Biographical Research Methods and Errors

How does a biographical error become accepted fact? In the case of S.R. Crockett — one of Scotland’s most widely read novelists of the late nineteenth century — the answer lies in three generations of writers who trusted their predecessors without returning to primary sources.

This article examines the methods of T.P. Sherard, whose 1895 magazine interview introduced miscalculated dates; Malcolm Harper, whose 1907 memorial tribute smoothed inconvenient truths with Victorian discretion; and Islay Murray Donaldson, whose 1989 academic biography combined valuable archival research with uncritical acceptance of earlier errors.

The result is a cascade of compounding inaccuracies — about Crockett’s age, his education, his Oxford connections — that now appear in modern scholarship and AI-generated summaries alike. Drawing on primary correspondence and archival evidence, this article argues that the unreliability in Crockett’s biographical record belongs not to Crockett himself, but to the methods of those who wrote about him.

A rigorous reassessment of Victorian biography, Scottish literary history, and the ethics of historical method.

An article from the Reading Room of the S.R. Crockett Online Museum.