Talk:John Pinkerton

robert heron
is there a reason that Robert Heron redirects here? i don't find the name anywhere in the article.--Alhutch 01:44, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, Robert Heron was Pinkerton's pseudonym for his Letters of Literature. PS: This article contains some errors--Pinkerton did not attend university, but articled to William Aytoun, a writer to the Signet at Edinburgh. As well, much of his scholarship is still considered to be very sound indeed, his ideas about the Celts aside.

Pinkerton was NOT a "pseudo-historian"
This from the Introduction to the Project Gutenberg ebook Early Australian Voyages, by John Pinkerton (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2660/2660.txt). The introduction was written for the 1886 edition by "H. M.", or, H Morley, as per the British Library catalogue entry for "Early Australioan Voyages."

John Pinkerton was born at Edinburgh in February, 1758, and died in Paris in March, 1826, aged sixty-eight. He was the best classical scholar at the Lanark grammar school; but his father, refusing to send him to a university, bound him to Scottish law. He had a strong will, fortified in some respects by a weak judgment. He wrote clever verse; at the age of twenty-two he went to London to support himself by literature, began by publishing "Rimes" of his own, and then Scottish Ballads, all issued as ancient, but of which he afterwards admitted that fourteen out of the seventy-three were wholly written by himself. John Pinkerton, whom Sir Walter Scott described as "a man of considerable learning, and some severity as well as acuteness of disposition," made clear conscience on the matter in 1786, when he published two volumes of genuine old Scottish Poems from the MS. collections of Sir Richard Maitland. He had added to his credit as an antiquary by an Essay on Medals, and then applied his studies to ancient Scottish History, producing learned books, in which he bitterly abused the Celts. It was in 1802 that Pinkerton left England for Paris, where he supported himself by indefatigable industry as a writer during the last twenty-four years of his life. One of the most useful of his many works was that _General Collection of the best and most interesting Voyages and Travels of the World_, which appeared in seventeen quarto volumes, with maps and engravings, in the years 1808- 1814. Pinkerton abridged and digested most of the travellers' records given in this series, but always studied to retain the travellers' own words, and his occasional comments have a value of their own.

Collywolly (talk) 03:56, 19 December 2008 (UTC)