‘Where personation ends and imposture begins’: John Wilson, noctes ambrosianæ, and the tory populism of blackwood’s edinburgh magazine

This chapter takes John Wilson’s emotional ambivalence as its point of departure for an analysis of the politics of emotion in reactionary episodes of Noctes Ambrosianae and in the critical reviewing of Blackwood’s more generally. While his character ‘Christopher North’ and other ‘personations’ allowed Wilson subtle arrogations and exploitations as the Lord of Misrule, the formal, intellectual, and emotional instabilities that the Noctes shared with the tradition of Menippean satire were central to the culture wars of the early nineteenth century. After establishing Maga’s self-conscious resistance to the Whiggism of the Edinburgh Review, the chapter analyses the episode of Noctes on the King’s Jaunt of 1822, reflecting on the role of sentiment in Maga’s political self-projection as the flag-bearer of a populist Tory nationalism.