John Forster

John Forster (1812–1876) was an English biographer, critic and journalist, born in Newcastle upon Tyne and trained as a barrister. As literary editor of the Examiner and later editor of the Daily News he was at the center of London letters, the friend and adviser of Leigh Hunt, Landor, Carlyle, Bulwer-Lytton and above all Charles Dickens, whose manuscripts he read and whose literary executor he became. His Life of Charles Dickens, published in three volumes between 1872 and 1874, drew on their long correspondence and revealed the novelist's childhood in the blacking warehouse. He also wrote lives of Goldsmith, Landor and Swift and histories of the Commonwealth period.