John George Edgar (1834–1864), was an English miscellaneous writer. Many of his books were intended for boys.

Life

Edgar, the fourth son of the Rev. John Edgar of Hutton,

Berwickshire Berwickshire (; ) is a historic county, registration county and lieutenancy area in south-eastern Scotland, on the English border. The county takes its name from Berwick-upon-Tweed, its original county town, which was part of Scotland at the ...

, was born in 1834. He entered a house of business at

Liverpool Liverpool is a port City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. It is situated on the eastern side of the River Mersey, Mersey Estuary, near the Irish Sea, north-west of London. With a population ...

and visited the

West Indies The West Indies is an island subregion of the Americas, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, which comprises 13 independent island country, island countries and 19 dependent territory, dependencies in thr ...

on mercantile affairs, but soon deserted commerce and devoted himself to literature.

Works

Edgar's earliest publication was the ''Boyhood of Great Men'' in 1853, which he followed up in the same year with a companion volume entitled ''Footprints of Famous Men''. In the course of the next ten years he wrote as many as fifteen other volumes intended for the reading of boys. Some of these were biographical, and the remainder took the form of narrative fiction based on historical facts illustrative of different periods of

English history The territory today known as England became inhabited more than 800,000 years ago, as the discovery of stone tools and footprints at Happisburgh in Norfolk have indicated.; "Earliest footprints outside Africa discovered in Norfolk" (2014). B ...

. Edgar was especially familiar with early English and Scottish history, and possessed a wide knowledge of border tradition. He became the first editor of ''Every Boy's Magazine''. In the intervals of his other work Edgar found time to contribute political articles, written from a strongly conservative point of view, to the London press.

Early death

Under his close and continuous application to work his health broke down, and he suffered what was termed "

congestion of the brain "Congestion of the brain" and "cerebral congestion" were medical terms used before hypertension was understood. The term was first proposed by Dr. von Basch in the nineteenth century and was widely used for the next 150 years, and had a major inf ...

" and died shortly afterwards, on 22 April 1864.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Edgar, John George 1834 births 1864 deaths 19th-century English writers 19th-century English merchants 19th-century English male writers 19th-century English businesspeople