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John Gibson Lockhart's Artistic Dichotomy

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2020

Abstract

The paper will focus on John Gibson Lockhart's art and fiction. Lockhart (1794-1854) used to be a famous Scottish man of letters.

He proved to be multi-talented. Lockhart published several novels, biographies, translations, hundreds of various articles concerning literature, and in his free time, he used to write poetry and draw pictures (mostly caricatures).

Nowadays he's best known as Walter Scott's first biographer and as a prominent Victorian literature critic. Lockhart's caricatures have been gaining more popularity in recent years, and several more were rediscovered recently.

Surprisingly, he abandoned both novel writing and drawing abruptly when he was appointed as an editor of the Quarterly Review in 1825, and the reasons behind this sudden change of habits are not entirely clear. All his novels and his drawings were created between 1810 and 1824, between his 16th and 30th year.

The paper will compare and analyze Lockhart as a novelist and as a caricaturist. His fiction and his drawings are remarkably different and reveal dissimilar aspects of his complex personality.