Christian Isobel Johnstone
Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781-1857) was a novelist, journalist, and editor. Her origins are rather more obscure than her contemporaries such as Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Brunton, and Susan Ferrier. She married an Edinburgh printer, Thomas McLeish, in 1797, but separated from him for unknown reasons in 1805 and later obtained a divorce. She married John Johnstone, also a printer, in 1815, the year in which Clan-Albin: A National Tale was published. This novel capitalized on the vogue for Scottish novels inaugurated by Waverley, but it was much more critical of England’s domination of the Celtic peripheries than was Walter Scott’s novel. Johnstone’s subsequent fiction includes Elizabeth de Bruce (1827), The Diversions of Hollycot, or The Art of Thinking (1828), and True Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1836). Her most popular work was The Cook and Housewife’s Manual (1826), which she published under the name of Margaret Dods, a character from Scott’s St. Ronan’s Well (1823).
Johnstone was perhaps more influential as a contributor to and editor of a series of newspapers and periodicals than as a novelist in her own right. In 1817, John and Christian Johnstone founded the Inverness Courier, which they ran until 1824, when they assumed the editorship of the Edinburgh Chronicle. In the wake of the First Reform Bill, the couple founded The Schoolmaster and Edinburgh Weekly Magazine, which made its first appearance in August of 1832, with an aim of facilitating the “cheap and universal diffusion of really useful information of every kind” at the cost of one and a half pence per issue. Disappointed at the limitations of the Reform Bill, the Johnstones sought to educate the readers to whom the vote had not been extended, and the prepare them for enfranchisement in the future.
Issuing The Schoolmaster on a weekly basis while writing most of the copy themselves was overly ambitious, and they quickly transformed it into a monthly magazine, Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine, which, like its predecessor, aimed to convey “useful and humanizing knowledge” through “the diffusion of cheap literature".” By keeping the cost to eightpence per issue, the Johnstones built up a circulation of 5,000 readers, only to find that they were still running at a loss. In 1834, they decided to join forces with their publisher William Tait, to whose periodical, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Christian Johnstone was a frequent contributor. Johnstone’s Edinburgh Magazine was absorbed into Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine and Christian Johnstone was appointed editor, a post she held until 1846. As the editor of Tait’s, Johnstone brough a new literary emphasis to the magazine and cultivated an impressive cast of contributors including Thomas De Quincey, Harriet Martineau, Amelia Opie, and Catherine Gore.
Johnstone did not put her own name on the title pages of her works until the 1840s. The editors of the Wellesley Index attribute her near-invisibility to her desire to maintain the respectability and privacy that her divorce had challenged, but Pam Perkins has found no evidence to support this claim, suggesting instead that Johnstone was employing a strategy similar to Walter Scott’s use of authorial disguises.
Bibliography
Alexis Easley, “Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in the 1830s: Dialogues on Gender, Class, and Reform,” Victorian Periodicals Review 38.3 (2005), pp. 263-79.
Andrew Monnickendam, The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations: Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier, and Christian Johnstone (New York: Palgrave 2013)
Pam Perkins, Women Writers and the Edinburgh Enlightenment (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010)
Juliet Shields, “From Family Roots to the Routes of Empire: National Tales and the Domestication of the Scottish Highlands,” ELH 74.2 (2006), pp. 919-40.