Early life and education
Wilson was born on 27 October 1950 in Stone in Staffordshire. [1] His father became the managing director of Wedgwood, the pottery company. [2]
He was first educated at the independent Catholic day school, St Dominic's Priory School, Stone before moving to Hillstone School (subsequently incorporated into Malvern College) in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, and then at Rugby School from the age of 13, where he read Mao and Marx in his spare time. While at Rugby, he wrote an article for the school magazine arguing that public schools should be abolished. The national press became interested in the story, with the Daily Express headlining its account "Red rebel in Tom Brown's school". [3] "Reporters arrived at the school gates, wanting to interview me, but my housemaster, wisely, would not let me talk to them", Wilson told Hunter Davies in 1993. [2]
Wilson went to New College, Oxford, graduating in 1972. [4] He had originally entered St Stephen's House, Oxford, [5] a Church of England seminary, with the intention of being ordained as a priest, [4] [6] but left the college after only one year of study, [4] and five years after graduation published the novel Unguarded Hours (1978) [6] based upon his experiences at the seminary and his perception of its homoerotic atmosphere. [6] [5]
Wilson taught English at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood, for two years and then spent seven years as a lecturer in medieval literature at St Hugh's College and New College, Oxford. [7]
Publications
A prolific journalist and author of nonfiction, Wilson has also written over 20 works of fiction, for which he has won the Somerset Maugham Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His novels also include such historical works as The Potter’s Hand (a study of the family life of Josiah Wedgwood), Resolution , a fictional account of Captain James Cook's second voyage, and Scandal , about the Profumo affair. His 2007 novel Winnie and Wolf, about the relationship between Adolf Hitler and Richard Wagner's English daughter-in-law Winifred, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Novels set in the present include The Vicar of Sorrows (1993), about a clergyman who has lost his faith dealing with the death of his mother, and Dream Children (1998), about paedophilia.
In the early 1990s, in the wake of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie and the continuing troubles in Northern Ireland, Wilson published a pamphlet, Against Religion, in the Chatto & Windus CounterBlasts series. He wrote biographies of Jesus and St Paul as well as a history of atheism in the 19th century titled God's Funeral, describing its growth as due to influences ranging from David Hume to Sigmund Freud. These and many other of his books, such as those on Leo Tolstoy (Whitbread Award for best biography of 1988), C. S. Lewis and Hilaire Belloc, are simultaneously sympathetic to religious belief and critical of it.
In August 2006, Wilson's biography of Sir John Betjeman was published. It was then discovered that he had been the victim of a hoax perpetrated by Betjeman's disgruntled biographer Bevis Hillier. Wilson had included in the book a letter (to Anglo-Irish writer Honor Tracy), purportedly by Betjeman, detailing a previously unknown love affair. Wilson acknowledged the letter to be a fiction when it was pointed out that it contained an acrostic spelling out an insulting message to him: "AN Wilson is a shit". [8] [9]
In 2001, Wilson published Dante in Love, a study of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri as an artist and philosopher, also portraying medieval Florence in depth to help readers understand the literary and cultural background of The Divine Comedy .
In addition to his biographies, Wilson has written four books covering entire eras, The Victorians (2002), After the Victorians (2005), Our Times (2008), and The Elizabethans (2011).
Critiques of Wilson's work
Lynn Barber of The Daily Telegraph wrote that "Wilson's forte is the character and he brilliantly conveys Betjeman's odd mixture of introspection and sociability, gaiety and melancholia, exhibition and self-disgust". [10]
In The Times (London), James Marriott called Wilson's book Resolution "a work of genius". [11]
Kathryn Hughes wrote in The Guardian of Wilson's biography of Queen Victoria, Victoria: A Life, "Subtle, thoughtful ... a shimmering and rather wonderful biography." [12] Daisy Goodwin in The Sunday Times review wrote: "This won't be the last biography of Victoria but it is certainly the most interesting and original in a long time." [13]
Wilson's Hitler: A Short Biography was criticised by the historian Richard J. Evans in a review in the New Statesman for factual inaccuracies and lack of original research and analysis, as well as personal biases. [14] In his review of The Laird of Abbotsford for Cencrastus , David McKie observed that "Concluding with Chesterton that the superficial impression of the world is by far the deepest, Wilson underpins his notions of Scott with the same paradoxical hope." [15]
Wilson's biography Charles Darwin, Victorian Mythmaker (2017), was criticised by John van Wyhe in New Scientist for confusing Darwin's theory of natural selection with Lamarckism at one point, as well as other scientific, historical and editorial errors. [16] Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian called it a "cheap attempt to ruffle feathers", with a dubious grasp of science and attempted character assassination. [17] In the Evening Standard , Adrian Woolfson wrote that "while for the greater part a lucid, elegantly written and thought-provoking social and intellectual history", Wilson's "speculations on evolutionary theory" produce a book that is "fatally flawed, mischievous, and ultimately misleading". [18] Steve Jones, an emeritus professor of genetics of University College London, commented in The Sunday Times: "In the classic mould of the contrarian, he despises anything said by mainstream biology in favour of marginal and sometimes preposterous theories." [19] The geneticist and former editor of Nature, Adam Rutherford, called the book "deranged" and said Wilson "would fail GCSE biology catastrophically." [20] [21]
Josiah Wedgwood was an English potter, entrepreneur and abolitionist. Founding the Wedgwood company in 1759, he developed improved pottery bodies by systematic experimentation, and was the leader in the industrialisation of the manufacture of European pottery.
Sir John Betjeman, was an English poet, writer, and broadcaster. He was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death. He was a founding member of The Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture, helping to save St Pancras railway station from demolition. He began his career as a journalist and ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television.
The Diary of a Nobody is an 1892 English comic novel written by the brothers George and Weedon Grossmith, with illustrations by the latter. It originated as an intermittent serial in Punch magazine in 1888–89 and first appeared in book form, with extended text and added illustrations, in 1892. The Diary records the daily events in the lives of a London clerk, Charles Pooter, his wife Carrie, his son William Lupin, and numerous friends and acquaintances over a period of 15 months.
George John Romanes FRS was a Canadian-Scots evolutionary biologist and physiologist who laid the foundation of what he called comparative psychology, postulating a similarity of cognitive processes and mechanisms between humans and other animals.
Sir Hugh Maxwell Casson was a British architect, also active as an interior designer, an artist, and a writer and broadcaster on twentieth-century design. He was the director of architecture for the 1951 Festival of Britain. From 1976 to 1984, he was president of the Royal Academy.
Emma Darwin was an English woman who was the wife and first cousin of Charles Darwin. They were married on 29 January 1839 and were the parents of ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood.
George Washington Wilson was a pioneering Scottish photographer. In 1849, he began a career as a portrait miniaturist, switching to portrait photography in 1852. He received a contract to photograph the Royal Family, working for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He pioneered various techniques for outdoor photography and the mass production of photographic prints as he gradually began to largely do landscape photography in the 1860s. By 1864 he claimed to have sold over half a million copies.
The Darwin–Wedgwood family are members of two connected families, each noted for particular prominent 18th-century figures: Erasmus Darwin, a physician and natural philosopher, and Josiah Wedgwood FRS, a noted potter and founder of the eponymous Josiah Wedgwood & Sons pottery company. The Darwin and Wedgwood families were on friendly terms for much of their history and members intermarried, notably Charles Darwin, who married Emma Wedgwood.
Sir Henry Holland, 1st Baronet, FRS was an English physician and travel writer.
Sir Francis Grant was a Scottish portrait painter who painted Queen Victoria and many British aristocratic and political figures. He served as President of the Royal Academy.
Essays and Reviews, edited by John William Parker, published in March 1860, is a broad-church volume of seven essays on Christianity. The topics covered the biblical research of the German critics, the evidence for Christianity, religious thought in England, and the cosmology of Genesis.
Bevis Hillier is an English art historian, author and journalist. He has written on Art Deco, and also a biography of Sir John Betjeman.
Wedgwood is an English fine china, porcelain and luxury accessories manufacturer that was founded on 1 May 1759 by the potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood and was first incorporated in 1895 as Josiah Wedgwood and Sons Ltd. It was rapidly successful and was soon one of the largest manufacturers of Staffordshire pottery, "a firm that has done more to spread the knowledge and enhance the reputation of British ceramic art than any other manufacturer", exporting across Europe as far as Russia, and to the Americas. It was especially successful at producing fine earthenware and stoneware that were accepted as equivalent in quality to porcelain but were considerably cheaper.
Frances Julia Wedgwood, also known as Florence Dawson, was an English feminist whose writing spanned philosophy, fiction, biography, history, religious studies and literary criticism. She was described as "a young woman of extreme passions and fastidious principles" and "at once a powerful reasoner and an inexorable critic of reason".
Richard Weikart is a professor of history at California State University, Stanislaus, advocate of intelligent design and senior fellow for the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute. In 1997 he joined the editorial board of the Access Research Network's Origins & Design Journal. Weikart's work focuses on claims about the impact of evolution on social thought, ethics and morality.
Metro-land is a BBC documentary film written and narrated by the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Sir John Betjeman. The film was directed by Edward Mirzoeff, and first broadcast on 26 February 1973. The film celebrates suburban life in the area to the northwest of London that grew up in the early 20th century around the Metropolitan Railway (MR), later the Metropolitan line of the London Underground.
Kathryn Hughes is a British academic, journalist and biographer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Literature.
Daisy Georgia Goodwin is an English screenwriter, TV producer and novelist. She is the creator of the ITV/ PBS show Victoria which has sold to 146 countries. She has written four novels: My Last Duchess or The American Heiress, The Fortune Hunter, Victoria, and “Diva”; all of which have been New York Times bestsellers and have been translated into more than ten languages. She has also curated eight poetry anthologies, including 101 Poems That Could Save Your Life. Goodwin spent twenty-five years working as a TV producer, where she created and produced shows like Grand Designs which has now been on Channel 4 for more than twenty years, and Escape to the Country which is in its twentieth year on BBC2.
John Higgs is an English writer, novelist, journalist and cultural historian. The work of Higgs has been published in the form of novels, biographies and works of cultural history.
Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a 2021 book by British writer Fiona Sampson. The book examines the life of Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and is the first full biography of the poet in over 30 years. Sampson's analysis explores the personal life and political awakening of Barrett Browning.
