Between fame and eccentricity: John 'Rob Roy' MacGregor, almost eminent Victorian

This paper celebrates Jill Roe’s contribution to the study of biography by exploring some changing attitudes to the purpose of biography in nineteenth-century Britain. By examining the authorised biography of an – to modern eyes – eccentric ‘muscular Christian’, John MacGregor, the paper traces a mutation in audience expectation from a view of biography as ‘exemplary’ in a moral or religious sense to a view of it as exemplary in a cultural sense not necessarily encouraging emulation. A final section of argument speculates on the balance of expectation between these two views among current readers of biography.