Scottish Authors > John Wilson ("Christopher North") Reviewer & Essayist 1785-1854

John Wilson was born in 1785 in Paisley, and received his university education in Glasgow and Oxford before settling in Edinburgh, one of a circle of clever young Tory lawyers which included his close friend and collaborator Lockhart. Wilson was a notable man already in his early years, a massive constitution and flowing blond hair, a formidable athletic prowess and a taste for exhibitionism which made him a public figure even before the success of his early poems (The Isle of palms, The Magic mirror, The City of the plague, 1812-16). He had some success, too, with sentimental fiction celebrating the pious virtues of Scottish common folks - Trials of Margaret Lyndsay (1823) and The Foresters (1825).

What catapulted Wilson into the public consciousness was his connection from 1817 to his death with Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine, the source of his critical reputation and his literary disguise as "Christopher North", author of fearsome (and fearless) slashing reviews and literary jokes, rambling commentaries on people and books of the day disguised as conversations in Ambroses's tavern (the Noctes Ambrosianae of Blackwood's, most but not all by Wilson) and his share in an astonishingly successful but deeply offensive Biblical parody The Chaidee manuscript which helped make Blackwood's for October 1817 a best seller. While the manuscript was withdrawn, and public apology made, the object of the exercise - publicity, a good launch for Wilson's editorship - was achieved. Nothing was sacrosanct.

Wilson's courage took him, too, to more controversial heights still when in 1820 the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University came vacant. Wilson was a Tory, and the Town Council who elected the professor shared his politics. Wilson was woefully under-qualified, and there were superb candidates with the wrong politics - Wilson was given the Chair. Oddly, it was a triumph in a way: Wilson turned out to be a public speaker of rare excellence, and his tenure of the Chair attracted generations of students to the subject. What he said was often thin, often borrowed from other sources; but he was one of literary Edinburgh's lions.

This sums up a lot about Wilson. As the influence of Scott waned (Scott died in 1832), as Lockhart left for London in 1825 (to be followed by Francis Jeffrey, and Thomas Carlyle) Wilson was the lion of a diminished literary circle, where he could dominate through personality and through the columns of Blackwood's, but where his shaky qualifications were not questioned, measured against his astonishing output of highly readable journalism, and his public performance as "the professor" ' He remained a lion all his life, and at his death in 1854 literary Scotland was notably quieter without "Christopher North". But perhaps it is a measure of his times, as well as of the man, that a city which supported figures of the stature of Jeffrey, Lockhart, Hogg and Carlyle should turn to Wilson for its literary lion.

Ian Campbell

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