In the case of the Scott-Christie
duel, Lang shows how John Scott, editor of the London Magazine, was the
aggressor, acting under the misapprehension that Walter Scott, aided and abetted by
Lockhart and Wilson, was behind the Blackwood’s attacks. He shows how
badly Scott managed the “affair of honor,” culminating in the challenge
he sent to John Christie that resulted in the mismanaged meeting in which he was
killed. He discusses in depth the tangled circumstances leading to Lockhart’s
appointment to the Quarterly Review, which in the end seems to have been at
the behest of John Murray himself—surprisingly given Murray’s anger and
contrition over the doings at Blackwood’s. His other long forensic
excursion explores the matter of Scott’s financial relationship with the
Ballantynes as reported in Lockhart’s biography of Scott. While the business
practices were hopelessly tangled, Lang is able to show that the Ballantyne
family’s chief informant was less than truthful and that Lockhart’s
information came from the printer Robert Cadell, who if not entirely disinterested,
was the best available source. So far from acting out of reckless malice, Lockhart
took pains to get at the truth and was unsparing in his criticism of Scott’s
own lack of judgment.
In his preface Lang apologizes for
writing a book that is largely an apology for John Gibson Lockhart, but given the
contrary evidence he discovered in Lockhart’s correspondence he felt obliged
to counter his subject’s reputation as the bad boy of literature. This
ill-repute was deeply engrained, beginning with the counter-attacks in the Chaldee
Manuscript affair, continuing though John Scott’s articles on “The
Mohock Magazine,” the Ballantyne pamphlets and Tait’s Magazine
reviews abusing the Life of Scott, and trailing off with a
quarter-century’s worth of writers with grievances against the Quarterly
Review. Liberals who disliked Scott positively despised Lockhart, as seen
in Harriet Martineau’s hatchet-wielding obituary reprinted in her
Biographical Sketches (1869). More insidious because less obviously
hostile was the treatment of Lockhart in Mary Gordon’s biography of her
father, John Wilson (1862, reprinted 1879) which lightened the character of
Christopher North by blackening that of his colleague. Andrew Lang tenaciously goes
after every charge made and largely succeeds in rebutting or deflecting them. To
little avail it seems; Scott’s reputation subsequently went into decline, and
with little interest since in Tory romanticism, Lockhart’s position remains
much as it was when Lang took him up.
His biography supplies the
back-story to Lockhart’s Life of Scott and covers the subsequent
affairs of the Scott family, but it leaves many gaps. Marion Lockhart’s
John Gibson Lockhart (1954) did little more than recast Lang’s
life-and-letters as a life-without-letters. One would think that the Tory satirists
Wilson and Lockhart, Maginn and Hook, would make attractive subjects for
biographers, if only hostile biographers, but such has not been the case.
David Hill Radcliffe
