Christopher North Research Articles

Periodical Auto-Biography: Theories and Representations

Previous articleNext article No AccessPAPERS DELIVERED AT THE 2015 WORDSWORTH-COLERIDGE ASSOCIATION MEETINGPeriodical Auto-Biography: Theories and RepresentationsMark SchoenfieldMark Schoenfield Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 46, Number 2Spring 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24888061 Views: 9Total views on this site © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Explaining the Circumstances

Christopher North with his wife Marisa run the Almassera Vella Arts Centre in a mountain village near Alicante, Spain (www,oldolivepress.com).He facilitates poetry readings , writing workshops and 7 day residential courses in the Spring and Autumn. His pamphlet collection 'A Mesh of Wires '(Smith Doorstop 1999) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, he had a third place in the National (1995) and recently won the Silver Wyvern at the ‘Poetry on the Lake' Festival in Italy. His first full collection ‘Explaining the Circumstances’ was published by Oversteps Books in February 2010 (www.overstepsbooks.com). The poem he has gracefully allowed us to include in this issue, is the title poem in this collection. A planned bi-lingual joint collection with the poet Terry Gifford ‘The Other Side of Aguilar’ is due for publication later this year.

John Wilson to William Wordsworth (1802): A New Text

John Wilson was profoundly affected by his first reading of Lyrical Ballads. At age sixteen in June, 1802, he wrote a remarkably insightful letter to Wordsworth praising volume--to which Wordsworth replied [William Wordsworth's Letter to John Wilson, 1802: A Corrected Version, ed. John O. Hayden, TWC, XVIII (1987)33-38]. This sensitivity to Wordsworth's poetic philosophy was rare at time, and began a relationship, which, despite controversy, was always marked by Wilson's high regard for Wordsworth's poetry. Many years later in an essay in Blackwood's Magazine, Wilson, as his alter-ego Christopher North, describes praise he has courted from all corners of earth, for his role in extending and promoting Wordsworth's reputation from the banks of Mississippi to the Ganges. In same essay North claims that in Scotland in early 1800s, there not twenty copies [of Lyrical Ballads]--we question if there were ten (Stroll to Grasmere, Collected Works). Despite his youth, Wilson's exuberant letter marks him out as a vigorously independent thinker and clearly able to extrapolate some of key concepts in Wordsworth's Preface. He conceives of poet's readers as connected by a delightful sympathy of Souls; a union of common interest in spontaneous appreciation of poetry. This system of philosophy, is embodied in poetry that, Wilson writes, flash on our Souls a conviction of immortality. Crucially here, Wilson recognises and responds to poet's intention. In his Preface to 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth makes claim for poems that their purpose is to illustrate manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement ... to follow fluxes and refluxes of mind when agitated by great and affections of our nature. Wilson is excited by Wordsworth's radical views on duty of poet and he even embraces tone of his writing. letter opens effusively praising Wordsworth's simple and forcible language in rhetoric that bears all hallmarks of an imagination profoundly coloured by Lyrical Ballads and its Preface. Once he graduated and moved to Lake District, Wilson became a friend of both Wordsworths and Coleridges. At one point he was assisting Coleridge's research for Friend by running errands to library at Calgarth Park, home of Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff. Wordsworths were frequent visitors to Wilson's home at Elleray, which was far more comfortable than their own. It is not unlikely either that two friends, Coleridge and Wordsworth, would have discussed their young acolyte's earlier letter. After all, it was a rare critical correspondence that had elicited an equally uncharacteristic reply, especially on subject of The Idiot Boy. Wilson's lucid comments on poem in 1802 are so clearly articulated that it may well be with them in mind, some fifteen years later, that Coleridge refers to only plausible objections, which I have heard to that fine one is, that author has not, in poem itself, taken care to preclude from reader's fancy, disgusting images of ordinary, morbid idiocy, which yet it was by no means his intention to represent. He has even by 'burr. burr, burr,' uncounteracted by any preceding description of boy's beauty, assisted in recalling them. other is, that idiocy of boy is so evenly balanced by folly of mother, as to present to general reader rather a laughable burlesque on blindness of anile dotage, rather than an analytic display of maternal affection in its ordinary workings. (Biographia Literaria, xvii) Wilson is torn between his genuine admiration for poet and his uncertainty that design of poem achieves its motive. He questions validity of subject as a suitable vehicle for moral intention of poem. …

"Toms Laocoon": A Newly Discovered Poem by Thomas Lovell Beddoes

ON AUGUST 10, 1821, KEATS HAD BEEN BURIED IN THE PROTESTANT CEMETERY in Rome for six months and Shelley was Byron's guest at Ravenna. Their rather younger contemporary Thomas Lovell Beddoes was staying with his friend, the Rev. Henry Card, at the somewhat less romantic location of Great Malvern, near Worcester. He was then eighteen years old and a highly intelligent youth of considerable promise. An undergraduate student at his father's old Oxford college, Pembroke, he was already a published (if not yet well-known) poet; his outrageously lurid Gothic volume, The Improvisatore, had appeared in March. His widowed mother, Anna Maria Beddoes, a younger sister of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, was living with her two daughters on the British island of Jersey off the French coast. (1) Very little is known of Beddoes' time at Oxford. He would publish his precocious verse drama The Bride's Tragedy to considerable critical acclaim in 1822 and be awarded his B.A. in 1825, but further information about his undergraduate years is scarce. However, a letter of August 10, 1821, from his mother to her sister, Emmeline King, now on deposit in the Bodleian Library and hitherto unnoticed, sheds considerable light on Beddoes' poetic activity during this period. (2) It also contains Anna Maria Beddoes' transcript of a previously unprinted--and unnoticed--Beddoes poem. After discussing matters unconnected with the young poet, his mother goes on to write that she is much pleased with Toms prize failure, rather I should say with his good sense, and proper temper on the occasion--Mr Howard must be a charming youth, so elegant, so easy a poet--Tom has sent me some lines on the Laocoon which he had believed was to have been the subject proposed instead of the ruins of Paestum, and here he has shewn much greater talent--Tom is at the Abbey House at Great Malvern, one amongst 15 Boarders, two Miss Harkers are there whom you know. (Bod. Dep. c.135/1) The Prize that Beddoes had tried for and failed to win was Sir Roger Newdigate's Prize for English Verse, which had been founded in 1806 as a memorial to Sir Roger, the 5th Baronet and well-known arch-Tory Oxford University politician. Each year the Professor of Poetry would set a topic, usually from Classical history or mythology, and invite entries of poems of fewer than 300 lines. Entries were traditionally written in heroic couplets, and dramatic compositions were not allowed. The Professor would choose a winner, and the lucky poet would read his verses to the gathered University at the end of the academic year in June. If he felt no entry was worthy of the award, the Professor was not forced to pick a winner--this happened several times over the nineteenth century, no doubt to the considerable mortification of the entrants that year. The prize continues to be awarded to this day; the vast majority of its winners have been long forgotten, but its nineteenth century winners included John Wilson (Christo pher North) in 1806, John Ruskin in 1839, Matthew Arnold in 1843, and, most famously, Oscar Wilde in 1875. Swinburne was an unsuccessful entrant in 1857. The topic chosen for the 1821 Prize was the ruins of Paestum, in Southern Italy, and the winner was a young aristocrat only a year older than Beddoes. (3) George Howard was the grandson of the Earl of Carlisle (Lord Byron's cousin and his unsatisfactory guardian in Chancery) and had been educated at Eton before matriculating at Christ Church on October 15, 1819. He was a precocious youth, also winning the Chancellor's Prize for Latin Verse in 1821; he would go on to take a first in Classics the following year. An amiable man, as Anna Beddoes correctly surmised, he would take up a political career as a liberal Whig and twice serve as a successful Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. His happy career stands in stark contrast to that of Beddoes, who would leave England for Germany in 1825 and begin a steady decline into obscurity, alcoholism, loneliness, and eventual suicide in 1849. …

Confessions of a Gentrified Sinner: Secrets in Scott and Hogg

You are my friend--you are right, replied poor Dick, his eye kindling with enthusiasm; why should shun name of an--an--(he hesitated for a phrase)--an out-of-doors artist? --Walter The Bride of Lammermoor That there are subjects of secrecy and confidence between us, is most certain; but to such, his communications to you could have no relation; and with such, I, as an individual, have no concern. --Walter Rob Roy THE CONCLUDING SECTION OF JAMES HOGG'S PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND Confessions of a Justified Sinner burlesques an editorial apology and explanation for disjointed state of text. Our unnamed editor narrates his skeptical expedition, which is provoked by a letter James Hogg wrote to Blackwood's Magazine, to Scottish Borders in search of perfectly preserved corpse of a suicide lately uncovered. Hogg himself appears in text, at an Ettrick livestock sale, and gives a fine performance of rural Scots obstinacy: I hae mair ado than can manage day, foreby ganging to houk up hunder-year-auld banes. (1) The editor, despite Hogg's stubbornness, finds body. He goes searching in company of Sir Walter Scott's son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart and Scott's sometime steward at Abbotsford, William Laidlaw (half-heartedly disguised as L--t of C--d and L--w) and even accepts Lockhart's offer to procure a horse, from his father-in-law. The amateur investigators find that lower half of suicide's body has not been disturbed: limbs, from loins to toes, seemed perfect and entire, but they could not bear handling. Before got them returned again to grave they were all shaken in pieces (251). Concealed in clothing is sinner's narrative, which have just finished reading. Neither Mr. Laidlaw nor Mr. Lockhart wishes to take possession of document, though former remarks that it `will maybe reveal some mystery that mankind disna ken naething about yet' (253). Lockhart responds, `it is not for your handling, my dear friend, who are too much taken up about mysteries already' (253). Such a rejoinder to a domestic employee of Walter Scott seem to refer to a mystery that, in 1824, was officially still a mystery. In practical terms, mystery of the Great Unknown, Author of Waverley, was no mystery at all. In 1824 Waverley novels were appearing in both Europe and America under Scott's name, and in same year William Hazlitt published The Spirit of Age, including a substantial discussion of Scott and his novels. (2) Four years earlier, first number of London Magazine had announced, we should be very much mortified were it afterwards to turn out that these fine works have been improperly attributed by public voice to--Walter Scott, and three months later same magazine, affecting no uncertainty, wished that Scott would either declare himself, or give himself a nom de guerre, that might speak of him without either a periphrasis or impertinence. (3) Of course do not wish to deny that there was any interest in identity of Author; though, as Richard Waswo observes, curiosity was in fact baffled neither very widely nor very long in public (307). My interest is in secret's Brobdingnagian protraction and overdetermination. Scott remained intent upon keeping up his incognito until 1827, when bankruptcy of his publisher forced a public avowal. On that occasion, London Magazine declared, world stared, not so much at unexpectedness of disclosure, for it was virtually well known before, but that declaration should be made at that particular moment; and in Blackwood's John Wilson, writing as Christopher North, disdained the silliest of all recorded controversies on fathership of novels and romances by Author of Waverley. …

Correspondence.

Access to psychiatric services for homeless mentally ill people Christopher North's reply Ethical and legal issues in suicide Judi Davis replies.

The Double Time Scheme in Antigone

In three articles published in Blackwood's Magazine (November 1849, April and May 1850), one Wilson, under the nom de guerre of Christopher North, propounded the view that Shakespeare's Othello operates on a double time scheme. The represented time in Cyprus (Acts II to V) is some thirty-three hours, lasting from about 4 p.m. on Saturday till the early hours of Monday morning. If we take this time scheme at face value, there has been no opportunity for Desdemona and Cassio to commit adultery: Iago's insinuations and Othello's suspicions are manifestly absurd. However, another time scheme is in operation as well. By its clock, the protagonists have been in Cyprus for more than a week. For example, we find Bianca, a local courtesan, complaining that it has been ‘seven days and nights, / Eight score eight hours’ (III.iv.171–2) since she last saw Cassio, who by the first time scheme had arrived in Cyprus only the day before.

Poems

Christopher North with his wife Marisa run the Almassera Vella Arts Centre in a mountain village near Alicante, Spain (www.oldolivepress.com). He facilitates poetry readings , writing workshops and 7 day residential courses in the Spring and Autumn. His pamphlet collection A Mesh of Wires (Smith Doorstop 1999) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, he had a third place in the National (1995) and recently won the Silver Wyvern at the ‘Poetry on the Lake' Festival in Italy. His first full collection Explaining the Circumstances was published by Oversteps Books in February 2010 (www.overstepsbooks.com). A bi-lingual joint collection with the poet Terry Gifford The Other Side of Aguilar is published this year.

CARLYLE'S “CHRISTOPHER NORTH”

CARLYLE'S “CHRISTOPHER NORTH”

Some Scottish Publishers: Part II

William Blackwood, the founder of the firm of the name, saw service in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and London before opening in 1804 as a bookseller at 64 South Bridge, Edinburgh. Blackwood continued in his bookselling capacity for a number of years, and his shop became a haunt of the literati, rivalling Constable's in reputation and in popularity. His first success as a publisher was in 1811, when he brought out Kerr's Voyages, an ambitious item, and followed shortly after by The Life of Knox by McCrie. About this time he became agent in Edinburgh for John Murray, and the two firms did some useful collaborating. Blackwood was responsible for suggesting alterations in The Black Dwarf, which drew from Scott that vigorous letter addressed to James Ballantyne which reads: “Dear James,—I have received Blackwood's impudent letter. G ‐ d ‐ his soul, tell him and his coadjutor that I belong to the Black Hussars of Literature, who neither give nor receive criticism. I'll be cursed but this is the most impudent proposal that was ever made”. Regarding this story Messrs. Blackwood say: “This gives a slightly wrong impression. Scott was still incognito. William Blackwood was within his rights. He was always most loyal to Scott.” There has been some controversy as to the exact style of this letter, and it has been alleged that Lockhart did not print it in the same terms as Sir Walter wrote it. Blackwood came into the limelight as a publisher when he started the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine in 1817, which was to be a sort of Tory counterblast to the Whiggish Edinburgh Review. He appointed as editors James Cleghorn and Thomas Pringle, who later said that they realised very soon that Blackwood was much too overbearing a man to serve in harness, and after a time they retired to edit Constable's Scots Magazine, which came out under the new name of The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany. [Messrs. Blackwood report as follows: “No. They were sacked—for incompetence and general dulness. (See the Chaldee Manuscript.) They were in office for six months only.”] Blackwood changed the name of The Edinburgh Magazine to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, and became his own editor, with able henchmen in John Wilson, Christopher North, John Gibson Lockhart, and James Hogg as contributors. It was a swashbuckling magazine, sometimes foul in attack, as when it told John Keats to get “back to the shop, back to plaster, pills, and ointment boxes”. Lockhart had a vigour of invective such as was quite in keeping with the age of Leigh Hunt, an age of hard‐hitting. The history of Blackwood in those days is largely the history of the magazine, though Blackwood was at the same time doing useful publishing work. He lost the Murray connexion, however, owing to the scandalous nature of some of the contributions published in Maga; these but expressed the spirit of the times. John Murray was scared of Blackwood's Scottish independence! Among the book publications of Blackwood at the period we find Schlegel's History of Literature, and his firm, as we know, became publisher for John Galt, George Eliot, D. M. Moir, Lockhart, Aytoun, Christopher North, Pollok, Hogg, De Quincey, Michael Scott, Alison, Bulwer Lytton, Andrew Lang, Charles Lever, Saintsbury, Charles Whibley, John Buchan, Joseph Conrad, Neil Munro—a distinguished gallery. In 1942 the firm presented to the National Library of Scotland all the letters that had been addressed to the firm from its foundation from 1804 to the end of 1900, and these have now been indexed and arranged, and have been on display at the National Library where they have served to indicate the considerable service the firm has given to authorship. The collection is valuable and wide‐ranging.

The Value of the Humanities

It is comforting for a humanist to reflect upon the well-known words of John Wilson, alias Christopher North, “Animosities are mortal, but the Humanities live forever.” A few extremists may urge that there is more of the darkness of night than of the warmth of Ambrose's tavern in the remark, but humanists who have had experience of concentrated attacks on certain areas of their domain will cling to the promise of a day when hostility will vanish and the value of the Humanities will not be questioned. The immortality claimed for the Humanities in Noctes Ambrosianae is not open to doubt unless human nature suffers in the future a change such as has not occurred during the centuries of evolution and revolution known to history. It is perhaps safe to assume that until such a radical change does occur, men and women will find their understanding widened and their spirit deepened by Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Goethe, by Rembrandt and Beethoven; they will reflect upon the meaning of “right” and of “good,” of “freedom” and of “truth,” and will profit by the reflections of the truly great thinkers of the past and present; they will be intrigued by the processes which have led to social success and failure, to the development of “higher religions,” and to the building of the imposing structure of modern science both in its pure and in its applied aspects.

Christopher North and the Genesis of the Raven

As an aftermath of a popularity which, in addition to being immediate and widespread, has proved to be enduring, there now exists a rather formidable mass of controversial writing having to do with the genesis of The Raven and consequently with the sources that Poe may have used in creating the poem. The late Killis Campbell, in his scholarly notes to The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, has left us a concise critical estimate of most of this controversial matter.1 Some accounts of the origin of The Raven are quite fantastic, and Campbell dismisses them with little comment as apocryphal. Others he considers not wholly convincing although he does not deny that they may contain at least a modicum of truth.

The Old Testament Interpretation of History. Christopher North

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Old Testament Interpretation of History. Christopher North William A. IrwinWilliam A. Irwin Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Near Eastern Studies Volume 7, Number 1Jan., 1948 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/370856 Views: 1Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

A Study in Periodical Patchwork. John Wilson's "Recreations of Christopher North" 1842

A Study in Periodical Patchwork. John Wilson's "Recreations of Christopher North" 1842

The recreation of Christopher North, 1842

The recreation of Christopher North, 1842

The recreations of Christopher North, 1842

The recreations of Christopher North, 1842

"Christopher North" on Tennyson

THE casual reader in English literature knows John Wilson, Christopher North , because young Alfred Tennyson lost his temper. Yet the lines on crusty, rusty, musty, fusty Christopher are as absurdly inapplicable to the author of the Recreations of Christopher North and the best of the Noctes Ambrosiance as they are to John Wilson the sentimental or macabre poet, John Wilson the emotional critic, John Wilson the brilliant talker of Modern Athens, lecturer in Moral Philosophy for thirty years at the University of Edinburgh, contributor of thousands of pages to Blackwood's Magazine, enemy of Whigs, flayer of Cockneys, and friend of De Quincey, Wordsworth, Lockhart, Walter Scott, Thomas Campbell, and James Hogg. Alexander Smith, in A Summer in Skye (1865), writes:

Wordsworth's Letter to Mathetes

Wordsworth's Letter to Mathetes has been strangely neglected by the critics. Yet it offers direct and valuable aid in understanding his poetry. It was written in reply to two young men, since identified as John Wilson (" Christopher North") and, his friend Alexander Blair. They had sought from Coleridge's ambling periodical The Friend advice on the proper guidance and conduct of life in youth. Theirs was the perennial problem of youthful enthusiasts: how, confronted with a varied world and without experience, were they to steer a wise course, to avoid giving themselves to unworthy causes, false ideals, vain pursuits? Their world is full of opportunities, causes, movements, and aims which solicit their interest and offer possible paths of endeavour; but such is their "present moral and intellectual state" that variety of opportunity is "little else than variety of danger." The young they hold, are formed with a capacity for good; but they are impressed by "the difficulties from within and from without, which may oppose the natural development of true feeling and right opinion." And so they put their problem to The Friend.

Tennyson's lines to Christopher North

Tennyson's lines to Christopher North Get access Mancuntensis Mancuntensis Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s4-I, Issue 20, 16 May 1868, Page 461, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s4-I.20.461d Published: 16 May 1868

"Christopher North."

"Christopher North."