Christian Isobel Johnstone

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Standard Name: Johnstone, Christian Isobel
Birth Name: Christian Isobel Tod
Used Form: Christian Isobel Todd
Married Name: Christian Isobel McLeish
Married Name: Christian Isobel McLiesh
Married Name: Christian Isobel Johnstone
Pseudonym: The Author of Clan-Albin
Pseudonym: Aunt Jane
Pseudonym: Margaret Dods
CIJ is remarkable both for her pioneering of the Scottish national tale (in the early nineteenth century, neck and neck with Sir Walter Scott ) and for her long-continuing career in journalism, as contributor and editor (the latter role unprecedented for one of her sex). Her non-fiction for adults ranged from cookery to the politics of resistance. She also wrote children's books both fictional and non-fictional.
Title-page of Christian Isobel Johnstone's novel or national tale "Clan-Albin", 1815, vol. 1..

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Catherine Gore
Many of CG 's novels were reprinted in popular series of the day: the Railway Library, the Parlour Library, Bentley's Standard Novels, Baudry's European Library, and A Collection of British Authors...
Anthologization L. E. L.
LEL's poetry was included in Christian Isobel Johnstone 's 1842 Rational Reading Lessons for children, and in 1879 in Louisa Anne Meredith 's Our Island Home, A Tasmanian Sketch Book, alongside other work by...
Anthologization Mary Russell Mitford
Though Our Village was rejected at first by the New Monthly Magazine, MRM went on publishing in that and in the London Magazine (for which she sometimes wrote in dramatic or dialogue form), the...
Friends, Associates Mary Howitt
In Nottingham MH met L. E. L. and perhaps Elizabeth Fry . She was visited by Mary and Dora Wordsworth (wife and daughter of the poet), and later she and her husband stayed with the...
Intertextuality and Influence Elizabeth Isabella Spence
Spence's title-page bears a quotation from James Cririe , a little-known Scots poet whom Burns had praised (and whom she cites several times later in her text). Perhaps for the sake of her original audience...
Literary responses Marion Reid
Christian Johnstone , reviewing Reid's work for Tait's Edinburgh Review, thoroughly approved it. The author, she said, had successfully settled the great boundary question of woman's sphere. The sphere, in its most circumscribed...
Literary responses L. E. L.
Reviews were positive. In the fifteen-page review in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, provided by Christian Isobel Johnstone , the writer confessed to being enthralled by the fascinating work and labelled the novel a pure specimen...
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
The Illustrations catapulted HM into fame: she was lionized by London society. She received flattering responses from Coleridge and from her precursor as a political economist, Jane Marcet .
Chapman, Maria Weston, and Harriet Martineau. “Memorials of Harriet Martineau”. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, James R. Osgood, 1877, pp. 2: 131 - 596.
212, 214
Christian Isobel Johnstone in...
Literary responses Harriet Martineau
The overall reception of this novel was better than that of Deerbrook, although the nobility of the hero was felt to be exaggerated.
Roberts, Caroline. The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian Ideologies. University of Toronto Press, 2002.
76-7
The Athenæum was downright hostile to the book's subject: Do...
Literary Setting Jane Harvey
Again her title-page quotes Shakespeare . The novel opens with a musical party in the housekeeper's room at Cassilwood House in Northumberland on the fifth of November at the time of the second Jacobite Rebellion...
Occupation Isa Craig
The Scotsman, founded in 1817, was already a well-established newspaper. IC worked under the editorship of Alexander Russel , who held this position from 1845 to 1876, and who had got his start in...
Publishing Amelia Opie
AO contributed the first part of Recollections of Days in Belgium to Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, of which Christian Isobel Johnstone was editor.
Mudge, Bradford Keyes, editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 116. Gale Research, 1992.
229
Opie, Amelia. “Introduction”. Adeline Mowbray, edited by Shelley King and John B. Pierce, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. i - xxix.
xxxix
Reception Anna Brownell Jameson
Reviewers noted the fact that it was a woman who had set out on this bold journey. Christian Isobel Johnstone 's review in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine was fairly typical in suggesting that that Winter Studies...
Reception L. E. L.
The merits of annuals in general were debated, and with some their contents became a byword for poor literary quality. Thus although Christian Isobel Johnstone considered LEL's Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book for 1836 to...
Textual Features Adelaide O'Keeffe
AOK 's unusual historical novel, which appeared several years before anything comparable by Sydney Morgan , Christian Isobel Johnstone , or Sir Walter Scott , seems to carry within itself the seeds of the national...

Timeline

9 June 1819: The library of the late Queen Charlotte was...

Building item

9 June 1819

The library of the late Queen Charlotte was auctioned by Christie's ; it included Jane Austen 's works, plus titles by Catherine Cuthbertson , Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire , Christian Isobel Johnstone , Alethea Lewis

31 March 1832: William Tait published the first issue of...

Writing climate item

31 March 1832

William Tait published the first issue of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine.
Houghton, Walter E., and Jean Harris Slingerland, editors. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900. University of Toronto Press, 1966–1989, 5 vols.
4: 475-6
Houghton, Walter E., and Jean Harris Slingerland, editors. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900. University of Toronto Press, 1966–1989, 5 vols.
4: 475-7

December 1855: The last regular issue of Tait's Edinburgh...

Writing climate item

December 1855

The last regular issue of Tait's Edinburgh Magazine was published.
Houghton, Walter E., and Jean Harris Slingerland, editors. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900. University of Toronto Press, 1966–1989, 5 vols.
4: 482-3, 586

Texts

Johnstone, Christian Isobel. Clan-Albin. Second, Macredie, Skelly, and Muckersy, 1815, 4 vols.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. Diversions of Hollycot. Oliver and Boyd, 1828.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. Elizabeth de Bruce. Blackwood, 1827, 3 vols.
Johnstone, John, 1779 - 1857, and Christian Isobel Johnstone. Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine. J. Johnstone and Mrs. Johnstone.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. Lives and Voyages of Drake, Cavendish, and Dampier. Oliver and Boyd, 1831.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. “Miss Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy”. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol.
1
, pp. 612-18.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. Nights of the Round Table. J. Johnstone, 1832.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. Rational Reading Lessons. 1842.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. Scenes of Industry Displayed in the Bee-Hive and the Ant-Hill. J. Harris, 1827.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel, editor. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine. W. Tait, 32 vols.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. The Cook and Housewife’s Manual. Oliver and Boyd, 1826.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. The Edinburgh Tales. W. Tait, 1846, 3 vols.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. The Public Buildings of Westminster Described. J. Harris.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. The Saxon and the Gael. T. Tegg, 1814, 4 vols.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. The Wars of the Jews. Harris and Son, 1823.
Johnstone, Christian Isobel. True Tales of the Irish Peasantry as Related by Themselves. P. Brown, 1836.