John Colin Dunlop

Born near Glasgow in 1785, he was the son of John Dunlop of Rosebank, who served as Lord Provost of Glasgow. He joined the Faculty of Advocates in 1807, though law seems to have shared his attention with a deeper interest in books, history, and criticism.

He later became sheriff-depute of Renfrewshire, a post he held from 1816 until his death in Edinburgh in 1842. Alongside public service, he built a reputation as a literary historian and scholar, and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1833.

His best-known book is History of Fiction (first published in 1814), an ambitious survey of prose storytelling that helped shape later writing about the novel and romance. He also worked on translations and edited literary material, making him one of those early nineteenth-century writers whose love of reading clearly fed everything he wrote.