Wilson, JOHN, 'Christopher North,' was born at Paisley on 18th May 1785. He was the eldest son, but fourth child, in a family of ten—his father a rich self-made manufacturer of gauze, his mother, Margaret Sym (1753-1825), a descendant of the great Marquis of Montrose. His earlier education he received at the manse of Mearns, a wild moorland parish of Renfrewshire, till in 1797, shortly after the death of his father, who left him a fortune of £50,000, he was sent to the university of Glasgow. Here he carried off many prizes, wrote essays and verses, and fell in love with one 'Margaret.' In 1803 he went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, as a gentleman-commoner, and soon became notable alike for the splendour of his intellectual gifts and for his supremacy in the various athletic sports—boxing, rowing, running, riding, swimming, &c. A six-foot Apollo, he leapt the Cherwell (23 feet wide), and walked back from London in a single night; withal he was a patron of the cockpit and a winner of the Newdigate (1806) by his prize poem on 'The Study of Greek and Roman Architecture.' Having taken a 'glorious' B.A., and broken off his 'unfortunate attachment,' in 1807 he settled in Westmorland, attracted partly by the beauty of the Lake Country and partly by a desire to cultivate the intimacy of Wordsworth, of whose genius he was already a devout admirer. He purchased the charming little property of Ellery, overlooking Windermere; associated not only with Wordsworth, but with Southey, Coleridge, De Quincey, and the rest; kept a whole fleet of boats on the lake; and would match himself some- times against the Cumberland wrestlers, one of whom has left it on record that he was 'a vera bad un to lick.'
In May 1811 he married Miss Jane Penny, a Liverpool lady, and now seriously devoted himself to poetry, in 1812 publishing his Isle of Palms (written five years earlier), and in 1816 The City of the Plague. Both had a fair success; but in 1815 the loss of his whole patrimony through an uncle's unjust stewardship obliged him to give up Ellery and settle with his mother in Edinburgh. He was called to the Scottish bar, but 'knew not what the devil to do' with the few briefs that came to him, so on the starting in 1817 of Blackwood's Magazine he proffered his services. They were readily accepted; and it is not too much to say that Wilson and his friend Lockhart (q.v.) were during its earlier years the soul of 'Maga's' success. Lockhart was withdrawn in 1826 to London; and Wilson, though never strictly its editor, became in the eye of the public more and more identified with the magazine; in a certain modified, yet very real sense, for many years he was editor. Meanwhile in 1819 he found himself in a position once more to set up house for himself, and in 1820 was elected over Sir William Hamilton to the Edinburgh chair of Moral Philosophy. The contest turned upon politics, and he as a Tory found favour with the town-council; still, though to begin with he knew little or nothing of his subject, and though even as a professor he would sometimes indulge in a 'mill,' he played a more than creditable part, and showed a wonderful power of stimulating the enthusiasm of his students. In 1837 he suffered an irreparable loss in the death of his wife; in 1840 he had a first slight shock of paralysis. He received a pension of £300 a year in 1851, and died on the midnight of 2-3d April 1854 at 8 Gloucester Place, Edinburgh, his home since 1826. He was buried in the Dean Cemetery, and in 1865 a statue of him by Sir John Steell was erected in Princes Street.
Wilson's works, collected and edited by his son-in-law, Professor Ferrier (12 vols. 1855-58), include Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life (1822), The Trials of Margaret Lyndsay (1823), and The Foresters (1825), as well as thirty-nine out of seventy of the 'Noctes Ambrosianæ,' which appeared in Blackwood's during 1822-35, and are dialogues named after 'Ambrose's Tavern,' the interlocutors comprising 'Christopher North,' 'Tickler' (his uncle, Robert Sym, 1750-1844), and the 'Shepherd' (Hogg). They in their day and in Scotland enjoyed an amazing vogue, and they are still remembered if not much read, while his poems and tales are well-nigh forgotten. Remembered and yet unread, in spite or because of The Comedy of the Noctes, selected by John Skelton (1876), where, if the selections had been the omissions, the result might have been more tolerable. A fine manly, healthy character, a true lover of Nature and Sport, and a first-rate exponent of both, Wilson was all this and something more; but he was not a humorist, though he was always trying to be humorous. Guffaws, not laughter, run through all his writings, which Hallam likened to 'the rush of mighty waters.'
See the Memoir by his daughter, Mrs Gordon (1862); an article by Mr Watts-Dunton in the Athenæum (July 8, 1876); Professor Saintsbury's Essays in English Literature (1891); Mrs Oliphant's William Blackwood and his Sons (1897); and Sir G. Douglas's Blackwood Group (1897).