John Wilson and the “Orphan-Maid”: Some Unpublished Letters

PMLA ◽  
1940 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 182-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Lang Strout
Keyword(s):  
National Library ◽  
Quarterly Review ◽  
Mary Gordon ◽  
John Wilson

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.

John Wilson Croker, Quarterly Review

Walter Scott ◽  
2003 ◽  
pp. 98-103
Author(s):  
John Wilson Croker
Keyword(s):  
Quarterly Review ◽  
John Wilson

Transmission of Renaissance herbal images to China: the Beitang copy of Mattioli’s commentaries on Dioscorides and its annotations

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
National Library ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Northern Chinese ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Animal Names ◽  
National Library Of China ◽  
Made In

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.

‘The malignity of Reviewers’: Coleridge, Wilson, and Blackwood's

Romanticism ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 234-242
Author(s):  
Charles Mahoney
Keyword(s):  
History Of ◽  
John Wilson

The first number of the refashioned Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine opens with a review of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria which is still regarded as one of the most virulent ‘attacks’ in the history of periodical reviewing. What could have motivated John Wilson to disparage Coleridge so personally and at such length? One factor may have been the treatment of Francis Jeffrey in the Biographia. Jeffrey's presence in both the Biographia and Wilson's review reveals a complicated debate regarding reviewing practices in the 1810s at the same time as it illuminates the boisterous, unpredictable tone of the new magazine.

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