author
A. W. Wiston-Glynn
Best known for a vivid early-20th-century life of the financier John Law, this little-documented writer brought a scholar’s eye and a storyteller’s sense of drama to economic history.
1 Audiobook
About the author
A. W. Wiston-Glynn is a notably elusive author in the historical record, but available catalog and digitized-book sources confirm that he wrote John Law of Lauriston, first published in Edinburgh by E. Saunders & Co. in 1907. The title page identifies him as holding an M.A. from Edinburgh, suggesting an academic background tied to the city.
His best-known work focuses on John Law, the Scottish financier linked with the Bank of France and the Mississippi Scheme. In its preface, Wiston-Glynn presents Law as one of the great dramatic figures of early 18th-century Europe, which gives a good sense of his style: serious, historically minded, and clearly drawn to large personalities and turning points in financial history.
Some bookseller records also attribute an Edinburgh volume to him, but beyond these works, firm biographical details are hard to verify. That uncertainty makes Wiston-Glynn interesting in his own right: a learned, somewhat shadowy author whose surviving work still offers a lively window into how Edwardian writers approached history and biography.