John Henry Nicholson

John Henry Nicholson was born into a distinguished family of literary and scientific note, at Lyme Regis, Dorset, England on 12 June 1838.

Nicholson's father was a distinguished biblical scholar and orientalist, who had studied at Oxford and in Germany, and in 1836 had published a grammar of the Hebrew language of the Old Testament.

Nicholson said of himself that he had inherited his taste for linguistic studies from his father, his love for art and propensity to mysticism from his uncle, and he shared with his brother his proclivities for chemistry and botany and other real sciences and literary inclinations with the whole family.

[1] Nicholson was educated privately and also attended the Croft House Academy for boys, Brampton, Cumberland, where he developed an abiding love of German under the tutelage of the distinguished writer, Eugen Oswald.

[7] So far back as 1856, however, he had begun to brood over the idea of writing an allegorical history of a man's life on the earth, and in 1873 whilst at Springsure, he wrote the early chapters of The Adventures of Halek, the work for which Nicholson is most well known.

[4][6] Others, like the reviewer in The Bulletin, were not so kind, writing that Halek had "one crowning fault - it is insufferably tedious",[13] a sentiment shared by A.G. Stephens who pronounced the book "carefully written, but dull".

[14] Largely autobiographical,[15] the work is essentially an allegory which communicates the idea of man's development from sinful worldliness to ideal goodness.

[16] Nicholson resigned from the Education Department in April 1885 but rejoined some years later and was head teacher of the state school at Cambooya from September 1893 to the end of 1894 when he finally gave up teaching.

Nicholson, along with friends George Essex Evans and James Brunton Stephens, was the recipient of a Commonwealth Literary Fund pension from 1908.