John Wilson and Sport

Abstract

In The Poetic Mirror (1816), the magnificent collection of verse parodies of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron and others, James Hogg takes aim at the poet John Wilson, drolly describing the man who was later to become a fellow principal of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine as ‘illustrious more for leaping than for song’,¹ a satirical reference both to the poetic powers and the athletic prowess of a poet who while still a schoolboy could long- jump nearly twenty feet. John Wilson was a sportsman throughout his life, and he sported in many guises. He was a practitioner - an angler, hunter, wrestler, cock-fighter, and a talented athlete in his youth - and also, so to speak, a theorist, an author who returned to sport many times during his career in Blackwood’s in important series such as his extended, nine-part review of the second volume of Pierce Egan’s pugilistic history Boxiana ( July 1819-October 1822), in the brilliant three-part meditation ‘Christopher in his Sporting Jacket’ (September 1828), and in individual essays in Maga on such matters as wrestling and equestrianism.