Peter Nicolas Cunningham was a British writer born in London, son of the Scottish author Allan Cunningham and his wife Jean. Cunningham published several topographical and biographical studies, of which the most important are his Handbook of London (1849) and The Life of Drummond of Hawthornden (1833). He edited Extracts from the Accounts of the Revels at Court in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1842) and Horace Walpole's Letters (1857).