John Watson, a Presbyterian minister who published his short stories under the pseudonym Ian Maclaren, occupies a peculiar position in Scottish literary history. Along with J. M. Barrie and S. R. Crockett, he was a member of what came to be known derisively as the Kailyard School of late Victorian Scottish fiction. Enormously popular in Britain and America during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, these writers presented idylls of a vanishing rural Scottish peasantry, which was being eradicated by industrialization and by the intrusion of agrarian capitalism into an essentially feudal society. A twentieth-century reaction against sentimentality made the Kailyarders a stock object of ridicule; yet, ironically, this tradition of condemnation has rescued Watson and his short stories from the obscurity that otherwise would have been theirs. In the latter part of the twentieth century, as the ideological basis of the Scottish Renaissance itself is coming under the microscope, some Scottish critics have begun to reassess the Kailyard writers on their own merits.
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John Watson biography
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