Category: People
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Robert Burns and The Puddin’ Race
In his brilliant poem To a Haggis, Scots poet Robert Burns introduces us to the family of puddins, of which the haggis is the greatest, the Chieftain. With confidence it rules over all others, including painch, tripe and thairm – all parts of the digestive tract of cattle, sheep and…
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Recognise Any of These Eighteenth Century Wigs?
I’m a bald man, have been since I saw a reflection of myself, aged 28, in a shop window in High Wycombe and had a barber shave it all off the next day. I’m fine with it (ughhh!), but it would be nice to have a Barnet*. If I was…
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Coming Soon: Prime Ministers on the Pan!
Today, Genius Fan kicks off the PMs on the Pan series, looking at those politicians who led the government of Eighteenth century Britain: the Prime Ministers. See them, one by one, sitting on the toilet every Monday starting 5 January, 2026. But why put them on the pan (for ‘pan’…
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Who’s On Your Fantasy Xmas Dinner Guest List?
As much as I love my parents-in-law (ahem, of course I do) if I had the chance to select ANY guests for my Christmas dinner, you know a ‘fantasy Christmas dinner’, they wouldn’t be on the list. Let me tell you who I would invite. And of course, they’re all…
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Genius Fan’s Four Big Anniversaries for 2026
The coming year, 2026, is a big year to celebrate things that happened in 1776. That is, it’s a big year for 250th anniversaries, and I’m going to highlight four big ones. If you read history then it’s likely you’ll know these – they’re the ones everyone talks about. Here…
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Jane Austen, Eighteenth Century Author
Today, 16 December, is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen. An excellent take away of this blog post is that you should make it a resolution for 2026 to read her novel, Pride and Prejudice. It’s her most famous (you know, Mr Darcy and all that) and…
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Eighteenth Century Faces Sketched by Genius Fan
Sketching faces to illustrate Genius Fan stories is a core part of the fun in this project for me. It can take a long time to get a likeness, and sometimes I have to go ahead and publish when I know the sketch isn’t quite right and could be improved.…
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William Smellie’s Legacy – Beyond his Bookcase
Some months ago I discovered there was a collection of books from the Eighteenth century tucked away in the library at Lanark. I made arrangements to view it and spent two hours handling and leafing through books that had been collected more than 270 years ago. This is the library…
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Highlights from Smellie’s Book Catalogue
There I am, staring directly at an Eighteenth century book collection, arms length from titles someone in 1750 would consider a ‘must have’ in their home. This is William Smellie’s library, all 300+ volumes, half of which are reference works for a teaching physician and the other half…for leisure? Two…
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Dr Smellie’s Treatise and Anatomical Tables
When one first sees William Smellie’s personal library, an Eighteenth century collection of 300+ volumes, stacked nicely into 24 shelves…it’s a little overwhelming. It’s a lot of books. Yes, but it’s dwarfed by Sir Walter Scott’s personal library at Abbotsford House, near Melrose, for example. That’s huge and almost unreal,…
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William Smellie’s Early Career & Book Collection
Keys in hand, librarian Elena Focardi makes her way to the locked door protecting the precious and valuable books at Lanark Library. I’ve come to see a book collection that’s 275 years old – owned by the town’s famous Eighteenth century son, William Smellie. He bequeathed his book collection, after…
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Book Collection Explorer: William Smellie
The book collection of Eighteenth century doctor William Smellie lies behind a locked door one might mistake for a janitor’s closet. You walk up the stairs, across the lobby, through one room, through another room, to an inauspicious, but secure entrance, beyond which is a temperature and humidity-controlled room, conditions…
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Boswell’s London Journal: Friends, Women & Johnson
Quote: “The London Journal 1762-1763…is a unique publishing event: the appearance for the first time of a major work by one of the most famous English* authors more than a century and a half after his death.” (p.xiii, Publishers’ Note, London Journal 1762-1763, Ed. FA Pottle, 1950) * Note: Boswell…
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Happy 75th Birthday to Boswell’s London Journal
Happy Birthday to James Boswell’s “London Journal, 1762-63” – it’s 75 years old next month. Hurrah!! QUOTE: “The Eighteenth century in this one volume of the journal is expressed more patently than in nearly all the other contemporary letter-writers and fiction-makers of the period put together. And the artistry! Make…
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Revealing the Boswell-Johnson Pilgrims
The earliest account I’ve found of someone following in the footsteps of Boswell and Johnson’s great tour of Scotland in 1773 was that of the great Johnson scholar, George Birkbeck Hill (1835-1903). It’s called Footsteps of Dr Johnson (Scotland), it was published in 1890 and it’s a great big book…
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Lost Correspondence is a ‘Mountain of Rubies’
Nothing’s hidden or lost anymore. Back in 1975 though, before broadband, smartphones and the World Wide Web put everything at our fingertips, one could still believe there were exciting discoveries yet to be made. That was the case among literary scholars who speculated about the existence of letters exchanged between…
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Samuel Pepys Makes it to the Eighteenth Century
If you’ve newly discovered this little site then you may not know that I’m an Eighteenth century nut. I believe it’s the greatest century. Better than the Twentieth, better than the Sixteenth, better than the Ninth. It’s very satisfying to me to discover that a high profile person or event…
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Ladies and Gentlemen, Behold! Fanny Burney
Novelist Fanny Burney shared a friendship with one of the Eighteenth century’s greatest writers, Samuel Johnson, and when she died in 1840, at the age of 87, the mighty Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote of his surprise that someone who mixed in the illustrious Johnson circle, so many years ago, had…
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Track Down Out-of-the-Way Memorials
I talk a lot about books in this Genius Fan blog, and my little library of nearly 200 volumes. But I also spend a lot of time online, fleshing out topics that I come across in books. Or elsewhere. Like the Eighteenth century military mapmaker Major-General William Roy, whose name…
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A Most Creative Way to Commemorate Boswell
Of all the ways Boswell has been commemorated – statue (though not in his native Scotland or his beloved London), bust, engraving, signs, plaques etc – the one on the land reclaimed from the Twentieth century’s disused Barony Colliery has to be the most creative. The mine, just a mile…
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Crane Required to Lift Birkbeck Hill’s Book
A big book is annoying when it doesn’t fit onto the bookcase, especially if it’s a volume one is particularly proud or fond of. This is the case with George Birkbeck Hill’s Footsteps of Dr. Johnson (Scotland). I have a copy. I had to adjust the height of one of…
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Staring at James Boswell’s Tankard
I’m always looking for new ways to get that intimate sense of history, rather than just reading an account of something in a book. Well, if you go to Dr Johnson’s House museum in Gough Square, London, you’ll see in a locked display cabinet (I’m guessing it’s all locked up)…
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I’ve Got the Eighteenth Century Disease
I’ve got the Eighteenth century disease. It’s not smallpox, TB or gonnorhea. It’s the one when your brain is on alert for four digit numbers beginning with 17. I was at the supermarket recently and the assistant said, “That’ll be seventeen forty five, please.” I almost didn’t hear her. My…
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On the Hunt With a Boswell Guidebook
I’m aware that when I travel around Scotland I’m often crossing the path of my literary hero, James Boswell. The most recent example was while I was travelling north up the east coast of Scotland…something Boswell and Samuel Johnson did, but in a carriage, in 1773. I made a short…
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Choosing a biography of Flora Macdonald
Take a guess: How many biographies are there of Flora Macdonald? (My guess is at the bottom of this post.) She sealed her fame as one of Britain’s most romantic heroines when she chose to help Bonnie Prince Charlie evade capture by government soldiers in June 1746. He was on…
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Scottish Enlightenment? Herman: Yes! Porter: …no
Popular history authors Roy Porter and Arthur Herman have opposing views on whether or not there was a Scottish Enlightenment. American Arthur Herman says there was, and to back it up wrote a book called The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World. British Roy Porter says there…
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An Airplane View onto Explorers of 1773
On Wednesday 18 August 1773 a little boat sailed across the Firth of Forth from Leith to Kinghorn, carrying passengers James Boswell, the Scottish lawyer and writer, his servant Joseph Ritter, the hugely famous Samuel ‘Dictionary’ Johnson, and Scots advocate William Nairne. On Thursday 17 July 2025, I departed Edinburgh…
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Close to Boswell and Johnson’s Hotel Room
Day 4 (Tuesday 22 July) Kudos to Montrose! You helpfully added an information plaque just inside a passageway indicating a James Boswell and Samuel Johnson hotspot. Here we have the location of the accommodation used by James Boswell and Samuel Johnson on their tour of Scotland in 1773. In his…
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Searching for The Professors’ Monument
Day 3 (Monday 21 July) It’s difficult to find the Professors’ Monument among all the tombs, mausoleums, stelae, headstones and statues of Glasgow Necropolis. The monument contains the remains of Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710-1796) – founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense. He was originally buried at the…
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Hamilton Old Parish Church. 18th Century
The Eighteenth century is all around us. All history is, of course, and usually the further back in time you go the harder you have to look for evidence of any particular period. So, what Eighteenth century things, books, people etc could I see over the course of a week’s…
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Sketching an 18th Century Man’s Leg
Drawing a gentleman’s leg is one of the many challenges to illustrating scenes from the Eighteenth century. And it’s something to get right – a ‘good leg’ was something for men to show off. The Third Earl of Bute (1713-1792), British Prime Minister from 1762-63, was known for having legs…
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Le Voyage de Boswell et Johnson aux Hébrides
I have a French language version of the combined accounts of Boswell and Johnson’s 1773 tour of Scotland, it’s called Voyage dans les Hébrides. My French isn’t good enough to fluently read this book (yet), but I’ve read the Boswell and Johnson accounts in English so I know the story…
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Boswell’s Complaint, Portnoy’s Complaint
In 1969, American writer Philip Roth published his fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s a tough read for a man who’s almost sixty (that’s me), but for a young man of nineteen (that was me back in 1984) – it was…awesome. It’s a psychiatrist’s chair-account of Alexander Portnoy’s struggle as a…
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Artillery Salvos, Then Some Johnson Studies
When you read books about the Eighteenth century, the lives of their authors are often equally fascinating. Usually the interest comes from their time spent during one of the world wars. Robert William Chapman (1881-1960) is one such scholar-author – of literary history. If you read about James Boswell and…
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Laurence Sterne’s Mind Boggling Achievement
There are so many clever ways to start a blog post about Laurence Sterne. Here’s the Genius Fan method: “Never heard of Laurence Sterne? Stop what you’re doing RIGHT NOW, run – sprint if your knees will bear it – to the nearest book shop and buy a copy of…
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Rev Joseph Spence, a Bit Boswell-like
When you’re a James Boswell nut, like I am, you’re always looking for references to him in any book that covers his period – the second half of the Eighteenth century. I’ve got a copy of Arthur H Cash’s Laurence Sterne: The Later Years…wait now, turn to the index…yep, there…
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He found Boswell’s ‘lost’ London Journal 1762-63
This is the story of how Claude Colleer Abbott discovered James Boswell’s ‘lost’ London Journal. The year was 1930. Essex-born Abbot was lecturing in English language and literature at the University of Aberdeen, and looking for a new research subject. Following up on the university Librarian’s suggestion to consider Dr…
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The Mighty Hume! Great Bloke. Decent Tomb.
No-one knows who David Hume is these days. He’s only the greatest philosopher ever to have written in English, that’s who. His mausoleum can be found in the Old Calton Cemetery, Edinburgh, and I went there recently to see his burial place; a man who I think was absolutely AMAZING.…
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Boswell met EVERYONE, but not Robert Burns
Have you read any of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels? They’re about the grown-up bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays who rogers his way through the political flashpoints of the Victorian age. Bedroom antics aside, the cowardly Harry Flashman rubbed shoulders with famous men and women of his age…not unlike my…
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The Edinburgh Tomb of Economist Adam Smith
Go to Edinburgh. Go to the Canongate. Make your way downhill. Look out for the Canongate Kirk on your left. Enter the Kirk gates – they should be open during the day. Turn left inside the gates. Follow the path. Keep walking round to the left. You will see a…
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You Lookin’ At Me? Portraits On My Wall
When office workers were sent home for the Covid lockdown of April 2020 we quickly adapted to video meetings using Teams, Zoom and Skype. We saw inside colleagues’ homes – what was behind them (the decor, wall art, bookcases etc), but we never saw what was in front of them.…
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Library Fantasists! Visit Sir Walter Scott’s Home
The world’s largest personal library – still intact – consists of more than 9,000 volumes and fills two rooms in Abbotsford House, near Melrose, Scotland. That’s the former home of the amazing best-selling Victorian author of the Waverley novels, Sir Walter Scott. It’s delightful to approach the building, with its…
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The Amazing Benjamin Franklin
If someone was to ask me the best way to ‘get into’ the Eighteenth century, I would say: Learn about Benjamin Franklin. His life story is amazing and I shall now use the twelve commonest synonyms for the word ‘amazing’ to demonstrate. Observe… Franklin (1706-1790), an American born in Boston,…
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Family and Friends Boswell Left Behind
It’s easy to lose sight of the family picture when you dig into the mountains of words, essays and books written about James Boswell. If you want to add another dimension as you read about his life, then take a moment to think about the others in his family and…
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Starting my James Boswell Collecting Habit
In summer 2021 I bought a set of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell. That was how my hobby of studying the Eighteenth century and book collecting kicked off. We didn’t have a bookcase back then, and the 14 volumes I collected sat stacked up on…
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Eighteenth Century as Seen by its Inhabitants
Our imaginations are rendering machines of infinite capacity. We can conjure anything we want in our mind’s eye and, for the moment anyway, only we can tap into them. But don’t rely just on the text in your favourite book to fuel your Eighteenth century day dreams, get creative and…
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Goldsmith, Madeira and the Rent
One morning in 1762, the soon-to-be-famous Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, was woken by an urgent rapping at the door of his London lodgings. “Knock, knock!” Upon opening up, there was his landlady, threatening to bring the bailiffs unless he settle his many weeks of unpaid rent. Goldsmith was not good…
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Samuel Johnson’s Tour of Scotland – Anniversary
It’s 250 years ago this year that the Eighteenth century’s literary celebrity Samuel Johnson published his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, an account of a three-month tour he made there in 1773 with his great friend James Boswell. It was actually published on 18 January 1775, and that…
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