John Pinkerton

John Pinkerton (17 February 1758 – 10 March 1826[1]) was a Scottish antiquarian, cartographer, author, numismatist, historian, and early advocate of Germanic racial supremacy theory.

In 1781, Pinkerton moved to London, where his full career as a writer began in earnest, publishing in the same year a volume of Rimes of no great merit, and Scottish Tragic Ballads.

Joseph Ritson pointed out in 1784 that the so-called ancient ballads were some of them of modern date, and Pinkerton admitted that he was the author of the second part of Hardy Kanute and part-author of some others.

He published an Essay on Medals in 1784, and in 1785, under the pseudonym of "Robert Heron", his bold but eccentric Letters of Literature depreciating the classical authors of Greece and Rome.

It was succeeded in 1787 by a compilation, under the new pseudonym of "H. Bennet" entitled The Treasury of Wit, and by his first important historical work, the Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths, to which Gibbon acknowledged himself indebted.

A new biographical collection, the Gallery of Eminent Persons of Scotland (1799), was succeeded after a short interval by a Modern Geography digested on a New Plan (1802; enlarged 1807).

Pinkerton next collected and printed in 1789 certain Vitae sanctorum scotiae, and, a little later, published his Enquiry into the History of Scotland preceding the Reign of Malcolm III.

His assertion that the Celts were incapable of assimilating the highest forms of civilisation excited "violent disgust", but the Enquiry was twice reprinted, in 1794 and 1814, and is still of value for the documents embodied in it.

He described the Celtic inhabitants of Britain as "a black-haired race," and stated that those with "fair faces, and red or light hair" possessed the "grand features of the Goths" and were of "Gothic extract."

[3] Some of Pinkerton's collection of books and maps was sold at auction in London, by Leigh & Sotheby, on 7 January 1813 (and 6 following days); a copy of the catalogue is held at Cambridge University Library (shelfmark Munby.c.159(1)).