Alexander Jamieson (1782–1850) was a Scottish writer and schoolmaster, now best known as a
rhetorician. He has been described as effectively a professional textbook writer.[1] After the failure of his school, he worked as an
actuary.[2]
Jamieson was active in the period 1814–1846 writing textbooks and running a school. In 1824 it was teaching at Heston House on
Hounslow Heath, where some
Hindustani was on the syllabus. From 1826 to 1838 it was at
Wyke House Academy in
Middlesex, which was advertised as a preparation for the Army, Navy, civil engineers, architects and surveyors.[2][5][6] Among his pupils there was
George Windsor Earl;[7]John Rouse Bloxam also taught there.[8]
Jamieson was declared bankrupt in 1838.[9] He then worked as an actuary. Towards the end of his life he suffered a stroke, then moved to
Bruges in Belgium with his wife Frances (née Thurtle), known as a writer, whom he had married in 1820. She was the author of the relatively successful Ashford Rectory; or, The Spoiled Child Reformed. Containing a short introduction to the sciences of architecture and heraldry....[10] He died in Bruges on 6 July 1850.[2][11]
Works
Jamieson was the author of two highly successful grammars: A Grammar of Rhetoric and Polite Literature (1818, at least 53 American editions) and A Grammar of Logic and Intellectual Philosophy (1819 and at least ten American editions).[3] The former drew on
Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, and the Philosophy of Rhetoric of
George Campbell, of which Jamieson published an abridgement in 1823.[12][13] Jamieson also abridged the Elements of Criticism by
Lord Kames.[1]
All these Scottish authors, along with
Alexander Bain, were widely used in 19th-century American colleges for rhetoric texts;[14] and the Grammar of Jamieson went through 24 editions by 1844.[15] It quoted freely from
Joseph Addison and
Mark Akenside, as well as sources such as Shakespeare and
John Milton,[16] and was a typical text of the
female education of the period.[17] The Grammar of Rhetoric combined Blair, Campbell, and Kames with the Lectures on Belles Lettres and Logic (1806) of
William Barron and the grammar of
Lindley Murray.[1]
^
abGavin Budge et al. (editors), The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers (2002), Thoemmes Press (two volumes), article Jamieson, Alexander (fl. 1818), p. 591.
^3rd e. corrected and enlarged (London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1820). See the bookseller catalogue Women Writers R–Z (London: Jarndyce, 2012).
ISBN9781900718899.