Charles Mackay

Charles Mackay (1814–1889) was a Scottish journalist, poet and song-writer, born in Perth and educated in Brussels. He worked for the Morning Chronicle, edited the Glasgow Argus and the Illustrated London News, and reported the American Civil War for the Times from New York. His songs, especially The Good Time Coming, sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and he published a dictionary of Lowland Scots. He is remembered today for Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, his 1841 history of financial bubbles, alchemists, witch hunts and other collective follies, which financiers still quote. The novelist Marie Corelli was probably his daughter.