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Puškin's Feast in Time of Plague and Its Original
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2018
Extract
John Wilson, when middle-aged, once set out his achievements for De Quincey to consider. “In The City of the Plague,” he wrote, “there ought to be something of the sublime. Is there?” Modern critics have not thought so: Saintsbury and Oliver Elton, while not stinting praise for the mature Wilson, the “Christopher North” who was the mainstay of Blackwood's Magazine and virtual creator of the Noctes Ambrosianae, dismiss the poetry of his early career as imitative and unimportant. His “poems, The Isle of Palms (1812) and The City of the Plague (1816), merely show that he was an intelligent contemporary of Scott and Byron, and a neighbour of the Lake poets.” The City of the Plague, as Wilson first conceived it, was to be “awful and wild, solemn.”
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- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1949
References
1 Quoted in Mrs.Gordon's, “Christopher North,” a Memoir of John Wilson (Edinburgh, 1862) II, 153 Google Scholar.
2 Saintsbury, G. E. B., A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1900) (London, 1918), p. 189 Google Scholar. In his essay on Wilson (Collected Essays and Papers [London and Toronto, 1923], I, 184-209), he amplifies the statement.
3 The Poetical Works of Milman, Bowles, Wilson, and Barry Cornwall. Complete in One Volume. Paris. Published by A. & W. Galignani. No. 18, rue Vivienne, 1829. (From Swann, Elsie, Christopher North (John Wilson) [Edinburgh and London, 1934], p. 248.Google Scholar)
4 Article on Wilson in the Dictionary of National Biography.
5 Quoted by Saintsbury in his essay on Wilson (Collected Essays, I, 184).
6 Ibid.