James Dykes Campbell

James Dykes Campbell (2 November 1838, Port Glasgow – 1 June 1895) was a Scottish merchant and writer, best known for editing and writing the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His biography has been described as "a landmark in the history of the genre in that it defines the standards of scholarship, accuracy, documentation, and impartiality by which every biographer of Coleridge has since been measured."

In 1866, Campbell joined a Mauritius mercantile firm, from where he would travel to Bombay and Australia, but kept up literary study and correspondence. In 1875, he married Mary Sophia Chesney, daughter of General F. R. Chesney. By 1881 he could afford to retire from business and return to England. In London, he befriended Bryan Waller Proctor's widow Anne Proctor, Robert Browning, Alfred Ainger and Arthur Symons. Though Campbell was not given the chance to be editor of Thomas Lovell Beddoes, he made a careful transcription of Beddoes's manuscripts – then in Browning's possession, though subsequently lost – which is now in the Bodleian Library. Leslie Stephen provided an obituary for the Athenaeum, and in 1896 Macmillan republished Campbell's biography of Coleridge introduced by Stephen's memoir. Another friend, W. Hale White, saw a facsimile edition of some Coleridge manuscripts through the press in 1899.

Works (ed.) Alfred Tennyson, Poems MDCCCXXX. MDCCCXXXIII, N.p., 1862 (ed.) Some Portions of Essays Contributed to The Spectator by Mr. Joseph Addison: Now First Printed from His Ms. Notebook, Glasgow: Printed for J. D. Campbell by Bell & Bain, 1864 (ed.) The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with a biographical introduction, London: Macmillan, 1893 Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Narrative of the Events of His Life, London & New York: Macmillan, 1894. Republished, with a memoir of Campbell by Leslie Stephen, London & New York: Macmillan, 1896. (ed.) Coleridge's Poems: A Facsimile Reproduction of Proofs and Mss. of Some of the Poems with Preface and Notes by W. Hale White, London: Constable, 1899 (ed.) Charles Lamb: Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, with Extracts from the Garrick Plays, London: Routledge, 1907