author
Robert Carruthers
1799–1878
A Scottish journalist and literary editor, he spent decades shaping the Inverness Courier while also producing biographies, criticism, and reference works for a wide Victorian readership. His books move easily between local history and big literary subjects, showing the range of a writer deeply at home in the world of print.
1 Audiobook
Life of Sir Walter Scott, with Abbotsford Notanda
by Robert Chambers, Robert Carruthers
About the author
Born in Dumfriesshire on November 5, 1799, he began with limited formal schooling and was apprenticed to a bookseller in Dumfries. That early closeness to books helped lead him into teaching and writing, and while in Huntingdon he published History of Huntingdon in 1824.
In 1828 he became editor of the Inverness Courier, a position he held for many years and through which he became an important literary figure in northern Scotland. Alongside journalism, he wrote and edited widely, including a memoir and edition of Alexander Pope's works, and he helped edit the first edition of Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature.
He was known as a versatile man of letters rather than a novelist of a single famous title: a critic, biographer, editor, and historian whose work connected newspapers, reference books, and classic literature. He died on May 26, 1878.