Duel at Chalk Farm Tavern: A Regency Tragedy

My guest today is Dr. Stephen Carver. He is a cultural historian, editor, and novelist. For sixteen years, he taught literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, spending three years in Japan as Professor of English at the University of Fukui. He is presently Head of Online Courses at the Unthank School of Writing. Stephen’s guest post is about a duel that occurred in 1821 at Chalk Farm.

On the night of Friday, February 16, 1821, two men faced each other across the field of honour, a wooded knoll beyond the Chalk Farm Tavern near Primrose Hill, to the north of a great chase that had yet to become Regent’s Park. This had been the scene of many duels; there were no neighbouring houses, just open fields hidden from the nearest road by a screen of trees. One of the men had left half a bottle of wine at the inn, telling the landlord he would be back to finish it later. It was a bright moonlit night, if a little misty on the low ground, and after the pistols were knocked and primed one duellist had called to the other: ‘You must not stand there; I see your head above the horizon; you give me an advantage.’ The seconds consulted and the men calmly changed their positions, once more facing off. Yet these were not soldiers or aristocrats, but men of letters, both well-known in the world of Regency journalism.

The men raised their pistols, and almost simultaneously they fired.

The man who had left the wine was John Scott, the editor of The London Magazine, a Whiggish, Radical and Romantic publication conceived as a reply to the hugely popular and High Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. At thirty-six, Aberdeen-born Scott was an established London newspaper man, having edited The Statesmen, The Censor, Drakard’s Stamford News, Drakard’s Paper, and The Champion. He had taken on the editorship of Robert Baldwin’s relaunch of The London Magazine the year before. Scott also wrote much of the copy, while notable contributors included Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. (1)

Scott was an idealist, and he never missed a chance to attack the ‘Pittite’ or Tory Party, who had held power almost exclusively in the newly designated United Kingdom since 1783. He campaigned for electoral reform, the abolition of slavery, Catholic emancipation, education for the poor, and an end to flogging in the British Army. He was not a man to back down in an argument, and when the rival journalist, Richard Newcomb Jr (using the common Georgian practice of writing under a pseudonym) denounced him as ‘a traitor, a Jacobin and a blackguard,’ Scott let it be known that should Newcomb care to make these accusations in person, he would meet the charge with a challenge.

But it was not Newcomb that Scott faced that fateful evening, but the lawyer and literary dilettante Jonathan Henry Christie, the London agent of the Scottish journalist John Gibson Lockhart. The son-in-law of Sir Walter Scott, J.G. Lockhart was one of the driving forces behind Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, part of a shadowy triumvirate with John Wilson (better known in print as ‘Christopher North’) and James Hogg (‘The Ettrick Shepherd’), a young and inexperienced team that had quickly begun making waves. Their inaugural issue alone contained a violent attack on Coleridge, and a biblical parody of Whig rival The Edinburgh Review entitled ‘Translation from an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript’ that resulted in an out-of-court settlement for slander.

The opening issue of Blackwood’s also carried the first of many virulent articles on the so-called ‘Cockney School of Poetry,’ written by Lockhart, egged on by Wilson. This satirical ‘christening’ of the second generation of Romantics in opposition to ‘The Lake School’ was particularly directed at Leigh Hunt, the editor of the Radical weekly paper The Examiner, although in follow-up articles it was quickly applied to anyone suspected of Whiggish principles, most notably William Hazlitt and John Keats. In dismissing Hunt and his circle – to which John Scott belonged – as ‘Cockneys,’ Lockhart’s class agenda was clear: Hunt was described as a ‘man of little education and low birth and habits’ who was ‘perpetually labouring to be genteel,’ while ‘All the great poets of our country have been men of some rank in society’ (‘Z’: 1817, ‘Cockney School I,’ 38 – 39).

Hazlitt at this point dodged the bullet, but once he leapt to Hunt’s defence in print he was dismissed as a ‘pamphleteer’ and a ‘driveller’ (‘Z’: 1818, ‘Letter from Z,’ 415). Hunt demanded that ‘Z’ reveal his identity, and a meeting was brokered with Christie by mutual friend John Hamilton Reynolds. This appeared to defuse the issue, until ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry No. 2’ appeared, again focusing on Hunt and tearing into his poem The Story of Rimini (1816), which was described as ‘vile, profligate, obscene, indecent, and detestable’ (‘Z’: 1818, ‘Letter from Z,’ 416).

Once more, Hunt used the pages of the Examiner to invite ‘Z’ to send his address to his printer ‘in order that justice may be executed on the proper person’ (qtd. in O’Leary: 1983, 139). Hunt put it about that this was to challenge ‘Z’ to a duel, although publisher William Blackwood and Lockhart interpreted it as a threat of an action for libel, a contingency that the anonymity of Regency journalists was intended to avoid, and why Lockhart wrote as not only ‘Z’ but as ‘William Wastle,’ ‘Dr Peter Morris,’ and ‘Baron von Lauerwinkel.’ The nebulous editors therefore decided to drop some chaff, and went after Keats instead, attacking the ‘imperturbable, drivelling idiocy’ of the recently published Endymion, the poet’s lack of a classical education, and his political affiliations (‘Z’: 1818, ‘Cockney School IV,’ 519, 524). Byron would later write of this review in Don Juan:

Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate;

’T is strange the mind, that very fiery particle,

Should let itself be snuffed out by an article (Byron: 1837, Canto XI, 446 – 448).

The ‘Cockneys’ were all at one time or another allies of John Scott, and he continued to work closely with Hazlitt on The London Magazine. Blackwood’s was also lampooning some of his closest friends, including humourist Peter George Patmore (the father of Coventry Patmore), and the Whig politician Sir James Mackintosh, who would rather have liked the Chair of Moral Philosophy that John Wilson had recently gained at Edinburgh University. They even went as far as to dismiss his star writer, ‘Elia’ (Charles Lamb), as a ‘Cockney scribbler.’ Scott and Hazlitt therefore went after Blackwood’s with a vengeance, criticising the attack on Keats and the ease with which Wilson had achieved his Professorship, darkly hinting at the worst kind of cronyism in the form of the considerable influence of Sir Walter Scott.

Lockhart responded as ‘William Wastle,’ sending up Scott’s popular travel writing in ‘The Mad Banker of Amsterdam’ and dismissing the dissenting Secession Church to which his family belonged as ‘Lilliputian.’ ‘Christopher North,’ meanwhile, teased about his circulation and sales, naming Scott in person and suggesting he ‘keep to his own side of the road’ (O’Leary: 1983, 141). Wilson had always been careful to keep his own name out of print, because to go public might leave one exposed to anything from a writ to a physical assault. To name Scott as the editor of The London Magazine was therefore not only a major breach of etiquette but genuinely dangerous.

Scott and Hazlitt replied in the November issue of The London Magazine in a twelve-page rant entitled ‘Blackwood’s Magazine: They do but jest – poison in jest – no offence i’ the world!’ which not only attacked ‘Peter Morris’ and ‘Christopher North’ but Walter Scott, who was charged with condoning and perpetuating Blackwood’s practice of ‘mystery as to the authorship’ (Anon: 1820, ‘Blackwood’s Magazine,’ II, 509). Sir Walter kept his own counsel in public, but privately wrote to Lockhart advising him to back off:

I care not how hard others lay on the Galwegian Stot, only I would not like to have you in that sort of scrape which, if he have a particle of the buffalo in him, might, I think, ensue. Revere yourself, my dear boy, and think you were born to do your country better service than in this species of warfare (qtd. in Lang: 1897, I, 243).

John Scott, however, kept up the pressure in his December issue, once more attacking what he called the barbarian ‘Mohock Magazine,’ appealing to his famous namesake to publicly disown his son-in-law’s excesses, and naming Lockhart as the ‘Emperor of the Mohocks,’ wrongly assuming that Wilson had left after becoming an academic. He concluded that ‘Dr Morris’ had acted ‘contrary to the usage of a gentleman’ (Anon: 1820, ‘The Mohock Magazine,’ II, 685). Scott’s blood was up to the point that he asked Patmore, ‘If Lockhart and I go out, will you accompany me?’ (O’Leary: 1983, 146). Christie, meanwhile, wrote to Lockhart that ‘I think you must do something more with him [Scott] than kill the zinc-eating spider’ (qtd. in Lang: 1897, I, 250).

Lockhart, however, had other concerns. His wife was expecting their first child and was gravely ill, his partner in crime John Wilson was focusing on his university career, and his illustrious father-in-law was far from happy at being drawn into a public spat. Edinburgh thus went quiet, leaving John Scott to wrongly assume that he had carried the day. Urged on by Hazlitt, and hoping to mortally wound his biggest commercial rival, he devoted much of the January issue of his magazine to harrying Blackwood’s. Again, he went after Lockhart, to whom he mistakenly ascribed several inflammatory articles in fact written by Wilson and Irish Tory William Maginn. Unwittingly, he had fallen into a trap set by the many disguises employed by Blackwood’s contributors. In Scott’s mind, and more damagingly in print, Lockhart therefore became the sole editor of Blackwood’s, and referring to a recent libel action against the magazine that named him, he again called him out:

We have been told that Mr John Gibson Lockart [sic], having been originally included in the action now pending, has given it under his hand, that he is not the Editor of the Magazine. The people of Edinburgh are not surprised at this denial: it is well known there that Doctor Morris, under the assumed name of Christopher North, is the Editor of the work, and the author of the most malignant articles! Would the Doctor have the baseness to make a similar denial? We believe he would; for all the professions of a merry careless temper, by which it has been attempted to characterize the publication he conducts, have evidently been intended to cover an organized plan of fraud, calumny, and cupidity. The cowardice which denies a perpetrated wrong, is the natural associate of such qualities. Doctor Morris would deny just as firmly as Mr Lockart [sic] (Anon: 1820, ‘The Mohocks,’ III, 77).

In the face of such direct provocation, Lockhart wrote to Christie:

Talk over the whole affair with Traill [James Traill, another Scottish lawyer based in London] and one or both of you go to this Mr Scott … you will dictate according to your own discretion, which I can trust better than my own, an apology to be inserted in the front pages of his next magazine, and whatever else I please. If there is any difficulty about this, it remains only that you fix a day for the man to meet me at York or any other place halfway between Edinburgh and London’ (qtd in O’Leary: 1983, 149).

From this moment on, the outcome was as inevitable as tragedy.

Duelling was illegal in the United Kingdom, and a fatal duel was considered murder, although judges were generally lenient. There was a precise etiquette, which afforded an opportunity through the mediation of ‘seconds’ to call the whole thing off with neither party losing face. Christie therefore called upon Scott at his rooms in Covent Garden and asked if he would take responsibility for the articles that Lockhart regarded as injurious to his honour, the final straw being the assertion that he had lied when he denied being the editor of Blackwood’s. Scott countered that he would admit his role on The London Magazine only if Lockhart would do the same.

Having been informed of this, Lockhart travelled to London, sending Christie forth again with a letter demanding an apology. Scott then acknowledged his editorship of The London Magazine, but asked that Lockhart disavow his association with Blackwood’s. Christie argued against this, so Scott modified his request, asking that Lockhart declare he never received payment from William Blackwood or stood in a position of management. This muddled the negotiations, until Scott’s wife, Caroline, suggested her husband ask family friend Horace Smith to act for him. Smith would later claim in a memoir written in 1847 that he had sought an ‘amicable adjustment of the affair.’ (2)

Lockhart’s advisor was somewhat more bullish. John Wilson Croker, then the Tory MP for Great Yarmouth, was an old friend of Walter Scott’s who wrote for The Quarterly Review. Croker had an axe to grind with John Scott, who, in the same issue of The London Magazine that carried the latest ‘Mohocks’ piece, had argued that George IV’s proposed Royal Academy of Literature, of which Croker was named as a fellow along with nineteen other peers, senior churchmen and Tory politicians, would ‘excite ridicule and disgust in the public mind’ (Anon: 1821, ‘Proposed Royal Academy,’ III, 72). Croker therefore wrote to Scott that:

Mr Lockhart, in consequence of Mr Scott having refused to act towards him according to the rules by which gentlemen are accustomed to regulate their conduct, thinks it necessary to inform Mr Scott, that he, Mr Lockhart, considers him a liar and a scoundrel’ (qtd. in O’Leary: 1983, 151.)

In an attempt to further provoke Scott to action, he added that Lockhart would shortly be returning to Scotland. Scott immediately replied that he considered this missive ‘as coming from the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine,’ and that he had no intention of meeting Lockhart on equal terms until he revealed himself as such.

It was Catch-22. Lockhart, apparently eager to shoot it out, consistently refused to make the one concession Scott required for them to do so, while Scott would not move an inch on this point. Eventually Lockhart cracked. Instead of leaving London he penned the required affirmation of his connection to Blackwood’s, in a draft statement that presented his side of the case at length and concluded that his error was in assuming that Scott had the manners and character necessary to accept the explanation of a gentleman. He sought the opinion of Dr John Stoddart, former editor of The Times, who suggested that it remained somewhat opaque on the question of his supposed editorship, and that he should perhaps open with a clear declaration one way or the other. Lockhart therefore added an introductory statement that: ‘Mr Lockhart has occasionally contributed articles to that publication; but he is in no sense of the word, editor or conductor of it, and neither does, nor ever did derive, any emolument whatever from any management of it’ (qtd. in O’Leary: 1983, 153). This was published in Stoddart’s paper, The New Times, on January 31, 1821, with a nota bene that a copy had been forwarded to Scott with a note that Lockhart would leave London in the next twenty-four hours. Unfortunately, the copy sent to Scott did not contain the new introduction.

Scott replied in a published statement, seizing on the discrepancy between Lockhart’s original announcement and the one that saw print. If Lockhart had made the same declaration to him that he had made in The New Times, he argued, ‘he would have received the satisfaction he desired.’ Correspondence between rivals and seconds was reproduced in detail, and Lockhart was described as ‘a mercenary dealer in calumny and falsehood; who, by a series of pitiful artifices and evasions, has skulked from the consequences of his own actions, until he has been dragged forth to infamy by a powerful hand’ (Scott: 1821, ‘Statement,’ 7 – 8).

Both men went on to circulate their accounts of the affair widely, each claiming they had won, although Scott harboured doubts in private. The thought that he should have accepted Lockhart’s challenge began to keep him awake at night.

Like Scott, Jonathan Christie could not leave it alone. Under his own initiative, he therefore wrote to Horace Smith on February 6, 1821, objecting to Scott’s statement and concluding that ‘if Mr Scott will take the same journey to find Mr Lockhart that Mr Lockhart took to find Mr Scott, Mr Lockhart will give him a meeting instantly’ (qtd. in Lang: 1897, I, 272). Smith passed the note on to Scott, declining to get involved. The job of second therefore passed to Peter Patmore. Lockhart approved of Christie’s action, and with his blessing Christie published his own statement of the case in the New Times on February 8, ‘solely with the view of rendering Mr Lockhart’s narrative more clear and intelligible to the public,’ and concluding: ‘If after this statement Mr Scott can find any persons who believe that there was anything more atrocious than an oversight in the circumstance of the two statements, Mr Scott is perfectly welcome to the whole weight of their good opinion’ (qtd. in Lang: 1897, I, 273).

Walter Scott was in London on business at the time, and he invited Christie to join him for breakfast, where he advised him to send John Scott a copy of his statement. Sir Walter wrote to Lockhart that he should ‘keep clear of magazine-mongers and scandal-jobbers in future,’ but reassured him – as was Christie’s opinion – that John Scott would not give a meeting: ‘The fellow will live on this affair for half a year which I dare say is all he wanted for as for fighting he thought as much of flying’ (qtd. in O’Leary: 1983, 156).

This turned out to be a terrible miscalculation. For John Scott, the final clause of Christie’s statement was an insult he felt unable to ignore. Patmore was dispatched to demand a public retraction. When Christie refused, Patmore promptly presented Scott’s challenge. As a lawyer, Christie knew that judges were more lenient with duellists that were seen as impulsive rather than calculating, and therefore suggested a meeting as quickly as possible, at the notorious field at Chalk Farm the following Friday. James Traill would act as his second, which turned out to be another poor decision on Christie’s part. On the appointed evening, Scott wrote letters to his wife and brother, to be delivered in the event of his death, told his wife he was dining in town, and went instead to Chalk Farm. By ten o’clock, Scott lie dying in a room in the tavern and Christie was on the run.

A couple of days later, Lockhart received a letter from the distraught Christie explaining what had happened:

We met last night, at nine o’clock, at Chalk Farm. I arranged with my second that I would not fire at Scott except in self-defence. Accordingly, I fired my first shot in the air. Before we fired again, Traill protested that, as Mr Scott had taken the usual aim at me, I should not forego that advantage again. I felt bound to follow his advice for self-preservation, and my second shot took effect… (qtd. in Lang: 1897, 274 – 275).

Christie knew Scott was no marksman and had deloped, throwing away his first shot. Under the Code duello this should have been more than enough to satisfy honour. To insist upon a second shot after a deliberate miss was unbecoming, and the seconds should have stopped the duel immediately. The duellists, meanwhile, were very probably too excited and confused to consider their actions. In Christie’s letter, he still sounds dazed: ‘I cannot and shall not attempt to describe the horror I felt’ (qtd. in Lang: 1897, 275).

Scott had taken a ball below the ribs on his right side. It had torn through him and lodged in his stomach, a mortal wound in the nineteenth century. Having examined him, Pettigrew, the attending surgeon, fled, leaving Christie to arrange for Scott to be taken to the tavern, being judged too badly injured to move further. As soon as Scott’s family arrived, Christie and his second took flight. Patmore was arrested, but managed to slip away in the confusion.

Friends joined Caroline at the bedside, while Robert Baldwin, the owner of The London Magazine, fretted about copy. The ball was removed from Scott’s abdomen two days later, and remarkably he appeared to rally, leading The London Magazine to report on Monday the 26th that ‘the danger which was at first apprehended is now greatly diminished’ (Anon: 1821, ‘The Lion’s Head,’ 243); but on the same night his fever returned and he died with his wife by his side the following evening, having never met J.G. Lockhart in person.

The inquest was held at the tavern, at which the family physician, Dr Darling, gave evidence that Scott had praised Christie’s conduct, but felt that ‘some great mismanagement’ had occurred. Pettigrew also appeared, stating that Patmore had told him that he was entirely ignorant of Christie’s plan to delope, which should have been communicated to him by Traill, after which it should have been immediately declared that honour had been satisfied. There was no other verdict possible than to charge Christie, Traill and Patmore with murder, and warrants were quickly issued for their arrests.

Scott’s funeral service was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Friday, March 9, and his body was interred in the vault beneath the church; sixteen coaches and seven private carriages followed the hearse. A public subscription was raised to support Scott’s wife and his two surviving children, to which Byron contributed £30 and the message ‘He died like a brave man, and he lived an able one.’ Sir Walter Scott, meanwhile, expressed some sympathy towards the family in correspondence with Lockhart, but the letters make it clear that as far as John Scott was concerned, the author of Waverley believed he got what he deserved, also reassuring his son-in-law that ‘The Duke of Wellington, whom I take to be the highest military authority in the world, pronounces you can have nothing more to say to Scott’ (qtd. in Lang: 1897, 277).

Christie and Traill returned from France to stand trial, although Christie urged Lockhart not to attend, advice the not-quite-editor of Blackwood’s followed. The trial opened at the Old Bailey on April 13 before Lord Chief Justice Abbott. The defendants did not speak, relying instead on character witnesses, and Scott’s statement to Darling was ruled inadmissible as it was unclear whether he knew he was dying at the time, that being a condition of the admission of the testimony of a dead man. In summing up, Abbott made it clear he did not appreciate Patmore’s absence. The jury must decide, he said, if the defendants were present when Scott was shot, and if the fatal shooting was premeditated, or occurred in the heat of the moment, ‘which might lessen the offence.’ That Patmore had engaged a surgeon for the duel made it a deliberate murder in the judge’s opinion, although he advised that the prisoners at the bar may have been ignorant of this fact. After deliberating for less than half-an-hour, the jury returned a verdict of ‘Not Guilty.’

Patmore returned to England in the summer, where he appeared at the Old Bailey on June 9. Dr Pettigrew and his assistant, W.B. Morris, were called, but advised by the Court that had they attended the field knowing that a duel was to take place then they would be liable to prosecution and therefore had the right to refuse to be examined. Taking the hint, both men declined to give evidence. Mr Justice Bayley advised the jury that there was no evidence that Patmore was involved in Scott’s death, and he was promptly found not guilty. Christie would later write to Lockhart: ‘It seems that we were not the men that fought the duel at all, they ran away as soon as the man was shot, & we good creatures happening to be walking by moonlight were attracted to the spot’ (qtd. in O’Leary: 1983, 165).

Blackwood’s remained unrepentant, Maginn going as far as to describe ‘Gruff-looking Z’ as ‘wet with the blood of the Cockneys’ in the April edition (Anon: 1821, ‘Hymn to Christopher North,’ 62), although Lockhart reportedly succumbed to a prolonged attack of depression after the affair (Millar: 1903, 520), and quietly withdrew from the magazine, becoming editor of The Quarterly Review in 1825. If asked, Walter Scott would later admit only his son-in-law’s ‘very slight connection’ with Blackwood’s, where he ‘engaged in some light satires’ (O’Leary: 1983, 168).

Lockhart had a distinguished literary career, but various family tragedies led to nervous breakdown and a decline in health; he died in 1854 at the age of sixty. J.H. Christie lived a long and prosperous life, and after the guilt he initially expressed to Lockhart over Scott’s death had passed, the story he would tell cast him as the innocent victim of circumstance. Patmore continued to write, most notably editing The New Monthly Magazine between 1841 and 1853, although his reputation never quite recovered after his trial. The London Magazine continued under the editorship of the John Taylor, but he was not an easy man to work with, and Hazlitt and Lamb soon left. It ceased publication in 1829. (3) The war of words between Liberal and Tory magazines continued, as did the common practice of pseudonym and anonymity, and Blackwood’s ran uninterrupted until 1980, always remaining in the hands of the founding family. (4)

Thus ended the tragedy of John Scott, Regency journalist. Had he have lived, his name would have ranked alongside early-Victorian newspapermen like John Macrone, Richard Bentley, and Henry Colburn, while his common sense and reforming zeal would have almost certainly been in tune with that of the young Charles Dickens. Instead, he is a stub on Wikipedia and a footnote in the biographies of Lockhart, Keats and Walter Scott. An early champion of Romantic poetry, Scott was often ahead of his time, and his crusading articles on electoral reform, company punishment, prisons, religious tolerance, slavery, and the freedom of the press serve now as a preface to a century of dynamic social change, and, ultimately, improvement, that he would not live to see, having stepped out one night on the field behind Chalk Farm Tavern.

Notes:

• This is the same Thomas Griffiths Wainewright that is now believed to have been a serial killer and multiple poisoner, but that’s another story.
• Horace Smith contributed a series of autobiographical articles under the collective title of A Greybeard’s Gossip about his Literary Acquaintances to W.H. Ainsworth’s New Monthly Magazine (Vol 80) in 1847, although he died before these could be edited into a single, published memoir.
• The London Magazine, or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer was pretty much in at the birth of the modern magazine. Established in 1732, it was a political reply to the Tory Gentleman’s Magazine (first published in 1731), whose founder Edward Cave first applied the military term ‘magazine’ to a printed digest. The first incarnation ceased publication in 1785. Baldwin’s resurrected London Magazine, first edited by John Scott, ran from 1820 – 1829, and it was briefly revived as The London between 1875 and 1879, although how connected this title was to the originally miscellany of art and literature is open to question. Harmsworth’s Monthly Pictorial Magazine was renamed The London Magazine in 1900, changing to The New London Magazine in 1930 and ceasing publication in 1933. The current London Magazine was established in 1954 and first edited by the poet John Lehmann, who had also edited New Writing in the 1940s. The London Magazine is presently edited by Dr Steven O’Brien.
• For more on Blackwood’s, please see: Stephen Carver (2016), ‘Tales of Terror from the House of Blackwood.’ Ainsworth & Friends. Available from: https://ainsworthandfriends.wordpress.com/2016/02/11/tales-of-terror-from-the-house-of-blackwood/

Works Cited:

• Anon. (John Scott and William Hazlitt). (1820). ‘Blackwood’s Magazine: They do but jest – poison in jest – no offence i’ the world!’ The London Magazine, II (11), November, pp. 509 – 521.
• Anon. (John Scott). (1821). ‘Projected Royal Society of Literature.’ The London Magazine, III (13), January, pp. 72 – 76.
• Anon. (John Scott). (1820). ‘The Mohock Magazine.’ The London Magazine, II (12), December, pp. 666 – 685.
• Anon. (John Scott). (1821). ‘The Mohocks.’ The London Magazine, III (13), January, pp. 76 – 78.
• Anon. (1821). ‘The Lion’s Head.’ The London Magazine, III (15), March, p. 243.
• Anon. (William Maginn). (1821). ‘Hymn to Christopher North, Esq.’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, IX (49), April, pp. 60 – 64.
• Byron, Lord George Gordon. (1837). Don Juan: In Sixteen Cantos With Notes. Halifax: Milner and Sowerby.
• Scott, John. (1821). STATEMENT, &c, London: C. Baldwin.
• Lang, Andrew. (1897). The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart. 2 vols. London: John C. Nimmo.
• Miller, J.H. (1903). A Literary History of Scotland. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
• O’Leary, Patrick. (1983). Regency Editor. Aberdeen: University Press.
• ‘Z’ (J.G. Lockhart). (1817). ‘On the Cockney School of Poetry No. 1.’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, I (1), October, pp. 38 – 41.
• —. (1818). ‘Cockney School of Poetry No. IV.’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, III (17), August, pp. 519 – 524.
• —. (1818). ‘Letter from Z to Mr Leigh Hunt.’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, II (4), January, pp. 414 – 417.

Stephen has published extensively on 19th century literature and history; he is the biographer of the Victorian novelist William Harrison Ainsworth and the author of Shark Alley: The Memoirs of a Penny-a-Liner, a historical novel about the wreck of the troopship Birkenhead. He is currently working on a history of the 19th century underworld for Pen & Sword, and a sequel to Shark Alley.

A summary of Shark Alley follows:

Jack Vincent used to be famous, part of a rising generation of literary authors that included Dickens, Ainsworth and Thackeray. Now he’s a nobody, scratching a living as a freelance journalist writing for a penny a line. Worse, the only job he can get is on a troopship bound for the frontier wars of colonial Africa. Outed as a friend of Dickens at the captain’s table, Jack recounts the events that have brought him to this fallen state. It is a journey that begins in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison and ends in the shark infested waters of the Western Cape and his berth on the HMS Birkenhead, the Victorian Titanic.

If you are interested in connecting with Stephen, click on the appropriate link below:

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