Christian Isobel Johnstone (1781–1857) was the only woman to edit a major British periodical in the first half of the nineteenth century, though she has rarely attracted the attention of scholars. She was also a novelist, educationalist, and prolific journalist, with a distinctively Scottish voice, which admirably illustrates the ambiguous legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Her view of that Enlightenment was partly expressed in a reference to the ‘mazy and intricate, or hedged and primrose paths’ of the world of Henry Mackenzie and Dugald Stewart. But she also wrote in the spirit of the Enlightenment of future social improvement and the continuing progress of civilisation, to be achieved partly through the extension of its educational hopes and practices to the working classes. She went beyond the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in that she was deeply committed to egalitarian values, drawn both from the political ideals of the French Revolution and from a rational, benevolent Presbyterianism indebted to the New Light wing of the Secession. She supported manhood suffrage, rejected racial prejudice and tentatively supported the rights of women. While she respected the language of Adam Smith and political economy where it promised greater prosperity, she also believed in interventionist poor law reform. Notwithstanding her strong opposition to complacent assumptions of Western superiority, Johnstone was also deeply versed in the stadial history of the Scottish Enlightenment, and her writing did not escape the hierarchical assumptions inherent in that developmental approach.

Christian Johnstone was born Christian Todd, the daughter of James Todd and Jean Campbell, in the parish of St Cuthbert’s, Edinburgh. At her birth in June 1781, three weeks after her parents’ marriage, her father was listed as a medical student. In December 1796 she married Thomas McCliesh, a printer; on her second marriage, in June 1815, to John Johnstone, a schoolteacher from Dunfermline, James Todd's occupation was also recorded as that of a printer. Though we have no further details of her upbringing or education, Christian Todd seems to have been rooted in the world of the Edinburgh printing trades.

More, however, can be surmised about her background. In November 1814 she divorced her first husband under Scottish law for adultery: the divorce papers reveal that she was married to Thomas McCliesh ‘in his father's house Nicolson Street by the Rev.