James Augustus St. John

James Augustus St. John (1795–1875) was a Welsh-born journalist, traveler and author. Largely self-educated, he worked on London newspapers and radical journals in the 1820s, lived for a time in France and Switzerland, and traveled in Egypt and Nubia, which he described in Egypt and Mohammed Ali (1834) and later books. His History of the Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece, published in three volumes in 1842, was an early attempt to write the social history of the Greeks rather than their politics and wars. He also wrote novels, a life of Louis Napoleon and several travel books, and four of his sons became writers, among them Bayle St. John.