John Stuart Blackie: Scottish Scholar and Patriot (review)

John Stuart Blackie's eccentricity provides a challenge and an opportunity for the biographer: Blackie's friend, the Aberdeenshire clergyman William Anderson, was in no doubt that he would one day merit a biography (77), and Stuart Wallace has written a clear and scholarly account, based on an extraordinarily diligent reading of the Blackie collection in the National Library of Scotland and a scrupulous search for his letters in other archives. In addition to his thorough account of Blackie's life, Wallace also provides a vast amount of information about those with whom Blackie corresponded, resulting in a useful guide to literary, educational, and intellectual circles in Victorian Scotland. Wallace has sought out Blackie's voluminous writings, and he offers a useful bibliography of the principal items. He has even gritted his teeth and read through Blackie's poetry.

Blackie was ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Scotland. He published his first article in 1832, at the age of twenty-three, and his last book in 1893, two years before his death. Open a volume of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine or the Foreign Quarterly Review, and the chances are that there will be an article by Blackie on Greek literature, Scottish educational reform, the land question, or the cause of the Gaelic language. He pestered the editors of Scottish newspapers with lengthy epistles and was much in demand as a public lecturer to diverse audiences. He travelled widely in Europe and the Near East, although not in America whose democratic constitution he feared.

As one might expect, he was a man of contradictions. He held two chairs at Scotland's ancient universities—that of Humanity (Latin) at Marischal College, Aberdeen, from 1841 to 1852, and of Greek at the University of Edinburgh from 1852 to 1882—so could be perceived as a serious scholarly figure. He also published endless verse, much of it dubious. He embraced progressive subjects, such as the reform of Scotland's universities, and campaigned on radical causes, such as the land question. This did not prevent him from being an incurable romantic and an opponent of advocates of democracy, such as the Manchester Chartist survivor Ernest Jones with whom he debated that topic in Edinburgh in 1867 (235–36). Blackie was, as Wallace argues, a "Scottish patriot," a member of the Scottish Home Rule Association, founded in 1886, but he was not an uncritical admirer of the institutions that had helped maintain Scottish identity since the Union of 1707. While many others were celebrating the democracy and egalitarianism of the Scottish university system, he lamented the fact that for much of the century the instruction, especially in Greek, was scarcely above that offered in the parochial schools. As he argued in the late 1850s, the intellectual quality of the Scottish universities was held back, especially compared to their German counterparts, by the practice of "allowing any raw ploughman's son, or blinking watchmaker's apprentice . . . to march from the lowest and most ill-taught parish school in the country, freely, and without question, into the Latin and Greek classes of the first University of the land" (223). His patriotism was not of a nationalistic kind; in fact, he was probably a Liberal Unionist in his political instincts, certainly as far as Ireland—peopled, he believed, by a race much inferior to the Scots—was concerned.

Wallace sympathizes with Blackie, but he is far from uncritical. He attempts to set Blackie in his context while sensibly reminding the reader that Blackie's eccentricity was such that contextualisation can be misleading. He notes Blackie's achievements, not least his hyperactive campaigning to raise funds to endow a chair of Celtic at the University of Edinburgh in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and his ceaseless advocacy for modernising the Scottish universities to bring them up to the standard that Blackie had found as a student in Germany in the early 1830s and revered for the rest of his life. Wallace also draws...