Allan Cunningham

Allan Cunningham, detail of a portrait by Henry Room; in the National Portrait Gallery, LondonCourtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London

Allan Cunningham,  (born December 7, 1784, Keir, Dumfriesshire, Scotland—died October 30, 1842London, England), Scottish poet, a member of the brilliant circle of writers that included Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, John Keats, and Thomas Hood, who were contributors to the London Magazine in its heyday in the early 1820s.

Allan Cunningham, engraving, 1833.© father was a neighbour of Robert Burns, and Allan became a friend of the self-taught rural bard James Hogg, “the Ettrick Shepherd.” Apprenticed to a stonemason at the age of 11, he nourished his literary appetite on the works of Scott. After publishing some poems disguised as old ballads in Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Songs (1810), he went to London where he became assistant and right-hand man (1814–41) to the sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey. In his spare time he was a hard-working writer and editor. He collected old ballads and stories, published as Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry (1822) and The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern (1825). He wrote The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 6 vol. (1829–33). He edited The Works of Robert Burns (1834), prefacing it with a biography of Burns that contained much valuable new material. He also wrote romances and dramatic poems of little merit, but his lyrical poems, though lacking the unselfconsciousness of the true ballad, are memorable for their rhythm and their verbal felicity.