Bibliography of the Gordons

Bibliography of the Gordons By John Malcolm Bulloch, LL.D. Section I. Aberdeen Printed at the University Press 1924 Only /jo copies printed of which this is No....^s......J CONTENTS PAGK Introduction Til A. to Augusta * "Chinese" Gordon 129 Lord George Gordon 176 INTRODUCTION The classification of people in the terms of their surnames—often an elusive label as the Great War very forcibly reminded us—is a fascinating pursuit, which, for reasons not difficult to understand, increases its number of devotees in proportion to the advance of democracy. The most obvious category is that of actual kinship, which we call genealogy. As its tests become more exigent and as the number of people bearing the same surnames increases, other categories are sought after. There is, for instance, the territorial classification pursued in the unkempt garden of " local history," and still more in such a book as Dr. Temple's " Thanage of Fermartyn ". More recently we have had attempts to group bearers of the same name in the terms of particular achievements, a method which has the sanction of everything that goes by the name of Eugenics. Crude as that method may seem, it was applied with singular suc- cess to the naval and military achievements of the Gordons in Mrs. Skelton's unique book, "Gordons under Arms," printed by the New Spalding Club. Tradition, starting from the alliterative tag, which declares that the Gordons " hae the guidin' o't," has long associated men of the name with vigorous Action, and mostly Action in the Field ; and the laborious investigation of the most dry-as-dust re- cords showed that the Gordons have borne arms in this country and in others out of all proportion to the incidence of the surname among our patronymics. It was not always possible to link these sailors and soldiers with definitely related family groups, but the classification enabled one to catalogue a large number of people that would otherwise escape the meshes of genealogy. Nobody has suggested that the Gordons hold high rank in belles- lettres. Indeed their instinct for Action militates against the meditative mood inherent in the bookman. And yet the most cursory examination of a catalogue like that of the British Museum discloses the fact that a "gseat many books are associated with the vii — BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE GORDONS Gordons in one way or another, and an enumeration of the names not only adds to our knowledge of bibliography, a subject capable of many combinations and permutations, but enables the genealogist to classify in more or less tractable form a large number of people who otherwise stand outside the pale of kinship, at least in the present state of our knowledge. It is this more than the mere bookman's interest in the subject that has tempted me to tackle a biographic bibliography of the Gordons. If one does not expect the Gordons to be bookmen in the sense of aesthetics, one is even more surprised that some of them have concentrated on producing very laborious books of the encyclopaedic and theological type. It is, of course, easy to understand the genesis and genius of an Adam Lindsay Gordon ; without a thought of writ- ing " literature " he simply expressed the typical Gordonesque dash, highly developed in our most dashing Dominion, in a swinging verse that all who run may read. Indeed it is his Voice that we always hear speaking in these galloping measures of his, not the Hand that wrote. On the other side we get a profound scholar like the Rev. Dr. Alexander Gordon, the distinguished Unitarian (originally of Ross-shire and Belhelvie stock), who has not only a large number of books to his credit, but who contributed no fewer than 700 memoirs to the Dictionary of National Biography. Again, there are the two Gordons— if indeed they are not one and the same—who produced Dictionaries (of words), one of which inspired Dr. Johnson to his own magnum opus. I have, however, come across only two Gordons in the publishing business itself. Amid the many definitions of the word " book" —Adam Lindsay Gordon, you may remember, could " make a book " in more senses than one,—one spreads a capacious net, into which a far larger number of Gordons can be dragged than in a mere genealogical survey. To begin with the writers, I include 1. Men and women of the name of Gordon. 2. Gordon women who have changed their names on marriage. 3. Women who have married Gordons. 4. Writers on books about the Gordon family and the Gordon Highlanders. viii INTRODUCTION The word book may be stretched to cover a multitude of activities, including articles in periodicals, music, maps and portraits, and most novel of all, specifications of accepted patents—never before, I think, included in a bibliography ; indeed, they are not even catalogued in the British Museum. These specifications are, in a sense, the product of a species of authorship, and, in any case, conjure up a large number of Gordons who cannot be classified in any other way. One of the very first specifications on record is that of Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun, whose patent (No. 252) was taken out in 1697. Some of the patents help to illustrate the tendency in families to enter commerce, a very interesting case being that of David Gordon (1774-1829) of the Culvennan family, who, as the inventor of " portable gas," was one of the pioneers of the motor industry, while his son Alexander (1802-68), produced the first attempt at motor- journalism in the shape of the Journal of Elemental Locomotion (1832-33). Strange to say, neither of them is even mentioned in the Dictionary of JVational Biography, though the powerful challenge to the railways from our roads has realised their prophetic vision. Another novel feature in the bibliography is the inclusion of printed law cases. For this purpose the splendid collection of pleadings in the Signet Library, gallantly catalogued by Mr. John Minto, but still in manuscript form—thanks to the Great War—has been laid under tribute, Mr. Minto having very generously lent me his Gordon slips to transcribe. These cases have a bearing on the genealogical " rather than the literary side of what has been called " Gordonology : and on that aspect of the subject special stress is laid throughout the bibliography. Unfortunately I have been unable to summarize the nature of the cases quoted. The extent of the bibliography on these ample lines has proved far greater than was anticipated either by Mr. P. J. Anderson, who characteristically suggested the task so long ago as January, 1919, or by myself, who actually started it in December of that year. Indeed, it is so extensive that the section of it presented here has filled a considerable portion of the Aberdeen University Library Bulletin of May, 1921; January and July, 1922; January, 1923; • IX — BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE GORDONS January and July, 1924. And, though I have seen every Gordon book in the British Museum and have got a complete account of all such books in the Library of Congress, the task of printing the material in extenso must lie in abeyance for the moment owing to the prohibitive cost of production. Though it does not lessen the misfortune, there is a curious irony in such a warlike family as the Gordons being thus boomeranged by the war, which not only has killed thousands of our contemporaries and penalised posterity, but has annihilated our ancestors by curtailing such chronicles as the present, for Maecenas has too much super-tax to be able to help them out. Therefore, as the bibliography stands, only the letter "A" is printed complete—or as complete as such an inquiry ever can be. In addition, however, I have been happily able to give the extensive bibliography of " Chinese " Gordon. He is not only the most famous of all Gordons, but, as at once a man of action and a mystic, he has furnished perhaps the greatest saga of modern Britain. Gordon never wrote a book proper himself: indeed, as Richard Burton says, he had "no literary skill," but the chameleon char- acter of the man made him inevitably the subject of an enormous controversial literature, which, on its purely journalistic side, has merely been tapped here and nothing more. A striking example of the diversity of opinion on Gordon, whom, Blunt says was " officially regarded as mad," is afforded by the statement in the Jesuit "Month" of August, 1885, that "men will soon cease to talk about General Gordon," and yet Mr. D. C. Boulger's biography of him issued eleven years later has run through nine editions. And despite the subacid estimate of Mr. Lytton Strachey in his " Eminent Victorians," most people will agree with Mr. Horace G. Hutchinson when he says, in his recent book, " Portraits of the Eighties," " Since the execution of Charles I. the fate of no one Briton has so profoundly stirred the heart of the nation as the death of Gordon ". Such a career gives the bibliography a wider appeal than mere local or genealogical interest. Unfortunately no further light is shed on Gordon's ancestry beyond his great-grandfather, David, though INTRODUCTION almost every biographer repeats the tradition that David belonged to the Gordons of Park, Banffshire. The books by and on "Chinese" Gordon have been arranged somewhat differently from the plan which would be followed by the formal bibliographer, for I have inventoried them under distinct sections according to the categories of his service—his origins, his service in the Crimea and the Near East, in China, at Gravesend, i-n Equatorial Africa, in Palestine, and in the Soudan, followed by a long list of general books, and even music, on his life generally.

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