ABSTRACT
John Younger began life in Longnewton, a village on the Scottish Borders, during a time of deep local recession. This ‘slip of an urchin’ found his course of education repeatedly stalled by ‘ague, small-pox, measles’ and other ailments, until poverty forced a complete halt. Realizing that his mind was probably ‘the only wealth or property’ he would ever possess, Younger initiated a sedulous course of self-education that would earn him the sobriquet of ‘Tweedside Gnostic’. His intellectual confidence became such that he claimed the ability, in one instance, to ‘appreciate at a glance the extent of [John Locke’s] research in the philosophy of the mind, detecting the weaker fancies of the theorist in the bosom of the philosopher’ (The Autobiography of John Younger, Shoemaker, p. 177). His obituary in the Caledonian Mercury declares that ‘Nature made him a poet, a philosopher, and a nobleman; society made him a cobbler of shoes’.
