Alexander Blair (writer)
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Alexander Blair (1782–1878) was an English writer and academic. Considered as an original thinker, he is also described as "disorganised, despondent and a ditherer".[1] He is known as a friend of Christopher North.
He was the son of Alexander Blair (1737–c.1816), a manufacturer and merchant in the Birmingham area, and brother of the writer and historian Mary Margaret Busk. Their mother was Mary Johnson. The elder Alexander Blair was an army officer, who in 1780 went into partnership with James Keir at Tipton.[2] They made alloy window sashes, and alkali, and the venture became a successful soap manufacturer.[3][4] The business with Keir included a coal mine. Blair also set up a business making masts, and bought land in the Canadian Maritimes.[5] In later life he encountered financial problems.[6]
Blair became a proprietor of the Royal Institution.[7] Socially, he knew James Boswell and Joseph Priestley, and was connected to the Lunar Society by his acquaintance. He was a Nonconformist, and in politics followed Charles James Fox.[5] He had heard of Keir's work on alkalis from William Irvine, the Glasgow chemist.[8]
Mary Johnson, wife of Alexander Blair the elder, was the daughter of Alexander Johnson of The Hague.[5] Johnson was a military agent there, and involved in litigation around 1770, when James Boswell acted as his lawyer.[9] Alexander Johnson was father to Richard Johnson (1753–1807), whose financial problems compounded those of the Blairs.[5][10]
