Nixon the Prophet

CHARLES MACKAY (1812–1889), a prolific Scottish author whose works include volumes of poetry, journalism, and memoirs, as well as numerous popular songs, was born in Perth; his mother died in his early childhood, and he was generally raised by his father, a Royal Artillery veteran who for long periods left the boy in the care of friends. At the age of ten, he was sent to continue his education in London, where he was encouraged to pursue his emerging literary ambitions, publishing his first poem when he was thirteen. The following year he joined his father in Brussels, and there acquired fluency in the principal European languages. Although he was expected to establish a career in the iron business, Mackay was determined to earn his living as a writer; after returning to London in 1832 he began working for newspapers—first the Sun, an evening paper, then the Morning Chronicle, where Charles Dickens was starting out as a parliamentary reporter. Over the next decade, Mackay contributed pieces to a variety of periodicals, and produced several volumes of verse, a history of the city of London, a guide to the River Thames, a prose romance, and—most memorably—a compilation of striking essays with the collective title Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and the Madness of Crowds, first published in three volumes in 1841 by Richard Bentley.

Mackay left London to become the editor of the Glasgow Argus in 1844; he left that position three years later, and was hired by the Illustrated London News in 1848, publishing writings on a variety of social, political, and cultural topics, as well as original songs. In 1857–1858 he undertook a tour of North America to deliver a series of lectures on popular song, and during his travels—an account of which he subsequently published in 1859 as Liberty and Life in America: or, Sketches of a Tour in the United States and Canada—he encountered a number of prominent figures, among them Emerson, Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In early 1862 Mackay returned to the United States, where, based in New York as the correspondent for the London Times, he reported on the American Civil War. In later years he devoted much of his attention to philological investigation, which resulted in such works as The Gaelic and Celtic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe (1878). Although he aspired to be recognized chiefly as a poet, he is now best known as the author of the Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, a persistently compelling work that has been reprinted many times. In an edition of the work published during the Depression of the 1930s, an overall collapse that he attributed to the follies of the "New Economics" of the previous decade, Bernard Baruch observed that it was this comprehensive inquiry that first made him aware of "the astonishing circumstances of each of the greater popular delusions of earlier eras"; and although he noted that in Mackay's melancholy catalogue "no preventive is anywhere suggested," Baruch went on to observe that just "as in all primitive, unknown (and therefore diabolic) spells, there may be potent incantations," so, too, "even in the general moment of gloom in which this foreword is written, when many begin to wonder if declines will never halt, the appropriate abracadabra may be: 'They always did.'"

The brief excerpt here is taken from the second edition (1852) of Mackay's perennially provocative work.

—SD

Amongst other English prophets, a belief in whose power has not been entirely effaced by the light of advancing knowledge, is Robert Nixon, the Cheshire idiot, a contemporary of Mother Shipton. The popular accounts of this man say, that he was born of poor parents, not far from Vale Royal, on the edge of the forest of Delamere. He was brought up to the plough, but was so ignorant and stupid, that nothing could be made of him. Everybody thought him irretrievably insane, and paid no attention to the strange, unconnected discourses which he held. Many of his prophecies are believed to have been lost in this manner. But they were not always destined to be...