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John Wilson and the “Orphan-Maid”: Some Unpublished Letters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alan Lang Strout
Alan Lang Strout*
Affiliation:
Texas Technological College
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Extract

In 1862, eight years after the death of John Wilson, appeared his biography written by his daughter, Mrs. Mary Gordon. George Gleig in a critique of this volume in the Quarterly Review of January, 1863, unsympathetically declares that Mrs. Gordon's “story of his first love, and of its influence upon his character and prospects, is mere silliness.” Later he declares also that the disproportionate space devoted to this romantic story “is a mistake into which only a woman could fall.” There is certainly a difference, sentimentally, between reading the faded manuscript letters now in the National Library of Scotland and reading these same letters in the cold print of a book; but Mrs. Gordon's inclusion of them is not “mere silliness.” Perhaps she would have omitted them had she realized how vividly they illustrate not only her father's emotional nature, but also his inherent weakness.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , March 1940 , pp. 182 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1940

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References

182 note 1 W. Bagehot, Literary Studies (1884), i, 24.

182 note 2 Except for the fact that a girl he knew only in her childhood has the same name as the heroine of the Trials of Margaret Lyndsay, I can see no reason for Mrs. Gordon's suggestion. If a living person served as a model, why not Margaret Mitchelson? See James Alexander Wilson's A History of Cambuslang (1929), p. 160.

182 note 3 Joanna Baillie wrote Scott on December 5, 1811, of meeting a lady who boasted that she had once shared a bed with him. “Dont start: it is upwards of thirty years since this irregularity took place, and she describes her old bedfellow as the drollest looking, odd, entertaining little urchin that even was seen. …” In a postscript of January 2 Miss Baillie adds, “The lady who claims you as her old acquaintance is a good old friend of ours, Miss Wight sister of Dr Wight late Professor of Divinity in Glasgow. …” Lockhart says the irregularity occurred on board the Leith smack when Scott was only four years of age [1775] … H. J. C. Grierson, Letters of Walter Scott (1932), iii, 62n.

182 note 4 The Roll of Writers to the Signet is an official record.

182 note 5 Mitchelson's marriage is recorded in a volume of the Scottish Record Society.

182 note 6 See Alexander Carlyle's Autobiography, ed. by J. H. Burton (1910).

182 note 7 Old North and Young North, or Christopher in Edinburgh and Christopher in London, Blackwood's Magazine, xxiii, 813.

182 note 8 I retain Mrs. Gordon's punctuation and paragraphing in those portions of her letters that I carry over.

182 note 9 Masson, v, 281–282 and 290–291. The two passages come from different articles written respectively in 1829 and 1850.

182 note 10 This incident amuses Miss Elsie Swann. See her Christopher North (1934), pp. 25–26.

182 note 11 Wilson died early in April, 1854.

182 note 12 Mr. Dunlop has called my attention to a passage in David Murray's The Old College of Glasgow (1927): “Archie was the college janitor during the early part of last century, a pawkie pleasant man who not only accommodated professors with a room but also ‘sold a dram, honest man’ to the students and citizens, holding a licence for that purpose.” The porter's lodge, Mr. Dunlop points out, was thus used as a tavern as well as a place for receiving parcels.

182 note 13 Miss Swann prints most of this passage in italics: see her Christopher North (1934), pp. 26–27.

182 note 14 Mr. Marryat Dobie of the National Library of Scotland points out to me that the date “should surely be March 21, 1807. Wilson himself wrote at the top of the paper ‘Thursday 19th’ and then scratched out both words and substituted ‘Saturday.’ The 19th of March fell on a Thursday, whereas the 19th of October was a Monday. The word which Mrs. Gordon transcribes as ‘October’ is, I think, ‘Oxford,’ certainly not ‘October.’ In any case, a few pages before, she gives a letter of Blair to Findlay, dated March 19, 1807, in which he talks about Wilson's exam, and says that he is staying with him; and here we have Wilson, in a letter perhaps begun on the 19th of some month and finished on the 21st, talking about the exam, and saying that Blair is with him.”

182 note 15 Masson, ii, 434: from Tait's Magazine, August, 1840. De Quincey outlines the itinerary of this trip in Masson, v, 283.

182 note 16 Mrs. Mary Gordon, Christopher North (1866), p. 100.

182 note 17 Miss Swann, p. 29.

182 note 18 In the second half of this paragraph I am guilty of the grossest self-plagiarism. See my William Wordsworth and John Wilson …, PMLA, xlix (March, 1934), 149.

182 note 19 Mrs. Gordon frequently alludes to this poem as having been written in her father's commonplace books, and although she never gives precisely the date, she mentions the principal part as having been written “in most eccentric juxtaposition” with her father's memoranda concerning his game cocks. As the cocks participated in mains before the flooring of Elleray was laid down, 1807 may be regarded as the approximate time of the poem's completion. It may, of course, have been begun at Oxford; the Welsh scenes indicate 1804 or 1805, perhaps, as the date of inception.

182 note 20 D. M. Moir, Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century (1851), p. 131.

182 note 21 Blackwood's Magazine xix, 393. Reprinted in Wilson's Essays Critical and Imaginative, edited by Ferner (1865), i, 37.