Wilson, Andrew (1831-1881), traveller and writer Andrew WILSON (1831-1881), traveller and writer, was born in Bombay, the eldest son of the missionary and orientalist, John WILSON (1804-1875) and his wife, Margaret BAYNE (d. 1835), who established the first schools for native girls in India. Wilson was educated at the universities of Edinburgh (BA 1851, MA 1854) and Tübingen, and lived for a period in Florence. On returning to India, he began a journalistic career with the Bombay Times.
Wilson's first work, published in England, was ‘Wayside Songs’, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, October 1856. In this he decried ‘any prejudice against the old idea of wandering as the completion of education’ (vol. 80, p. 403), and indeed he continued to travel throughout his life, and to write of his experiences. He completed a trip through Baluchistan, and his first travel pieces, based upon this, were published, again in Blackwood's, in 1857. Most of his subsequent work was published in this journal. In 1857 Wilson travelled to Hong Kong and joined the staff of the China Mail; he edited this paper from 1858 to 1860.
Wilson is best known for his book The Ever-Victorious Army (1868), recounting the suppression of the Taiping uprising in 1863–4 by Colonel C. G. ‘Chinese’ Gordon. Wilson relied mainly upon the journals of Gordon for this work, and claimed that Gordon had allowed him access because of his approval of a pamphlet—England's Policy in China—which Wilson published in Hong Kong in 1860, calling for an alteration in Britain's approach to China. Wilson essentially advocated stronger support by the West of the existing government in China, and in the preface to The Ever-Victorious Army compared China's situation to that of Britain, which had just seen the second Reform Act. In Britain, he said: the power of the aristocracy … has been losing ground of late years, and some barrier is necessary against the state of matters in which the power of the people can be directed by passionate demagogues … the Chinese system might afford hints to this end, or supply warnings. (A. Wilson, The Ever-Victorious Army, 1868, xxiv) Wilson was particularly impressed by the meritocracy principle in Chinese bureaucracy, and believed this could offer some solutions for Britain's difficulties. His book suffered the criticism that it was ‘overladen’ with his desire to show ‘the ability of the arch-imposter and his generals, the superiority, in a sense, of Chinese officialdom to that of Europe’ (C. Chesney, Essays in Modern Military Biography, 1874, 165). Wilson visited the United States at the beginning of the American Civil War, and spent some years living again in Britain and travelling in Europe. He wrote a highly regarded series on Switzerland for Blackwood's in 1865–6. He returned to India in the early 1870s, edited the Times of India for a period in 1873, and undertook a number of other journeys through the subcontinent and China. In his travels Wilson was much more than an observer. A contemporary noted that, when in China, Wilson lived ‘among the Chinese as one of themselves, though without disguise’ ( Men of the Reign, 1020). Wilson indicated on at least one occasion that he had converted to Buddhism. He returned to Britain in the late 1870s, and lived in the Lake District, where he died, at his home, Bank House, Howtown, Ullswater, on 8 June 1881. JANETTE RYAN Wealth at death £66 6s. 8d.: probate, 22 July 1881, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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