ABSTRACT
John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854), the son of a Presbyterian minister in Glasgow, met Godwin for the first time in 1809. After leaving Oxford, Lockhart studied law in Edinburgh and became an advocate in 1816. He preferred literary society, however, and from April 1817 onwards became a regular contributor to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, whose Tory politics he shared. From 1829 onwards he supervised the publisher John Murray’s Family Library, a series of biographies, histories, and travel narratives. Lockhart’s personal contact with Godwin was renewed when the latter asked him to consider his proposal for a volume in the Family Library series. Though Lockhart encouraged Godwin’s project, he did not accept the resulting book, the Lives of the Necromancers, for publication because of Murray’s disapproval. Lockhart and Godwin continued to meet occasionally at London literary gatherings during the last few years of Godwin’s life, but never became intimate.
