From teenage delinquent to man of letters: James Campbell’s remarkable career

The great age of the Scottish autodidact must have ended a century ago, but it had a prodigious impact while it lasted. To read John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969) is to be plunged headfirst into a world of kenspeckle lads studying Nietzsche behind the crankshaft and miners quoting Burns to each other as they were winched up from the Lanarkshire coal face. If James Campbell (born 1951) isn’t quite a figure to rank with James Thompson the Younger (1834-82) or the Rev. George Gilfillan (1813-78), to name a couple of Gross’s exemplars, then he is certainly their spiritual heir – a man whose preliminary knowledge was picked up on his own and whose take on contemporary literature is all the more pointed for having been acquired outside the usual channels of school and university.

Gross turns up towards the end of Just Go Down to the Road (the title derived from a friendly Easter Ross shepherd’s advice on how to get a lift) as a reserved yet encouraging editor of the TLS with whom Campbell begins a four-decade engagement in the early 1980s.