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1. Genesis

On 29 November 1815, not long after settling in Edinburgh in pursuit of a legal career, the young John Gibson Lockhart wrote to his Oxford friend Jonathan Christie of the city then cried up as the Modern Athens:

Edinburgh's two most prominent literary men were also lawyers: Walter Scott, one of the Principal Clerks of the Court of Session and the poet of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808), and Francis Jeffrey, leading advocate in the courts and editor of the Edinburgh Review. In such an environment Lockhart may well have hoped to fulfil his own literary ambitions as well as to start a legal career, Edinburgh seeming to favour success more than had either Glasgow or Oxford, where earlier phases of his life had been spent.

Although Lockhart was born in the manse of Cambusnethan in Lanarkshire, on 12 June 1794, his clerical father was transferred to the Blackfriars College Kirk of Glasgow in 1796, so that Lockhart himself grew up in the heart of what was rapidly becoming the second city of the British Empire. Dr Lockhart lived in Charlotte Street, then a pleasant road of Georgian houses leading downhill towards the northwest corner of Glasgow Green, a large communal open green space near the River Clyde that acted as a lung for the increasingly industrialised city, used by citizens not only for washing laundry but also as recreational space. Lockhart was educated firstly at the city's Grammar School and then at Glasgow College, until in 1809 he won a Snell Exhibition to study at Balliol College, Oxford.

An imaginative leap is required for a modern reader to appreciate what engravings meant for a reader in the early nineteenth century, before the widespread creation of the great institutional art galleries of Britain's capital and provincial cities enabled access to original paintings and before the internet and other media bombarded each one of us with a plethora of photographic images. The young Charlotte Brontë, for example, struck her school-fellows as knowing a good deal about celebrated pictures and painters, and by the age of thirteen had already drawn up a list of painters whose work she wished to see, but her information came mostly from printed descriptions and from woodcuts or engravings. Whenever ‘an opportunity offered of examining a picture or cut of any kind, she went over it piecemeal, with her eyes close to the paper’, and she and her sisters ‘would take and analyse any print or drawing which came in their way, and find out how much thought had gone to its composition, what ideas it was intended to suggest, and what it did suggest’. A similar dependence on prints as an initial source of information on paintings is evident in various passages of Lockhart's Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk. After seeing William Allan's Two Tartar Robbers dividing their Spoil, Dr Peter Morris learns that James Stewart (1791-1863, ODNB) is preparing an engraving of the picture and orders a copy for his home of Pensharpe-Hall, both as a souvenir for himself and as an opportunity for his correspondent Rev. David Williams (who has not seen the original) to judge for himself of the composition (p. 306). It must also have been common for someone viewing a wellknown painting for the first time to have had its outline previously fixed upon his or her mind by a more easily accessible engraving. Morris, in stating to his correspondent that at Hamilton Palace he has seen Rubens's Daniel in the Lions’ Den, adds that he need not say anything about it ‘as you are quite familiar with the prints’ (p. 519).