WILSON, JOHN (1627–1696), English playwright, son of Aaron Wilson, a royalist divine, was born in London in 1627. He matriculated from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1644, and entered Lincoln’s Inn two years later, being called to the bar in 1649. His unswerving support of the royal pretensions recommended him to James, duke of York, through whose influence he became Recorder of Londonderry about 1681. His Discourse of Monarchy (1684), a tract in favour of the succession of the duke of York, was followed (1685) by a “Pindarique” on his coronation. In 1688 he wrote Jus regium Coronae, a learned defence of James’s action in dispensing with the penal statutes. He died in obscurity, due perhaps to his political opinions, in 1696. Wilson was the author of four plays, showing a vigorous and learned wit, and a power of character-drawing that place him rather among the followers of Ben Jonson than with the Restoration dramatists.
The Cheats (written in 1662, printed 1664, 1671, &c.) was played with great success in 1663. John Lacy found one of his best parts in Scruple, a caricature of a Presbyterian minister of accommodating morality. Andronicus Comnenius (1664), a blank verse tragedy, is based on the story of Andronicus Comnenus as told by Peter Heylin in his Cosmography. It contains a scene between the usurper and the widow of his victim Alexius which follows very closely Shakespeare’s treatment of a parallel situation in Richard III. The Projectors (1665), a prose comedy of London life, is, like Molière’s L’Avare, founded on the Aulularia of Plautus, but there is no evidence that Wilson was acquainted with the French play. Belphegor, or the Marriage of the Devil; a Tragi-comedy (1690), treats of a theme familiar to Elizabethan drama, but Wilson took the subject from the Belphegor attributed to Machiavelli, and alludes also to Straparola’s version in the Notii. He also translated into English Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae (1668).
See The Dramatic Works of John Wilson, edited with introduction and notes by James Maidment and W. H. Logan in 1874 for the “Dramatists of the Restoration” series.
WILSON, JOHN (1785–1854), Scottish writer, the Christopher North of Blackwood’s Magazine, was born at Paisley on the 18th of May 1785, the son of a wealthy gauze manufacturer who died when John was eleven years old. He was the fourth child, but the eldest son, and he had nine brothers and sisters.[1] He was only twelve when he was first entered at the university of Glasgow, and he continued to attend various classes in that university for six years, being for the most part under the tutorship of Professor George Jardine, with whose family he lived. In these six years Wilson “made himself” in all ways, acquiring not inconsiderable scholarship, perfecting himself in all sports and exercises, and falling in love with a certain “Margaret,” who was the object of his affections for several years.
In 1803 Wilson was entered as a gentleman commoner at Magdalen College, Oxford. Few men have felt more than he the charm of Oxford, and in much of his later work, notably in the essay called “Old North and Young North,” he has expressed his feeling. But it does not appear that his Magdalen days were altogether happy, though he perfected himself in “bruising,” pedestrian ism and other sports, and read so as to obtain a brilliant first class. His love affairs did not go happily, and he seems to have made no intimate friends at his own college and few in the university. He took his degree in 1807, and found himself at twenty-two his own master, with a good income, no father or guardian to control him, and apparently not under any of the influences which in similar circumstances generally make it necessary for a young man to ajlopt some profession, if only in name. His profession was an estate on Windermere caUed Elleray, ever since connected with his name. Here he built, boated, wrestled, shot, fished, walked and otherwise diverted himself for four years, besides composing or collecting from previous compositions a considerable volume of poems, published in 1812 as the Isle of Palms. Here he became intimate with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and De Quincey. He married in 1811 Jane Penny, a Liverpool lady of good family, and four years of happy married life at Elleray succeeded; then came the event which made a working man of letters of Wilson, and without which he would probably have produced a few volumes of verse and nothing more. The major part of his fortune was lost by the dishonest speculation of an uncle, in whose hands Wilson had carelessly left it. But this hard fate was by no means unqualified. His mother had a house in Edinburgh, in which she was able and willing to receive her son and his family; nor had he even to give up Elleray, though henceforward he was not able constantly to reside in it. He read law and was called to the Scottish bar, in 1815, still taking many a sporting and pedestrian excursion, and publishing in 1816 a second volume of poems, The City of the Plague. In 1817, soon after the founding of Blackwood’s Magazine, Wilson began his connexion with that great Tory monthly by joining with J. G. Lockhart in the October number, in a satire called the Chaldee Manuscript, in the form of biblical parody, on the rival Edinburgh Review, its publisher and his contributors. From this time he was the principal writer for Blackwood’s, though never its nominal editor, the publisher retaining a certain supervision even over Lockhart’s and “Christopher North’s” contributions, which were the making of the magazine. In 1822 began the series of Noctes Ambrosianae, after 1825 mostly Wilson’s work. These are discussions in the form of convivial table-talk, giving occasion to wonderfully various digressions of criticism, description and miscellaneous writing. From their origin it necessarily followed that there was much ephemeral, a certain amount purely local, and something wholly trivial in them. But their dramatic force, their incessant flashes of happy thought and happy expression, their almost incomparable fulness of life, and their magnificent humour give them all but the highest place among genial and recreative literature. “The Ettrick Shepherd,” an idealized portrait of James Hogg, one of the talkers, is a most delightful creation. Before this, Wilson had contributed to Blackwood’s prose tales and sketches, and novels, some of which were afterwards published separately in Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (1822), The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay (1823) and The Foresters (1825); later appeared essays on Spenser, Homer and all sorts of modern subjects and authors.
The first result of his new occupation on Wilson’s general mode of life was that he left his mother’s house and established himself (1819) in Ann Street, Edinburgh, with his wife and family of five children. The second was much more unlooked for, his election to the chair of moral philosophy in the university of Edinburgh (1820). His qualifications for the post were by no means obvious, even if the fact that the best qualified man in Great Britain, Sir William Hamilton, was also a candidate, be left out of the question. But the matter was made a political one; the Tories still had a majority in the town council; Wilson was powerfully backed by friends. Sir Walter Scott at their head; and his adversaries played into his hands by attacking his moral character, which was not open to any fair reproach. Wilson made a very excellent professor, never perhaps attaining to any great scientific knowledge in his subject or power of expounding it, but acting on generation after generation of students with a stimulating force that is far more valuable than the most exhaustive knowledge of a particular topic. His duties left him plenty of time for magazine work, and for many years his. contributions to Blackwood were extraordinarily voluminous, in one year (1834) amounting to over fifty separate articles. Most of the best and best known of them appeared between 1825 and 1835.
The domestic events of Wilson’s life in the last thirty years of it may be briefly told. He oscillated between Edinburgh and Elleray, with excursions and summer residences elsewhere, a sea trip on board the Experimental Squadron in the Channel during the summer of 1832, and a few other unimportant diversions. The death of his wife in 1837 was an exceedingly severe blow to him, especially as it followed within three years that of his friend Blackwood. For many years after, his literary work
- ↑ His youngest brother was James Wilson “of Woodville” (1795–1856), the zoologist. He purchased, on behalf of Edinburgh University, in Paris, the Dufresne collection of birds, and arranged them on his return to Scotland. He contributed to Blackwood’s Magazine and to the North British Quarterly Review, and wrote many of the articles on natural history in the seventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
