John Henry Nicholson

Who was John Henry Nicholson?

John Henry Nicholson was an Australian teacher and writer.

Nicholson was the son of John Nicholson, an oriental scholar of distinction, and the first English friend of Ludwig Leichhardt Nicholson was born at Lyme Regis, Dorset, England, was educated at Croft House academy, and emigrated to New South Wales in 1854. He went to Queensland in 1859, opened a private school at Toowoomba in 1860, and in 1863 had a school at Warwick. He joined the Queensland education department in May 1865 as an assistant teacher. He resigned in 1868 in order to visit England, rejoined the department in June 1869, and later had charge of several country state schools.

Between 1867 and in 1878 he published three little books of miscellaneous prose and verse, facetious and satirical in character and not of much merit. So far back as 1856, however, he had begun to brood over the idea of writing an allegorical history of a man's life on the earth, and in 1873 he wrote the early chapters of The Adventures of Halek, which was published in London in 1882.