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John Stuart Blackie: Scottish Scholar and Patriot

Online ISBN:
9780748653386
Print ISBN:
9780748611850
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Book

John Stuart Blackie: Scottish Scholar and Patriot

Published online:
22 March 2012
Published in print:
25 May 2006
Online ISBN:
9780748653386
Print ISBN:
9780748611850
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

This book presents a biography of this influential and distinguished Scotsman. John Stuart Blackie was one of the most impressive and influential figures of nineteenth-century Scotland, as well as one of the most striking and flamboyant. As an intellectual, he translated Goethe's ‘Faust’ and brought first-hand knowledge of German philosophy to Scotland as a means of keeping the Enlightenment tradition alive. As first Professor of Humanity at Aberdeen from 1839 to 1852 and then as Professor of Greek at Edinburgh until 1882, he played a, perhaps the, central role in modernising the Scottish university curriculum, removing the dead hand of theological orthodoxy, raising standards (and the entry age), introducing tutorial teaching and establishing new chairs (including the Edinburgh chair of Celtic). His role in the reform of secondary school teaching was equally central. But Blackie was also a great ‘public man’, corresponding with the great and famous throughout Great Britain and Europe, from Goethe and Carlyle to Ruskin and Gladstone, and filling the pages of newspapers and journals with writings on the major issues of the day. For the last thirty years of his life he became closely involved in issues of Scottish nationalism and home rule, and as champion of the crofters is largely responsible for their contemporary survival and unique status.

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