John Mackenzie

John Mackenzie (1806–1848) was a 19th-century Scottish literary scholar of the Scottish Gaelic language and its literature.

Life

He was born on 17 July 1806 in the parish of Gairloch, Ross-shire, and was the son of Alexander Mackenzie who rented some land on the north side of Loch Ewe. Despite being descended from the Scottish nobility, the family had come down in the world. He left the parish school of Gairloch at an early age, and was apprenticed to an itinerant carpenter and joiner. An accident at work compelled him to return to Gairloch.

In 1833 Mackenzie went to Glasgow, pursuing publishing projects. In 1836 he was appointed a book-keeper in the Glasgow University printing-office. He then worked for the Edinburgh publisher Maclachlan & Stewart.

Mackenzie's original poetry is minor. His other work was mainly for Maclachlan & Stewart, where he translated from English or edited about 30 different Gaelic works, including:

religious works by Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, William Dyer and William Guthrie; English-Gaelic section of Neil MacAlpine's Gaelic Dictionary; an edition of Duncan Ban MacIntyre's poems; and in 1844, a Gaelic history of the Young Pretender, and a collection of Gaelic Jacobite songs.