John Wilson Ross

Born in 1818 at Belmont, St. Vincent, John Wilson Ross was the son of John Pemberton Ross and a grandson of the botanist Alexander Anderson. He was educated at King's College London, spent part of his early life in British Guiana, and later returned to England to pursue literary work.

Ross wrote across an unusually wide range of subjects. He edited the second and third series of The Universal Decorator from 1860 to 1863, contributed biographical pieces to Paper and Print, published the poem Ninian in 1839, translated Paul Féval's Les Amours de Paris in 1846, and wrote for magazines and reviews. An 1871 essay in the Edinburgh Review argued that the Odyssey was composed centuries after the Iliad.

His most notable work was Tacitus and Bracciolini: the Annals forged in the Fifteenth Century (1878), a learned and controversial study arguing that Poggio Bracciolini forged Tacitus’s Annals. He also published an anonymous pamphlet on biblical prophecy and was known for taking strikingly independent positions in literary debate. Ross died at his home in Holborn on May 27, 1887.