ROBERT HERON
Robert Heron (1764-1807) was a Scottish writer and translator. He was born in New Galloway, Kirckcudbrightshire and studied Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. For some time he worked as an assistant of Hugh Blair. He wrote a History of Scotland, partly in prison, which was published in six volumes in 1794-1799. Besides, he wrote some comedies and contributions to journals.
The fragments:
Among Heron’s translations was Carsten Niebuhr’s famous travelogue Travels through Arabia (1792), which indicates his interest in the Arab world. In the same year he published Arabian tales in four volumes, a translation of Cazotte’s Continuation de Mille et une nuits. The translation is preceded by a Preface in which Heron meditates about the vogue of the Oriental tale among his contemporaries. He criticizes the modern novels which contain ‘low and almost insipid obscenities,’ and were meant ‘almost exclusively, for the debauchee and the woman of pleasure’. [p. VI] The Eastern tales provided entertainment for those who sought it, by presenting something new, strange, and ‘uncommon’. It was the extravagancies and strangeness, especially, which according to Heron appealed tot he general audience, apart from the rich imagination and elements of magic.
Sources/references:
H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Heron, Robert’, Oxford dictionary of national biography, Oxford University Press, Oxgford etc. 2004.
Thomas F. Henderson, ‘Heron, Robert’, in: Sidney Lee, Dictionary of national biography, Smith, Elder &Co, London 1891.
Muhsin Jassim Ali, Scheherazade in England; a study of nineteenth-century criticism of the Arabian nights, Three Continents Press, Washington 1981.