Colin Mackenzie (Scottish writer)


Colin Mackenzie was a nineteenth century literary contributor/hack writer, editor, translator and compiler. Between 1849 and 1851 he was the secretary of Charles Cochrane's 'National Philanthropic Association.' Mackenzie spent his adult life living and working in London, England. His interests were wide ranging and his publications reflected this. They were primarily works of non-fiction, including educational and informative works on chemistry, cookery, medicine, popular science, geography, history, economics and religion, but he also wrote about the 'gentlemen's clubs' of London, a 'parliamentary pocketbook' with a strong reformist leaning in 1832 and, towards the end of his career, a report on the chronic poverty and famine that scarred Britain and engulfed Ireland in the late 1840s.

Biography

Mackenzie was born in Edinburgh on the 8th May 1795. Between 1810 and 1814 he studied for a Master of Arts degree at Kings College, Aberdeen University. In 1814 he travelled down from Scotland to London, enrolling at Guy's and St Thomas's Hospitals in October of that year to train as a surgeon. Mackenzie never completed his studies, but spent the rest of his life in London, writing, editing, translating and contributing to numerous books, journals and pamphlets. A baptismal record from Westminster St James for Mackenzie's eldest son Alfred shows that Mackenzie had married his first wife, Ann, by 1818. Ann died at some point in the 1830s and Mackenzie married again in 1846. A ‘Royal Literary Fund’ file on Colin Mackenzie contains a relatively large amount of primary information about Mackenzie’s life. The Royal Literary Fund was a charitable organization dedicated to writers in urgent need of financial assistance, which had Dickens and Thackeray as committee members at various points in its existence. Mackenzie applied for, and received financial help from the RLF on five occasions between 1838 and 1853. Mackenzie died in 1854.

1821-1823:''One Thousand Experiments in Chemistry'' and ''Five Thousand Receipts''

Mackenzie's two earliest works, One Thousand Experiments in Chemistry and Five Thousand Receipts in all the Useful and Domestic Arts were by far and away his greatest successes. The accuracy of the information in One Thousand Experiments in Chemistry and the practicality and safety of the experiments were called into question in some book reviews in the journals of the time but One Thousand Experiments in Chemistry proved to be a popular success all the same and was republished 22 times in the 1820s in Britain, Europe and America. Five Thousand Receipts was an even greater success. A household economy compendium, filled with recipes for all kinds of concoctions, whether culinary, medicinal or for practical household needs, Five Thousand Receipts went through at least 26 editions between 1823 and 1864 and was particularly successful in America. Mackenzie, though, made no financial gain whatsoever from his American successes due to the complete absence of copyright protection for publications by British authors in nineteenth century America and this contributed to the hardship that he and his family were to endure in the following decade.

Subsequent Works, 1824-1838

Other publications followed on a diverse range of topics, but none were as successful as the earliest works. Mackenzie's RLF applications indicate that he was the author of The Clubs of London, a work that has been commonly ascribed to Charles Marsh. They include an 1848 letter from prominent publisher of the time Richard Bentley suggesting that Mackenzie consider writing an updated version of the book, a suggestion Mackenzie rejected because of the financial terms of the proposed arrangement.
1832 saw the publication of Mackenzie's A Key to Both Houses, although again he was not credited with the authorship on the title page. There can be no doubt that Mackenzie was the author though. In early 1834 Mackenzie went to court in London to claim the considerable sum of £457 that he insisted he was owed for the book from bankrupt publisher James Cochrane. Whilst Mackenzie's authorship of A Key to Both Houses was not disputed in the case, the £457 remuneration he claimed for was and in the end Mackenzie was forced to settle for £100. The outcome was disastrous for Mackenzie and his family. Mackenzie spent two spells in Whitecross Street Debtors Prison in central London between 1834 and 1838. Around this time, the precise date is uncertain, Mackenzie's first wife, and mother of their five children, died.
A Key to Both Houses is ostensibly an encyclopedic overview of the British Houses of Parliament, past and present, written on the eve of the 1832 Reform Act. However the real interest lies in its lengthy footnotes in which Mackenzie is highly critical of the British parliamentary establishment and strongly supportive of reform and the 'people,' whether they be the 'London mechanics,' the disenfranchised masses of the 'great towns,' the 'poor Irish' living under 'curfew' or those British and Irish forced off the land by the 'enclosure' of the 'commons.' Mackenzie is supportive of a proto-Chartist agenda of 'Universal Suffrage, Vote by Ballot and Annual Parliaments.' A Key to Both Houses did make a significant impression on Chartist leader James Bronterre O'Brien, who quoted from it at length and with enthusiastic approval in a letter to the editors of The Northern Star in 1838.
Mackenzie also contributed to the English edition of Mikhail Zagoskin's The Young Muscovite. Although Frederic Chamier is credited with being the editor of this three volume work, scholars have noted that the British Library copy of the work has 'written by Colin Mackenzie, Esq' inscribed on the title page in pencil and in his RLF applications Mackenzie claims that he edited it in 'conjunction' with Chamier.

National Philanthropic Association and Later Works, 1839-1853

The decade after the 1838 publication of The British Museum was a relatively barren one for Mackenzie in terms of published works. In 1846 Mackenzie remarried but the marriage appears to have broken down in acrimony and in 1849 Mackenzie succeeded in presenting a petition to the House of Commons, asking for the short term reintroduction of the 'whipping post' and 'ducking stool' for ‘undutiful and runaway wives’ whilst a parliamentary inquiry looked into 'the baleful influence of...marriage settlements.' The petition failed
In an RLF application of 1849 Mackenzie wrote that he was working on a pamphlet 'for the resuscitation of our West India Colonies, and the real abolition of the Slave Trade'; in 1852 the pamphlet The Case of the Free-Labour British Colonies was published.
Also in 1849 Mackenzie became secretary of Charles Cochrane's National Philanthropic Association. The National Philanthropic Association commissioned Mackenzie to write A Plea for the Very Poor, on the plight of the 'very poor' in the aftermath of the ‘hungry forties’ in London, but also including reports of the Highland Potato Famine and of an Gorta Mór, the contemporaneous Great Famine in Ireland.
In 1850 Mackenzie was a leading figure in a campaign that took place in national newspapers and public meetings for the memorial to the recently deceased philanthropist, royal and uncle to Queen Victoria, Prince Aldolphus, Duke of Cambridge to be a series of soup kitchens around London for the destitute The plan was a controversial one and was met with disdain in the columns of The Times newspaper, and eventually failed.
In 1851 Henry Mayhew described Colin Mackenzie as ‘enlightened and kindly’ in London Labour and the London Poor. That same year Mackenzie was back in the London courts again. This time he was being sued by his sister for monies for the maintenance of his daughter, whom he had sent up to Inverness in 1848 because ‘he thought London to be a bad place for young girls.’
In 1853, a year before his death, while Mackenzie was living at 69 Dean Street, Soho, across the road from the home of Karl Marx, he wrote a letter concerning his plan to develop ‘a Banking and Financial System which...will shortly become acceptable and convenient to every Trading individual in this and other Countries.’ There is no record of Mackenzie and Marx ever having met, and the project to create a new ‘Financial System’ was never published.

Publications