Skip to main content

John Wilson and Regency Authorship

  • Chapter

Abstract

John Wilson died on April Fool’s Day, 1854. In the decade that followed three substantial monuments were erected in his honour. First, from 1855 to 1858, his son-in-law and nephew, James Ferrier, who held at St Andrews the same Chair, of Moral Philosophy and Political Economy, that John Wilson had held at Edinburgh for more than three decades, published his twelve- volume edition of Wilson’s works, beginning with the Noctes Ambrosianae, the papers that had first appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for which Wilson was most celebrated, collected in four volumes. Then in 1862 Wilson’s second daughter, Mary Wilson Gordon, produced a two-volume biography of her father. Finally, on March 25, 1865, the bronze statue of Wilson in Prince’s Street Gardens, Edinburgh, was inaugurated. Like the collected Works and the biography, the statue, ten feet high, and mounted on a substantial plinth, offers a representation of Wilson on the heroic scale, but this is not all that the three monuments have in common.:

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. J. G. Lockhart, Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1819), II, 224.

    Google Scholar 

  2. John Wilson, ‘Observations on Mr Wordsworth’s Letter relative to a New Edition of Burns’ Works’, BEM, 1 (June 1817), 261–266.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. A. L. Strout, ‘John Wilson, “Champion” of Wordsworth’, Modern Philology, 31 (1934), 384–386.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Thomas Carlyle, ‘Christopher North’, The Nineteenth Century and After, 87 (1920), pp. 103–117.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Elsie Swann, Christopher North: ‹John Wilson› (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1934), p. 190.

    Google Scholar 

  6. John Wilson, ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. XXX’, BEM, 21 (January 1827), 100–117.

    Google Scholar 

  7. John Scott, ‘Lord Byron: His French Critics: The Newspapers; and the Magazines’, London Magazine, 1 (May 1820), 492–497.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Frank P. Riga and Claude A. Prance, Index to the London Magazine (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1978), p. 12.

    Google Scholar 

  9. James Crossley, ‘Sylvanus Urban and Christopher North’, BEM, 10 (August 1821, Part II), 103–107.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Ralph M. Wardle, ‘Who was Morgan Odoherty?’, PMLA, 58.3 (September 1943), 716–727.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. John Wilson, ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. XL’, BEM, 24 (December 1828), 677–708.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Nicola Z. Trott, ‘North of the Border: Cultural Crossings in the Noctes Ambrosianae’, Romanticism on the Net, 20 (November, 2000).

    Google Scholar 

  13. William Maginn, ‘Noctes Ambrosianae. No. IV’, BEM, 12 (July 1822), 100–114.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Lord Byron, The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. by Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 89.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  15. John Wilson, ‘Familiar Epistles to Christopher North, From an Old Friend with a New Face. Letter II. On Anastasius by - Lord Byron’, BEM, 10 (September 1821), 200–206.

    Google Scholar 

  16. John Scott, ‘Blackwood’s Magazine’, London Magazine, 2 (November 1820), 509–521.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970), pp. 685–686.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Penny Fielding, Writing and Orality: Nationality, Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 58–64.

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Copyright information

© 2013 Richard Cronin

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Cronin, R. (2013). John Wilson and Regency Authorship. In: Morrison, R., Roberts, D.S. (eds) Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303851_16

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics