1. Genesis

On 29 November 1815, not long after settling in Edinburgh in pursuit of a legal career, the young John Gibson Lockhart wrote to his Oxford friend Jonathan Christie of the city then cried up as the Modern Athens:

Edinburgh's two most prominent literary men were also lawyers: Walter Scott, one of the Principal Clerks of the Court of Session and the poet of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808), and Francis Jeffrey, leading advocate in the courts and editor of the Edinburgh Review. In such an environment Lockhart may well have hoped to fulfil his own literary ambitions as well as to start a legal career, Edinburgh seeming to favour success more than had either Glasgow or Oxford, where earlier phases of his life had been spent.

Although Lockhart was born in the manse of Cambusnethan in Lanarkshire, on 12 June 1794, his clerical father was transferred to the Blackfriars College Kirk of Glasgow in 1796, so that Lockhart himself grew up in the heart of what was rapidly becoming the second city of the British Empire. Dr Lockhart lived in Charlotte Street, then a pleasant road of Georgian houses leading downhill towards the northwest corner of Glasgow Green, a large communal open green space near the River Clyde that acted as a lung for the increasingly industrialised city, used by citizens not only for washing laundry but also as recreational space. Lockhart was educated firstly at the city's Grammar School and then at Glasgow College, until in 1809 he won a Snell Exhibition to study at Balliol College, Oxford.