JOHNSTONE, D(avid) Lawson

(? -?)

   UK writer, mostly of novels for older children, including The Mountain Kingdom (1888), a Jules VERNE-style LOST-WORLD tale whose young protagonists travel into the Kingdom of the Smoking Mountains (in Tibet), which is inhabited by descendents of ancient Greeks; our heroes thwart a rebellion against the monarch. The Paradise of the North (1890; cut 1894) similarly uncovers a lost world, but this time at the North Pole and inhabited by Norsemen. The White Princess of the Hidden City (1898) uncovers yet another, now in Central America and inhabited by Whites whose claim to the Americas - in accordance with 19th-century fantasies of racial justice - is found to antedate that of the Amerindians.

   JC