Full Name John Watson Role Author | Name Ian Maclaren Nationality Scots | |
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Born 3 November 1850 ( 1850-11-03 ) Manningtree, Essex Died May 6, 1907, Mount Pleasant, Iowa, United States Books Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, A Doctor Of The Old School, Young barbarians, The Days of Auld Lang Syne, Church Folks Similar People Theodore L Cuyler, Henry Drummond, William Boyd Carpenter, J M Barrie, Walter Scott | ||
Education University of Edinburgh | ||
Ian Maclaren
Rev. John Watson (3 November 1850 – 6 May 1907), known by his pen name Ian Maclaren, was a Scottish author and theologian.
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Biography
He was the son of John Watson, a civil servant. He was born in Manningtree, Essex, and educated at Stirling and at Edinburgh University, later studying theology at New College, Edinburgh, and at Tübingen.
In 1874 he became a minister of the Free Church of Scotland and became assistant minister of Edinburgh Barclay Church. Subsequently, he was minister at Logiealmond in Perthshire and at Glasgow, and in 1880 he became minister of Sefton Park Presbyterian Church, Liverpool, from which he retired in 1905.
In 1896 he was Lyman Beecher lecturer at Yale University, and in 1900 he was moderator of the synod of the English Presbyterian Church. While travelling in the United States he died from blood poisoning, following a bout with tonsilitis, at Mount Pleasant, Iowa. His body was returned to England, and buried in Smithdown Cemetery in Liverpool.
Maclaren's first stories of rural Scottish life, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894), achieved extraordinary popularity, selling more than 700 thousand copies, and were succeeded by other successful books, The Days of Auld Lang Syne (1895), Kate Carnegie and those Ministers (1896), and Afterwards and other Stories (1898). By his own name Watson published several volumes of sermons, among them being The Upper Room (1895), The Mind of the Master (1896) and The Potter's Wheel (1897). Today he is regarded as one of the principal writers of the Kailyard school.
It is thought that Maclaren was the original source of the quotation “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle,” now widely misattributed to Plato or Philo of Alexandria. The oldest known instance of this quotation is in the 1897 Christmas edition of The British Weekly, penned by Maclaren: “Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.”