Croker, John Wilson

(krō´kər), 1780–1857, British Tory politician and author, b. Ireland. He was a member of Parliament from 1807 to 1832 and secretary of the admiralty from 1810 to 1830. The most famous of his regular contributions as a critic to the Quarterly Review was his virulent attack (1818) on Keats's Endymion. Croker's best work was his careful edition (1831) of Boswell's Life of Johnson.

See Croker Papers (ed. by L. J. Jennings, 3 vol., 1884; repr. 1972).