Colin Mackenzie (Scottish writer)

Colin Mackenzie was a nineteenth century literary contributor/hack writer, editor, translator and compiler. Between 1849 and 1851 he was the secretary of Charles Cochrane's 'National Philanthropic Association.' Mackenzie spent his adult life living and working in London, England. His interests were wide ranging and his publications reflected this. They were primarily works of non-fiction, including educational and informative works on chemistry, cookery, medicine, popular science, geography, history, economics and religion, but he also wrote about the 'gentlemen's clubs' of London, a 'parliamentary pocketbook' with a strong reformist leaning in 1832 (the year of the first Reform Act) and, towards the end of his career, a report on the chronic poverty and famine that scarred Britain and engulfed Ireland in the late 1840s.

Mackenzie was born in Edinburgh in 1796. Between 1810 and 1814 he studied for a Master of Arts degree at Kings College, Aberdeen University. In 1814 he travelled down from Scotland to London, enrolling at Guy's and St Thomas's Hospitals in October of that year to train as a surgeon. Mackenzie never completed his studies, but spent the rest of his life in London, writing, editing, translating and contributing to numerous books, journals and pamphlets. A baptismal record from Westminster St James for Mackenzie's eldest son Alfred shows that Mackenzie had married his first wife, Ann, by 1818. Ann died at some point in the 1830s and Mackenzie married again in 1846. A ‘Royal Literary Fund’ file on Colin Mackenzie contains a relatively large amount of primary information about Mackenzie’s life. The Royal Literary Fund was a charitable organization dedicated to writers in urgent need of financial assistance, which had Dickens and Thackeray as committee members at various points in its existence. Mackenzie applied for, and received financial help from the RLF on five different occasions between 1838 and 1853. Mackenzie died in 1854.

Mackenzie's two earliest works, One Thousand Experiments in Chemistry (1821) and Five Thousand Receipts in all the Useful and Domestic Arts (1823) were by far and away his greatest successes. The accuracy of the information in One Thousand Experiments in Chemistry and the practicality and safety of the experiments were called into question in some book reviews in the journals of the time but One Thousand Experiments in Chemistry proved to be a popular success all the same and was republished 22 times in the 1820s in Britain, Europe and America. Five Thousand Receipts (1823) was an even greater success. A household economy compendium, filled with recipes (receipts an archaic word for recipes) for all kinds of concoctions, whether culinary, medicinal or for practical household needs, Five Thousand Receipts went through at least 26 editions between 1823 and 1864 and was particularly successful in America. Mackenzie, though, made no financial gain whatsoever from his American successes due to the complete absence of copyright protection for publications by British authors in nineteenth century America and this contributed to the hardship that he and his family were to endure in the following decade.

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