a collection of fictitious letters reflecting on Scottish culture and characters, written by John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) in the persona of ‘Peter Morris’, a Welshman on a tour of contemporary Scotland spent chiefly in Edinburgh, with some later parts from Glasgow.

LOCKHART, as one of the moving figures behind Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, was well used to satire and hoaxing, and Peter’s Letters is a frequently ironic, well-informed tour of Scotland’s leading literati and legal and public figures which allows the author (behind the assumed Welsh persona) to comment with straight face on all his subjects, personal friends and colleagues included. The epistolary form is organised in such a way as to allow one major figure or theme to occupy one ‘letter’, and there is much faux-innocent description – of Archibald Alison, who preaches well ‘in spite of his accent, which has a good deal of his country in it’ and of the ‘unaffected simplicity’ of James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd. It is a mischievous and witty performance sure to please and offend both sides of the political divide in Edinburgh, and a wicked satisfaction will have come to Lockhart from adding a title page claiming to be a ‘second edition’, while it was in fact the first.

Peter Morris’s guide through the Edinburgh sequences of Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk is Lockhart’s alter ego, ‘the nervous, irritable, enthusiastic, sarcastic Will Wastle’ – a reactionary Tory ‘dashing execrations by the dozens upon the Whigs, the Presbyterians, and the Edinburgh Reviewers’ (Peter’s Letters 1:23, 36). The Whig intellectuals associated with the Edinburgh not surprisingly come under attack, though Jeffrey is said to be better than the Review that is paradoxically acknowledged to be characteristically his.

Ian Campbell, University of Edinburgh