author
James Simson
b. 1826
Best known for writing about Scottish Gypsies, John Bunyan, and the naturalist Charles Waterton, this 19th-century Scottish author also left a vivid memoir of growing up beside Inverkeithing’s old quarantine station. His work moves between folklore, biography, and personal memory in a way that still feels distinctive.
2 Audiobooks
John Bunyan and the Gipsies
by James Simson
Was John Bunyan a Gipsy?
by James Simson
About the author
Born on January 4, 1826, in Inverkeithing, Fife, James Simson was a Scottish author and the son of Walter Simpson. He spent much of his childhood at the Inverkeithing Lazaretto, a quarantine station whose unusual setting later became the basis for one of his best-known books.
Simson wrote across several subjects, but he is especially associated with books about Scottish Gypsies. He edited and published his father’s History of the Gipsies, with specimens of the Gypsy language in 1866, and later wrote works including The Scottish Churches and the Gypsies, The Gypsies, and The Social Emancipation of the Gypsies. He also wrote on John Bunyan, including The English Universities and John Bunyan and the Encyclopædia Britannica and the gipsies and Was John Bunyan a Gypsy?, and published a biography of Charles Waterton in 1880.
Another notable work is Reminiscences of Childhood at Inverkeithing; or, Life at a Lazaretto (1882), valued for its firsthand picture of an unusual childhood in Scotland. Taken together, his books suggest a writer drawn to overlooked lives, curious histories, and subjects that sat a little outside the literary mainstream of his time.