James Sime

James Sime (1843–1895) was a Scottish critic, biographer and journalist.

Born 31 October 1843, he was eldest son of Rev. James Sime (died 1865) of Airdrie, and then of Wick, Caithness and Thurso, and his wife Jane Anderson of Glasgow (died 1889). He was educated at Anderson's Gymnasium, Aberdeen, leaving in 1859 for Edinburgh University, where he graduated M.A. in 1867. In 1866, rather than entering the ministry, he went to Germany, and studied German literature and philosophy, first at Heidelberg University, and then at Berlin.

Sime returned to the United Kingdom and settled in London's Norland Square, Notting Hill, in 1869, and went into journalism. In 1871 he took a mastership at Edinburgh Academy, but resigned and returned to London in 1873. He was a writer for the rest of his life, in areas including social and educational topics, and European politics. As a journalist he worked on The Globe, the Pall Mall Gazette, and the St. James's Gazette under Frederick Greenwood. He contributed to The Athenæum, Saturday Review, and the English Illustrated Magazine. He wrote long-term for the The Graphic and Daily Graphic, and for some time was on the staff of Nature.

From 1880 Sime lived in Bedford Park, London, at 1 Queen Anne's Grove, in a house which he had had built. He died there of influenza, on 20 March 1895, and was buried at Hampstead Cemetery.

Sime's published works were:

• History of Germany, 1874, vol. 5 of the "Historical Course for Schools" edited by E. A. Freeman.
• Life of Lessing, 2 vols. 1877. During his period in Germany Sime had collected biographical material for this work, and on Goethe and Schiller.
• Schiller (Blackwood's Foreign Classics for English Readers), 1882.
• Mendelssohn's Letters, 1887.
• Life of Goethe (Great Writers Series), 1888.
• Geography of Europe, 1890.

He also edited Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm, 1877, and wrote articles dealing with German history, literature, and biography in the Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th edition.

Sime married, on 6 October 1865, Jessie Aitken Wilson, youngest sister of Sir Daniel Wilson and George Wilson of Edinburgh University. One child of this marriage survived him, Georgina Jessie.